How to position your brand in competitive B2B space?

Open ten B2B SaaS websites in new tabs and you will struggle to tell which one is which. Most B2B SaaS teams follow the same proven template, which is why customers struggle to tell you apart.

The companies breaking through aren't the ones with more features or bigger marketing budgets. They're the ones who made hard choices about who they serve and what they're genuinely best at. This guide shows you exactly how to stand out in a crowded B2B SaaS market without burning through your runway or compromising on revenue targets.

Why B2B market feels crowded and most differentiation strategies fail?

B2B brands rarely start by copying competitors on purpose. They start by following best practices, and those best practices keep pushing everyone toward the same layout. Jakob Nielsen argued as early as 2000 that websites would “tone down” distinctive design and become more standardized. Webflow’s SaaS templates literally ship with the same components and page structure, built to highlight features quickly and drive action. That’s how we end up here.

When we work with founders on marketing at Apricot, this is exactly where we pull in our website partner Grafit: they keep the conversion structure that works, but rebuild it as a scalable design system and a component based Webflow site that actually looks and feels like your category leader, not a template clone.

However, we’re not here to tell you to stop using templates. The problem is that positioning gets crowded fast. When everyone follows the same layout, the same language follows. Same blue coded words and generic value props about innovation and growth.

Companies often refuse to exclude anyone from their target market because they’re terrified of limiting their addressable market. So they position themselves as “the platform for businesses of all sizes” and then wonder why nobody converts.

When buyers can’t distinguish between vendors, they default to three criteria: brand recognition, price, and whatever their colleague recommended. If you’re a startup competing against established players, you lose on recognition. If you compete on price, you destroy your margins. That leaves differentiation as your only viable path to growth.

The biggest mistake companies make is thinking differentiation comes from having different features. It doesn’t. Features get copied fast. Real differentiation comes from positioning decisions that are hard to reverse and even harder to copy, which is why B2B positioning is a core part of your brand strategy.

How to stand out in competitive B2B space?

Generic positioning advice tells you to "be unique" or "find your niche." That's useless. Here's the actual framework companies use to break through competitive B2B SaaS market.

1. Find your real competitive alternative

Most B2B SaaS companies pick the wrong competitors. You're obsessed with the other startups in your space when your buyers are actually comparing you to spreadsheet, patchwork of tools,  consultant, junior hire, or doing nothing at all.

Start talking with your happiest customers and ask them:

• What were you using to solve this problem before us?
• What almost convinced you to stick with that approach?
• At what point did the old way become unbearable?
• What would you go back to if we disappeared tomorrow?

The patterns in these answers reveal who you’re actually competing against. We saw this when we worked with Valueships, a pricing strategy consultancy for B2B SaaS and tech teams.

They don’t win by being “better than other pricing consultancies.” They win by naming the real alternative: spreadsheet pricing, gut feel decisions, and discount leakage. Their promise is built to beat that status quo, a minimum 10% revenue uplift guaranteed, backed by a clear method and case study proof. That’s strong positioning. It turns the choice into “keep the mess” versus “get a measurable uplift,” not “us versus another vendor.”

Our advice is to map out what customers actually consider when they're solving a problem. Then build your B2B positioning around beating that alternative, not the startup that just raised their Series B. When you fight the right battle, differentiation becomes obvious.

2. Stand out in B2B space with sub-segment until you can dominate something specific

You can't beat Salesforce at CRM. But you can beat them at CRM for investment banks. Narrow markets feel dangerous because the addressable market looks small. The reality is that specificity creates pricing power and eliminates most of your competition.

You can see it in how BibliU, an edtech company that delivers digital textbooks and courseware to universities, scaled. When they turned to us for help, we didn’t market to “education.” We defined a focused list of target universities, treated each campus as its own account, and built messaging for the real buying group inside each one. It helped turn “one off wins” into a repeatable playbook, and it supported outcomes like roughly 40% UK higher ed market share, +37% YoY customer acquisition.

Our advice is to take your customer list and find the patterns in your best accounts. Not surface-level firmographics like company size. Real patterns like their sales process, their existing tech stack, or how they go to market. Those patterns reveal your actual segment.

Look for these segmentation signals:

• Companies with similar pain intensity (not just similar pain points)
• Buyers who share specific infrastructure or processes
• Accounts where multiple decision makers align on the same problem
• Customers who see your differentiators as critical

Then make the scary decision: Own that segment completely. Don't hedge with "we serve" language. BibliU “owns” higher education in a pretty classic way: they don’t position as generic “education software,” they position as a platform built for universities and colleges, with outcomes and language that match how campuses buy and operate.

3. Translate every feature into tangible business value

Most B2B SaaS companies stop at surface-level benefits. "Our platform saves time." Okay, but time doing what? Saving whose time? How much time? What do they do with the time saved?

