Here's something I've noticed working inside the ERP channel: the firms that struggle most with marketing almost never have a product problem. Their implementations are solid. Their retention is strong. Their clients refer them. And they still can't seem to win net-new business at the rate they should.
When I dig in, the same issue surfaces. They can't tell me, in plain language, who they're for and what they solve first. Not in a tight, repeatable way. They can tell me everything about their methodology, their certifications, their vertical experience. But compress it to a single sentence a stranger could repeat? That's where it falls apart.
I want to be fair about something before going further. Some firms genuinely do have a positioning problem rooted in their service offering. They're trying to be everything to everyone, and no amount of clever language fixes that. If your real problem is that you serve too many industries with too many modules and no meaningful differentiation, the 15-word test won't save you. That's a strategy problem, not a messaging problem.
But for the firms that do have real differentiation and still can't articulate it, that's a solvable problem. And the cost of leaving it unsolved is higher than most people realize.
Why 15 Words Specifically
The number isn't arbitrary. It comes from how buying decisions actually survive inside an organization.
Think about what happens after your demo. Your champion goes back to work. A week later, in a steering committee or a leadership meeting, someone asks about the ERP shortlist. Your champion has 90 seconds, maybe less, to explain why you made the cut. They're not reading from your proposal. They're not pulling up your website. They're speaking from memory, under mild social pressure, to people who weren't in the demo and have no particular reason to trust you yet.
If they can't compress their confidence in you into one clear sentence, they won't fight for you. They'll say something vague like "they seemed solid" or "they have a lot of experience," and the room will move on. I've watched this happen enough times to say it plainly: that advocacy lives or dies on how easy you are to explain.
Forrester's preference marketing research frames this well. By the time formal evaluation starts, 41% of B2B buyers already have a single preferred vendor chosen. You become the preferred vendor not by winning the RFP, but by being clear enough, consistently enough, that you're already the obvious answer when someone starts asking around.
15 words is roughly the length of a sentence someone can say out loud without losing the room. If your differentiation requires more than that to land, it won't survive the conversations you're not in.
If you want to understand why this keeps happening in the first place, the fuller picture is here.
What Good Actually Looks Like
Generic positioning in the ERP channel follows a predictable pattern: long on credentials, short on specificity. Here's what it actually looks like side by side.
An Acumatica partner serving distributors: "We are a leading Acumatica Gold Partner providing end-to-end cloud ERP solutions to help mid-market distributors achieve digital transformation and operational excellence." 23 words, zero specificity. "Digital transformation" means nothing to a warehouse manager staring at a pick list with the wrong quantities on it. Compare that to: "We help Acumatica distributors fix broken inventory counts and stop shipping errors in 90 days." Same firm, same capability, different clarity entirely.
A Spire partner serving small manufacturers: "Our team of experts specializes in Spire Business Management software, offering implementation, training, and support to help Canadian businesses grow and streamline their workflows." "Streamline workflows" is the most ignored phrase in B2B history. The version that actually works: "We help Spire manufacturers get accurate job costing without making the shop floor hate the software." That last clause is doing the real work. Every manufacturer sponsoring an ERP project knows the shop floor revolt is a real risk. Naming it signals that you've been in the room when it happens.
A Dynamics 365 partner in professional services: "We leverage the power of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform to provide integrated financial and project management solutions that drive better decision-making for professional services firms." That sentence was written by a committee afraid to exclude anyone. The version that earns a response: "We help Dynamics 365 firms stop losing billable hours to manual entry and messy spreadsheets." Every CFO in a services firm knows exactly what lost billable hours cost them. You don't have to explain it. You just have to name it.
In each case the differentiator isn't the words. It's the specificity underneath the words, the willingness to name a real pain for a real person instead of covering all bases and landing nowhere.
How to Find Your 15 Words
This is the same problem I see on most VAR websites. If your homepage can't pass the 30-second test, your positioning work isn't done yet. Here's where to start.
The mistake most firms make is trying to write their way to good positioning. They get into a room, argue about language, and eventually agree on something everyone can live with. That process produces compromise sentences, not sharp ones.
The better source is your existing clients. Call three of them, the ones you'd clone ten times if you could, and ask what they tell people when they recommend you. Don't prompt them. Don't suggest language. Let them answer in their own words and write down exactly what they say.
What you'll hear is almost always more specific and more persuasive than anything that came out of an internal positioning session. They'll say things like "they actually understand how job shops work" or "they've done this migration so many times they know where it breaks before it breaks." That language is your positioning. It's already proven. It survived a real conversation with a real person who had something at stake.
Take it, compress it, and test whether you can finish this sentence in 15 words or fewer: we are the right choice for [who] because we [solve what, specifically].
If you can't get there, you don't have a language problem. You have a clarity problem, and it's costing you deals in rooms you'll never see.
If you want to pressure-test your 15-word line before it goes anywhere public, send it over. I'll tell you whether it would survive a CFO's steering committee or just sound good in a slide deck. No positioning frameworks, no discovery call required. Just a straight read from someone who's seen enough VAR websites to know the difference between a sentence that travels and one that doesn't.