How a shortlist forms
- A trigger creates a need. A tool breaks, a regulation lands, a target goes up.
- One person starts looking. They search, ask peers, check review sites and AI assistants.
- They form a category in their head and a handful of names inside it.
- They share the list internally. Colleagues add names from their own memory.
- The group agrees a shortlist.
- Someone contacts a supplier.
Steps two to five happen out of your sight. Entry to the list runs on memory, and memory keeps whatever has been stored simply and repeatedly: a category, a situation, a name. Complicated positioning gets skipped.
Most of your market is out of market
John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in work published with the LinkedIn B2B Institute in 2021, set out the 95-5 rule: at any moment, roughly 95% of business buyers are out of market.
Positioning is how the 95% store you correctly, so the 5% recall you when their moment comes.
Why AI assistants make vague positioning disappear
Ask ChatGPT for the best options in a category and it compresses everything written about that category into a short, confident answer. Compression rewards distinctiveness. A company with one clear, specific claim, repeated across its own site and in third-party coverage, gives the model something concrete to say. A company that promises "powerful, flexible solutions" gets averaged into "other options include".
Picture an operations head at a 60-person logistics firm asking for the best warehouse software for a mid-size 3PL. The five names and one-line reasons she gets back become her starting shortlist, and she forwards them to two colleagues before visiting a single vendor site. The vendor whose every page says "built for 3PLs under 100 staff running mixed-client inventory" has given the assistant a reason to name it. The vendor promising "end-to-end supply chain excellence" has given it very little.
Most brands sit in the averaged middle. In Wynter's 2025 survey of 100 B2B SaaS marketing leaders, 6% rated their own brand as very distinctive.
A familiar example
A marketing lead needs a new webinar platform. They ask in two private Slack groups and get four names. They search for a comparison of two of them, read one review site, look at three websites for about ninety seconds each, and book one demo.
Three of the four names arrived through someone else's recommendation. The vendors that lost went out on their homepages, in under two minutes, because the buyer could tell at a glance who the winner was built for.
Recommendation is the distribution system for positioning. A position that someone with zero incentive can repeat travels much further than your ad budget.
The method
Before you start: run your buyer's question
Open ChatGPT and Gemini and ask the question your buyer would ask, in their words. Note who gets named and what gets said about each. That is your competitive picture as buyers see it, and it is often a surprise.
1. Write the question your buyer asks a peer
Use their words, in a full sentence. "Who do you use to automate invoicing in NetSuite?" is far more useful than your category name. That sentence tells you which list you are competing to join.
2. Find out who gets named today
Ask ten customers who else they considered and who they would have asked. Ask five people who chose someone else. Read the threads in the communities where your buyers talk. It takes a week, and it is the most useful week of research a small team can spend.
3. Pick the situation you want to own
Say who you suit best, and who you suit less. "Built for finance teams at lean companies with zero in-house engineers" sticks because it narrows. Narrowing is the price of being remembered.
4. Apply the repeat test
Say your positioning out loud to someone outside the company. Wait a day. Ask them to repeat it. If it comes back garbled, it is too complicated to travel, and travelling is its whole job.
5. Put it where research happens
The top of your homepage. Your review site listing. Your LinkedIn tagline and your team's profiles. The first line of a podcast introduction. The subject line of the email that gets forwarded. Same words, everywhere, for longer than feels comfortable.
6. Make the destination worth the visit
Curiosity earns the click. What sits behind it decides the shortlist. One useful page that answers the buyer's question beats twelve pages of category filler, and it is the page the first researcher forwards to everyone else.
How to measure it
- Branded search volume over time. Rising branded search with flat spend means positioning is working.
- An open "how did you hear about us?" field on your forms. Messy, and closer to the truth than last-click data.
- Inbound win rate compared with outbound, and how often prospects arrive already naming you as their preference.
- Twice a year, ask a sample of your market which suppliers they would consider. Movement in unprompted recall is the scoreboard.
- Every quarter, re-run your buyer's questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and track whether your name and your claim appear.
- Ask lost deals who else was on the list. Present and lost points to the product. Absent points to positioning.