Take your differentiated capabilities and map them to value. Be specific. Not "increase efficiency" but "get invoices paid 40% faster." Not "better insights" but "spot revenue leaks before they cost you six figures." The more concrete and measurable, the better.

During our work with Snowstack, a Snowflake consulting partner, we focused our content strategy on turning technical capabilities into buyer ready value instead of broad claims. For example, we did not say “increase efficiency.” We said “AI ready data without breaking patient privacy,” delivered in a clear timeframe, “in 90 days.” That’s what strong positioning looks like: concrete, measurable value instead of generic promises.

Push through three levels of value:

Level 3 is where differentiation actually happens. Everyone sells operational value. Few companies connect features to the buyer's personal success metrics.

Test this with your sales team. If they can't explain why a feature matters in one sentence that mentions money, time, or risk, you haven't translated it. Keep pushing until every differentiator connects to something a CFO or CEO would care about.

4. Make your B2B positioning standing out in every customer touchpoint

Positioning lives in strategy documents. Differentiation lives in every piece of content, every sales conversation, and every product decision. If your homepage could work for three different companies, your positioning hasn't left the conference room.

Your website should make it obvious who you serve within ten seconds. Your content should consistently reinforce your unique point of view. Your sales deck should lead with your differentiated value, not a company overview. Your product roadmap should double down on your differentiators, not chase feature parity.

5. Create demand by challenging industry assumptions

Most B2B SaaS marketing chases existing demand. The companies that break through create new demand by changing how buyers think. They challenge industry assumptions. They call out broken best practices. They make prospects question whether their current approach is costing them more than they realize.

Build a content strategy around contrarian ideas that support your positioning. If your differentiation is speed, create content about the hidden costs of slow tools. If your value is simplicity, challenge the enterprise complexity tax. Make prospects uncomfortable with the status quo before you pitch the alternative.

How a B2B marketing agency helps you stand out faster

Most companies understand positioning in theory. Executing it across every channel while running day-to-day marketing operations is where things fall apart. You're building product, managing a team, hitting quarterly targets, and somehow supposed to completely overhaul your positioning strategy.

This is where specialized B2B marketing agencies create disproportionate value. Not because they have magic frameworks you don't. Because they've done this positioning work dozens of times across multiple markets and can compress your timeline from twelve months to three.

Howevre, not every agency is the right fit for every company. The agency that works for enterprise SaaS companies with long sales cycles won't help a product-led growth startup. The positioning specialists won't solve your demand gen execution problems if your strategy is already solid. Choosing the right partner requires understanding what kind of help you actually need at your specific stage. If you're evaluating agencies and want a framework for making the right choice, read our guide on how to choose the right SaaS marketing agency for your company.

The courage to choose is how you stand out in crowded B2B market

Standing out in a crowded B2B market isn't about incremental improvement. It's about fundamentally different positioning backed by the courage to exclude people. It's about picking one thing and being dramatically better at it than anyone else. It's about building a category of one instead of fighting for scraps in a category of thousands.

The market doesn't need another "best-in-class solution." It needs someone willing to plant a flag and say this is who we are, this is who we serve, and this is what we're better at than everyone else. That clarity is what breaks through.

Most companies know what makes them different. They're just afraid to bet everything on it. That fear keeps them positioned in the mushy middle where every competitor looks identical. The companies that break through are the ones who made the hard choice to own something specific.

Your differentiation already exists in your best customer relationships. You just need the framework to extract it and the courage to commit to it. Start with the positioning framework. Find your competitive alternatives. Identify your unique value. Map it to the segment that cares most. Define the market you'll win.

Then make every marketing decision, product decision, and sales decision reinforce that positioning. The compounding effect of consistent, specific positioning beats scattered attempts at differentiation every time.

Choose who you serve. Choose what you're best at. Choose the market you'll win. The choosing is how you stand out in a crowded B2B SaaS market.

How Apricot helps B2B SaaS companies stand out in crowded markets

We works specifically with growing B2B tech companies across Europe who need to stand out in competitive markets. Not companies that need basic marketing execution. Companies that have product-market fit but struggle to articulate why buyers should choose them over alternatives.

The positioning work starts with deep customer interviews to find your actual differentiators. Not what you think makes you special. What your best customers actually value. Then we translate that into positioning that works across your website, content, sales materials, and campaigns.

We've helped B2B SaaS companies reposition from generic "platform for businesses" to owning specific segments where they can dominate. The results show up in higher-quality inbound leads, shorter sales cycles, and premium pricing that sticks because your differentiation is clear.

If you're a European B2B tech company burning budget on marketing that generates leads but not revenue, the problem is probably positioning. Let’s chat and see how we can help you!

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