Direct answer
Weak positioning is paid in three places: price, time and the shortlist. In Marn and Rosiello's Harvard Business Review study, each 1% of price given away costs about 11% of operating profit — and suppliers a buyer can't tell apart give price away. 6sense's 2025 research finds the vendor preferred before first contact wins about 80% of the time; indistinguishable during research, you're the comparison, not the choice. Add the cycles that stall because nobody could say why you.
The comforting belief is that positioning is a marketing nicety — a sentence on the website, a slide in the deck — and that the real business happens in the sales conversation, where product and price decide. Vagueness sounds respectable, which is why it survives. But it has a price. It is just paid in installments across departments, and no department ever sees the whole bill.
Here is where it gets paid.
The discount is where it shows up first
In 1992, Michael Marn and Robert Rosiello published "Managing Price, Gaining Profit" in Harvard Business Review, using the average economics of 2,463 companies in the Compustat aggregate. A 1% improvement in realised price lifted operating profit by 11.1%, against 7.8% for the same improvement in variable cost, 3.3% for volume and 2.3% for fixed cost. The arithmetic runs both ways. Each 1% of price given away costs about 11% of operating profit, on the average company in that study.
Now ask why price gets given away. When a buyer can't tell two suppliers apart on anything that matters to them, price is the only variable left, and the salesperson knows it before the buyer says it. So, to take an ordinary example, 3% comes off to close. Then 5%, because the competitor matched. Nobody calls that a positioning cost. It is booked as commercial flexibility, and read against the Marn and Rosiello figures, 3% off the price on half your deals is not a rounding error — it is a material share of the year's operating profit, given away because nobody decided why you were worth the full amount.
A position a competitor could repeat word for word is not a position. It is a price list waiting to be negotiated.
The sales cycle is where it hides
The second installment is time. When a buyer cannot see a difference, they do not pick — they add steps. Another reference call. Another demo for another stakeholder. A request for a proposal "so we can compare like with like", which is the buyer telling you, politely, that you are alike. Across the businesses I've worked with, the deals that stalled for months without a clear no were almost never lost on product; they were lost to indecision the supplier had created by giving the buyer nothing to decide with. That is my observation, not a measured finding, and I'd put it against most sales teams' pipeline reviews.
Every extra month in the cycle is salary, travel and management attention spent on a deal that a decided position would have closed or disqualified in the first meeting. The cost sits in the sales budget. The cause sits upstream.
The shortlist is where it's fatal
The third installment is the one you never see, because it happens before you're called. 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report found that the vendor buyers prefer before they engage with sellers goes on to win about 80% of the time — and that the buying journey has compressed, with buyers contacting vendors earlier but deciding on the same basis. If your positioning is indistinguishable during the research phase, you are not on that buyer's short list as a choice. You are on it, at best, as the comparison that makes their preferred vendor's price look reasonable.
From the book: before a first meeting with an accountancy practice, I took screenshots of nearly thirty competitor homepages across Belgium and the Netherlands and put theirs in between. Then I asked them to imagine being a business owner unhappy with their accountant: look at these thirty sites — can you tell which one is yours, and why a visitor should pick you? They had no answer. The typical page read "Since 2015, we offer bookkeeping with expertise and personal attention." It could have been any of the thirty. So could the fee any of the thirty could charge. They chose another partner for their marketing, which I mention because being right about a cost is not the same as being paid to fix it.
| Where it's paid | How it appears in the accounts | What is actually happening |
|---|---|---|
| Price | "Commercial flexibility"; average discount creeping up year on year | Nothing but price left to compete on, so price is what moves |
| Sales cycle | Pipeline ageing; deals that neither close nor die | The buyer was given nothing to decide with, so they added steps |
| Shortlist | Invisible — lost before contact, never logged as a loss | Preferred vendor chosen during research; you are the comparison |
| Marketing | Spend that never compounds; each campaign restarts from zero | Undifferentiated message, so nothing accumulates in the buyer's memory |
Putting a number on yours
You will not get a precise figure, and anyone who offers you one is guessing. You can get an honest order of magnitude in an afternoon with three numbers you already have. First, the average discount from list on last year's closed-won deals, multiplied by revenue, then read against the Marn and Rosiello multiplier. Second, the deals that were lost with "price" or "went another way" as the only recorded reason — count them, and weigh them at your normal margin. Third, the deals that sat more than twice your median cycle before dying, priced at the sales cost of carrying them. Add the three. The result is what an unmade positioning decision cost you last year, and it will be larger than anything you're spending to fix it.
Positioning is the second of four upstream decisions — who you're for, why you, what you sell, what you say — and it fails most often because the first one was never made either; the pattern is in the signs your business never decided who its ideal customer is, and the bill for that one is in what guessing your ideal customer really costs. The five-question version of the whole audit is on the quick diagnostic; the full argument is Reports, Not Revenue.
- Pull last year's average discount from list on closed-won deals. Multiply by revenue. That is the first installment.
- Count the deals lost with "price" as the only reason. Weigh them at normal margin. That is the second.
- Count the deals that lived past twice your median cycle before dying. Price the sales cost of carrying them. That is the third.
- Read your homepage next to five competitors' with the logos covered. If you can't tell which is yours, neither can the buyer.
- Write one sentence a competitor could not honestly repeat. If nobody in the leadership team can, that is the decision to make first.
If the honest answer to "why you, compared to whom" is a sentence any competitor could sign, that is what a Commercial Immersion Diagnostic settles: €2,900 fixed, no retainer, and if it doesn't surface something concrete and actionable, you don't pay for it.
Weak positioning never sends an invoice. It takes 3% off the price, two months off the cycle, and the deal you were never called about.
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