Most marketing advice starts with what to build: a better website, a stronger campaign, a content calendar, a new positioning statement. What it skips is the step that makes all of those things actually work: talking to the people who already chose you, in a way that surfaces what they actually experienced.
Not a satisfaction survey. Not a testimonial request. A real conversation, run like a journalist would run it, where you stop talking and let them tell you what was going on in their world before you showed up, what they thought they were buying, and when they first felt the impact.
That conversation is where your positioning lives. And most firms never have it.
What a Customer Conversation Actually Surfaces
A SaaS ISV I work with asked me to help them create a customer success story. Simple enough on the surface: interview the customer, write up the before and after, publish a nice quote. Underneath that ask, though, they were struggling with something deeper. Their campaigns weren't landing. Their website felt flat. They kept hearing "we're not sure exactly what you do" from both prospects and VAR partners.
Instead of starting with a draft, we started with a call.
I interviewed their customer the way a journalist would, not the way a vendor usually does. I asked: what was going on in your business before you found this tool? What did you think you were buying? When did you first feel the impact? Then I stopped talking.
In 45 minutes, that customer gave us more clarity than any internal positioning meeting had produced. They never used the vendor's internal feature names. They didn't describe the product as a "configurable workflow engine" or a "unified data layer." They said things like:
"We finally stopped doing month-end in panic mode."
"My team doesn't have to chase people for updates anymore."
"Honestly, we thought this was an implementation add-on. It turned out to be how we run projects now."
Two things came out of that conversation. First, raw, specific language that described the real outcome: less chaos, fewer manual follow-ups, a calmer month-end. Second, a blind spot in the current messaging. The customer admitted they'd misunderstood part of the implementation methodology. The way the process was described on the website made it sound like extra complexity, not built-in handholding. The vendor thought they were signalling rigour. The customer heard risk.
One 45-minute call. Two things worth more than six months of internal debate.
What We Did With It
The customer conversation became a lever in three places, and this is the part worth paying attention to if you're about to launch anything.
For the campaign they were running, we cut the jargon in half and rebuilt the narrative around the exact phrases the customer used. Instead of "accelerated time-to-value," we wrote "no more month-end panic." Instead of "workflow orchestration," we talked about "not chasing people for updates." Every email, every ad, every landing page led with one of those concrete, customer-sourced outcomes. We didn't change the offer. We changed the language we were speaking.
On the website, we rewrote the hero and product overview to sound more like the customer and less like the product team. We stopped leading with architecture and started leading with the one idea a buyer could repeat to their CFO: "This is how teams like yours stop running projects out of spreadsheets and inboxes."
In the implementation methodology section, we fixed the confusion the conversation had uncovered. Changed how the phases were labelled. Added one clear diagram. Rewrote the copy so it framed the process as guided and low-risk instead of multi-step and heavy. The goal was simple: when a buyer skimmed that page, they should feel taken care of, not intimidated.
The next campaign saw stronger click-through and better reply quality, not because the offer changed, but because prospects finally recognized themselves in the story. On sales calls, prospects started repeating the new language back: "We just want to get out of month-end panic mode like that customer in your case study." Internal teams started using the same phrases in decks and demos. The language had travelled.
The Two Things Worth Doing Before Your Next Campaign
That story is a long way of making two points that apply whether you're an ISV, a VAR, or a consultancy.
The first: before you build anything, talk to one customer the way I described above. Not to collect a testimonial. To find out what they were actually experiencing before they hired you, what they thought they were buying, and what changed. Record it. Write down the exact phrases they use. The language that comes out of that conversation is your positioning, and it's already been tested in a real situation with real stakes. Research on B2B buying behaviour consistently shows that peer recommendations and prior experience shape the shortlist long before formal evaluation starts. That means the words your best clients use to describe you are doing sales work, whether you've harnessed them or not. Most firms haven't.
The second: before any campaign launches, write one sentence that answers this: who is this for, and what do they need to believe before they'll respond? Not a tagline. Not a goal. One sentence that forces you to be specific about the buyer and the belief. If you can't write it, the campaign isn't ready. No amount of design, budget, or targeting fixes a message that hasn't been thought through at that level. The ISV in this story couldn't write that sentence before we did the customer interview. Afterwards, it took about ten minutes.
Both of these are diagnostic tools, not creative exercises. They work because they force specificity before you spend anything. And specificity, as the previous posts in this series have argued, is the actual competitive advantage in the ERP channel. Not features, not credentials, not price. Clarity about who you're for and what you solve first, expressed in language your buyer would actually use.
That's where the work starts. Everything else follows.
If you've read through this series and recognized your firm in any of it, that's a useful signal. The patterns here, losing on clarity instead of price, failing the 15-word test, content that fills a calendar without building trust, campaigns that launch before the message is ready, are fixable. They're also the exact problems I work on with ERP VARs, ISVs, and technology consultancies who are technically excellent but struggling to translate that into visible market presence.
If you want to talk through where your biggest gap is, send me a note. No discovery call script, no slide deck. Just a straight conversation about what's actually getting in the way.