Webinar recap: Closing the gap between brand positioning and B2B buyer language

In our recent webinar, we shared a first look at our new report, What B2B buyers say when you’re not in the room. It’s built using the Basis Ideas methodology, combining AI-powered language analysis with expert manual coding, to compare how brands describe themselves with how buyers talk in real-world peer conversations.

The headline finding surprised a lot of people in the room:

83% of what buyers say about B2B brands contradicts how those brands describe themselves.

That is not a minor mismatch. It’s a meaningful gap between intended positioning and the language buyers use when they are trying to make a safe decision.

And this gap shows up in shortlists, in stalled deals, and in the conversations you never get to hear.

In the webinar, Tom explained what this 83% gap really means in practice:

Buyers are forming opinions earlier than most brands realise, and they are doing it in places that rarely show up in pipeline data.

In the webinar poll, we asked: what percentage of negative sentiment or scepticism forms before an RFP even exists?

Three in four (76%) attendees believed the answer was between 30 and 60%. But, based on what we see in our dataset, it’s actually 70–80%.

That matters because once scepticism sets in, it tends to stick. By the time someone enters a formal process, they are often validating the impressions they picked up earlier, not starting with a blank slate.

Where do those impressions form? In the digital peer spaces buyers trust most: LinkedIn threads, Slack channels, specialist forums, Discord groups, Reddit, and other informal communities. These are the places buyers go to sanity-check a shortlist, ask for a second opinion, and surface red flags long before they fill in a contact form.

As Conor put it during the discussion:

One of the clearest signals of the positioning gap is how little brand language overlaps with buyer language.

When we compare the phrases brands use most with the language buyers repeat in peer conversations, the overlap is around 14%.

Brands tend to lean on familiar positioning terms such as “innovative”, “trusted”, “strategic partner”, “all-in-one”. Buyers, especially closer to a decision, default to more practical, defensible language.

They want to know what will make their life easier, what will reduce risk, what will save time, and what they can confidently justify to others in the decision-making group.

This is not an argument for stripping out ambition, or banning certain words. It’s a reminder that, when a buyer asks “but what does that mean in practice?”, your messaging needs to land with evidence, clarity, and specifics.

A big theme in the webinar was how certain claims now trigger scepticism by default, not because the product is weak, but because the framing lacks proof.

Three examples came up repeatedly:

• AI-powered / AI-driven: If you cannot clearly explain what the AI does and what benefit it delivers, buyers interpret it as hype. In the tech space, vague AI claims are a consistent source of negative sentiment. 
• Market-leading / award-winning / best-in-class: These can work, but only when they’re recent, relevant to the buyer’s category, and tied to measurable outcomes. 
• All-in-one: Particularly in software and tech, “all-in-one” often reads as disruption, hidden complexity, or lock-in risk unless you can show exactly how it integrates into an existing stack. 

The pattern is simple: buyers are not automatically sceptical of bold claims. They are sceptical of claims that cannot be checked, defended, or validated quickly.

So what do buyers talk about when they are making a decision?

Across sectors, we repeatedly see buyer decision language map back to seven core drivers. These are the themes buyers return to when narrowing a shortlist and defending a decision internally.

Those drivers are:

1. Proof of ROI and track record

2. Ease of integration and implementation risk

3. Service quality and responsiveness

4. Cost and value transparency

5. Risk and compliance

6. Time saving

7. Peer validation and social proof

You do not need to “cover” every driver in every message. But you do need to know which ones dominate in your category, and whether your messaging makes those answers easy to find.

We unpack these further in our report.

In the discussion, Conor shared a practical starting point.

1. Audit your owned media, especially your website. 

   Not to do a word swap exercise, but to pressure-test whether the claims you make are backed by specific evidence. Buyers are seeing the same language everywhere, so the difference is not the adjective. It’s the proof. 

2. Look hard at your pricing clarity. 

   Even for bespoke offers, buyers are not necessarily asking for an exact number upfront. What they need is reduced uncertainty: ranges, scenarios, signals of where you sit in the market, and enough context to understand whether you are likely to be viable.

3. Upgrade your case studies. 

   Buyers do not want perfect stories. They want credible stories. Include what went wrong, what changed, and what was learned. That is how proof becomes believable.