Frozen Out: how stalled growth is really a positioning problem

Its focus on the fact most B2B go-to-market models are built for a business that a company has already outgrown I fully agree with. Where the niggles come in for me is that the fix is just about rewiring the sales and marketing machine. This focus on architecture treats the symptom but not the cause. The real fix, especially under PE hold-period pressure, is positioning. Get "why us, why now" right and win rate, deal size and sales cycle all move. Miss it and every downstream fix (more headcount, more AI, more alignment) is quietly taxed.

Why the market has frozen

Tackling positioning has never been more important as the market still remains frozen for a wide range of reasons.

Several forces are compounding into a single problem. Markets are saturated: most buyers already own more tools and services than they can use — whether it's software licences or the roster of agencies, advisors and point-solutions they've accumulated, they're over-supplied and now consolidating.  The endless economic roller coaster means everyone is more cautious. C-suite leaders are nervous like never before for a number of reasons.  By now everyone knows the data points on C-suite short tenure, but added to this a new lexicon I learnt the other day was ‘job hugger’.  As it turns out, it’s not someone whose job is extra tactile HR, but workers who cling on for safety and financial stability, even if they are bored or unfulfilled.

This means paralysis is the default. In The JOLT Effect, Dixon & McKenna identified 40–60% of qualified B2B deals are lost to "no decision" — the buyer does nothing; 56% of those losses come down to indecision (fear of a wrong call), not losing to a competitor. That data is from 2022 and I would be amazed if it decreased.

AI acts as a comfort blanket to hide behind with everyone hoping it is the silver bullet to simplify and align, but adoption at the enterprise level is cautious and firmly still in experimentation stages.  It’s often a top-down request from leadership to experiment (in some instances only when an AI policy has been written), which adds another to-do list item to C-suite when fundamentals still remain broken.  Research to date supports this too, with 95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots delivering no measurable impact on the bottom line — efficiency theatre while the real value goes untouched. (MIT, The GenAI Divide, 2025.)

Indecision only gets worse with more noise

When growth stalls, the reflex is to shout louder or look like you’ve bolted on more AI (or it was always there hiding in the background).  Adding more noise just overwhelms an already overwhelmed buyer, anyone trying to negotiate with a toddler in a supermarket will know this one well!  What breaks the freeze is positioning sharp enough to flip the buyer’s fear.  From “what if I choose wrong” to “what if I don’t move”.  The Alexander Group’s fix of sales and marketing architecture (across scorecards, coverage models and alignment) is useful but the wrong first move.

You can’t align an engine around a story the market doesn’t believe; architecture without positioning just makes you efficient at selling the wrong thing.  Sales and marketing have been spoiled with a shortcut default in the last five years - “there’s a tool for that” has been the easy solution.  Not sitting in a room looking at the whites of each other’s eyes, really understanding what the market and buyer want (and where they feel the pain) to help them, not overwhelm them.

Positioning: a clean definition

April Dunford, whose positioning approach is the gold standard in my mind, defines it as “how your product is a leader at delivering something a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.” Put simply: why us, why now.

It's the context that sets off every downstream assumption a buyer makes — who you compete with, what you should cost, who you're for. Good positioning makes those assumptions true. Bad positioning quietly taxes every deal, forcing sales and marketing to spend their time correcting the wrong ones. That tax shows up where it matters commercially: win rate, sales cycle and how much pipeline actually converts.

The methodology, across five components (Alternatives, Capabilities, Value, Best-fit Buyers and Market Category) run in a focused workshop, re-points the whole commercial engine at the buyers most likely to convert.  It also helps unfreeze sales and marketing teams.  Silos, overwhelm, selling habits only focused on certain products or offerings (that have been around longer) plus clinging onto old positioning can melt away with a structured approach to agreeing what positioning now works for the current market and clients that are spending.

AI won't thaw the top of the funnel

Beyond the comfort-blanket adoption problem, there's a second AI trap: the belief that it'll supercharge the top of the funnel and drive growth on its own. It won't — it's back to basics on that one. The real value is in the data and the accounts you already sit on. I've been having a bit of career nostalgia about my agency days, launching loyalty programmes for consumer brands whose leaders knew they were sitting on gold that needed mining. Those businesses won because they understood and targeted the value in their own base. AI should sharpen decisions, not multiply output - especially as weak data just means weak AI output too. As Naureen Mohammed put it in her recent excellent Marketing Week article, being found by AI and being chosen by it are two different jobs — "you cannot optimise your way past a weak brand." The same is true of positioning. You can't shortcut your way past a fuzzy story — whether the one reading it is a buyer or a bot.

Why this is existential for PE-backed businesses

In the world of PE, hold periods and value-creation plans don’t allow for scaling the wrong story. Positioning has to be ideally fixed before you pour money into sales and marketing. Otherwise you are building an expensive engine pointed at the wrong buyers, right before the investment case is under the microscope.  The timing matters — with PE and M&A activity picking up sharply across the UK and Europe in 2026, more businesses are inheriting a go-to-market built for a company that no longer exists.

Where to start…

So how do you know if your growth problem is really a positioning problem?  Does any of the following sound familiar:  sales reps each lead with a different story or ‘product hug’ e.g. feel more comfortable talking about one older product that solves a single problem, rather than the wider, evolving challenge your prospect actually faces. Your most senior seller has quietly become your Chief Narrative Officer and the story changes every time they sell it.  You discount to win, each sales cycle starts with a long ‘education’ period to raise awareness of the problem you solve, you keep losing to “do nothing” or maybe refer to it more confidently as status quo (being in Latin doesn’t make it any more painful!).  Finally, the harshest truth for marketers, your content could carry a competitor’s logo unchanged.

If growth has stalled and you're not sure whether it’s positioning, pipeline or product, I’m happy to have an honest conversation and provide clarity before you commit budget or a full-time hire. That's why I set up Tonic & Co. — clear, concise GTM and commercial guidance: a tonic for the business world we are all navigating right now.