Before you redesign your website, check your positioning

Most B2B teams who get in touch with me already know what they want. Usually it's a new website, sometimes a rebrand, and quite often a WordPress-to-Webflow migration with a design refresh on top.

They're usually right about the symptoms. Leads have dropped off, the site feels dated, and prospects don't quite get what the company does. Where the brief goes wrong is the cause.

In most of my discovery calls, the problem turns out to sit one level down. The company can't explain what it does in a way a buyer understands, and that's a positioning problem. A redesign on its own won't fix it, however good the design is.

What the brief says, and what's actually going on

Positioning is the decision about who you're for and why you're the better choice for them. Messaging is how you put that into words, and your brand and website are where buyers come across both.

When the positioning is fuzzy, you see it all the way down. The homepage lists features without saying what the company does. Buyers and investors land on the same generic page. Sales spend the first twenty minutes of every call covering the basics.

From inside the company, that looks like a design issue, because the website is the thing that feels off. So the team briefs a redesign. I've seen plenty of well-designed sites built on unclear positioning, and they look good while quietly underperforming.

A brief for a new website often turns out to mean buyers can't tell whether you're for them. "Our brand feels dated" usually means the company has moved faster than its story. And "we need more leads" can mean you already have leads, just the wrong ones.

Five signs the problem is positioning

If a couple of these sound familiar, a new website on its own probably won't solve it.

1. Sales calls turn into explanations

One financial services client I'm working with now saw this first-hand. Prospects were booking calls because they thought the company was an investment firm, which it isn't. The first part of every call went on correcting that before any real conversation could start. When a sales call becomes an education session, the website has already failed at its job.

2. Your team describes the company differently

In discovery sessions with several people from the same company, I ask everyone what the business does in a couple of sentences. I've yet to hear matching answers. Product leads with the platform, sales with the service, the founder with the vision. Most people need a paragraph and a few caveats to get there, and if your own team can't agree, a buyer skimming your homepage won't manage it either.

3. "Our users don't know what we do"

More of my recent projects open with this line on the very first call. It's an honest diagnosis, and a useful one, because it points straight at the message rather than the layout.

4. You're getting leads, just the wrong ones

Form submissions look healthy, but the calls go nowhere. That usually means the message is broad enough to pull in people who were never going to buy. Sending more traffic to the same page only gets you more of those conversations.

5. Several audiences, one story

When buyers, investors and partners all land on the same homepage, each of them has to work out alone whether you're relevant. Most won't spend the time.

Why teams spend on the wrong fix

For most of the B2B marketing teams I work with, the website and brand are the biggest line in the budget. That's understandable, since they're the most visible things a company owns. Visible isn't the same as causal, though.

When results stall, the instinct is to go bigger, with a larger agency and a broader scope, on the assumption that more people and more process will produce a better outcome. If nobody looks at the underlying problem, what you tend to get is a bigger invoice and a more polished version of the same confusion. The new site is faster and nicer to scroll, and buyers still can't tell what you do.

I don't think teams get this wrong through carelessness. A design problem is easy to point at, whereas a positioning problem is something you feel long before you can name it. Briefs get written by people who know the product so well they can't see what an outsider is missing. Ownership is split too: marketing has the website, sales has the pitch and leadership has the strategy, so the gap between them belongs to nobody. And when the only numbers on the dashboard are traffic and form fills, a positioning problem shows up looking like a conversion problem.

What to track instead

Traffic and form submissions tell you how much is happening. They say very little about whether people understand you. These are the signals I'd look at:

Most teams already record their sales calls and log lost deals in a CRM. The data is there. It just rarely gets read as evidence about positioning.

Research you can run this month

Finding out whether you have a positioning problem doesn't need a six-week strategy engagement. I'd start with the cheapest check and work up from there.

Ask AI what it thinks of you

This takes about an hour. Put the same few prompts into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini:

• "What does [company] do, and who is it for?"
• "Who are [company]'s main competitors, and how is it different?"
• "I'm a [your ideal buyer]. Should I consider [company]?"

Then compare the answers with how you'd describe yourself. Wherever they're vague, wrong or contradict each other, your public story has the same gap. It's the quickest read on brand sentiment I know of.

Run the team test

Ask five people across the company to write down, separately, what you do in two or three sentences, then put the answers side by side. When I've done this with clients, the answers never match, and hardly anyone gets there in a few sentences. The distance between those answers is your positioning problem, written down.

Talk to your users

Interviews take the longest, usually a few weeks to arrange and run, and they teach you the most. Speak to five to eight recent customers and a couple of lost deals. Ask why they chose you, what nearly put them off, and how they'd describe you to a colleague.

Pay attention to their wording. Customers rarely describe you the way your homepage does, and in my experience their version is usually the clearer one.

Where AI search fits in

Plenty of B2B buyers now use AI assistants to research and shortlist suppliers, and I see my own clients doing exactly that when they evaluate vendors. Showing up in those answers, and being described accurately, is turning into a real source of pipeline, so AI visibility deserves a place on your dashboard.

It only gets you so far. A buyer who clicks through from an AI recommendation still lands on your site wanting to know what you do and whether it's relevant to them. If the page can't answer that quickly, the recommendation goes to waste.

The two problems feed each other. AI tools summarise whatever they can read about you, so if your site describes you three different ways, they'll pass that confusion on to buyers or latch onto the wrong part of the business. That's what was happening to Abatable. Getting your positioning clear helps with both audiences at once.

A real example: Abatable

Abatable helps organisations buy environmental credits with integrity, through procurement, advisory and market intelligence. They came to me for a WordPress-to-Webflow migration and a redesign.

Discovery turned up something else. Some visitors assumed Abatable was a software platform, and others filed it under consultancy. AI search engines had picked up the advisory work and missed most of the rest. Inside the company, the description changed depending on who you asked.

The old site looked fine. What it couldn't do was explain the company. So before any design work, I ran working sessions with six people from go-to-market, content, product, brand and the founding team, and mapped seven competitors. That showed a gap nobody in the market owned: real carbon expertise backed by technology, with integrity at the centre. We named the tensions that made Abatable hard to position and made a decision on each one, then rebuilt the site structure so buyers, investors and developers could each find their own route from the first screen.

The brand extension, the new site and the migration of more than 100 pages followed, all within 13 weeks.

Contact form submissions went up 54% after launch, and the team says the leads are better qualified than before. The design played its part, but most of that lift came from being clear about what Abatable is and giving each audience a way in.

Read the full Abatable case study

Where to start

Before you sign off a redesign or a rebrand, it's worth checking a few things. Could five people in your company describe what you do the same way? Do AI assistants describe you accurately, and to the right audience? Do prospects turn up to calls already knowing what you do?

If you can say yes to all of that, your positioning is probably in decent shape, and a new website might be exactly the right spend.

If not, I'd start with the story and then design and build around it. That's normally less work than a full rebrand, and it means whatever you spend afterwards goes further.

It's also how I run my own projects. Every engagement starts with discovery, which is where we work out together whether you need positioning work first or can go straight into design.

If some of this sounds familiar, book a 30-minute call. We'll talk it through and you'll come away with a plan, whether or not we end up working together.