Enterprise Growth Problem? Blame Brand (Really)
Has your positioning ever survived a happy hour?
The question is a reframe, inspired by a real conversation. A few years ago, a company with good positioning, and real differentiation, had just closed a difficult quarter. One of their sales reps was at a conference—late, at the bar, a couple drinks in with his guard down. Asked how he pitched the company to prospects, he shrugged. “Whatever I need to say to get the deal done.”
He wasn’t going rogue. He just never felt the positioning strongly enough to use it when it counted.
The Polite (But Perilous) Fiction
Most CMOs in enterprise B2B already know this happens. They just describe it differently. Adoption was uneven. Sales needs another enablement session.
What they’re actually describing is a belief problem. And another training session has never fixed a belief problem.
At Emotive Brand, we call this the belief gap: the distance between what a company has decided to say about itself and what its people actually say.
In a 50-person startup, you can keep the story coherent through proximity. At enterprise scale, the brand has to survive across thousands of people who weren’t in that room, across functions with their own priorities and vocabularies.
Either belief is strong enough that people carry it without being reminded, or the story quietly disintegrates into a hundred well intentioned variations that add up to nothing the market can recognize, nevermind embrace.
The Nod That Means Nothing
There’s a moment worth dreading. Leadership team in a room, brand work on the wall, and everyone nods. But nodding is just the absence of objection, not the presence of belief. When people walk back to their desks after that meeting, the nod evaporates because they didn’t feel what they approved, they just confirmed it was accurate, and those are different things.
A CRO at an enterprise SaaS company put it well. “We don’t have a messaging problem. We have a conviction problem.” His team understood the talking points. They just didn’t believe them enough to feel confident improvising with them. And every enterprise sale eventually requires improvisation. The moment a prospect asks a question the messaging doc didn’t anticipate, you find out whether your team has conviction or just compliance.
Why Emotion Is the Rational Move
A Google and CEB study found that B2B buyers are driven more by emotional connection to brands than B2C consumers. That stops most people for a second, but it makes sense when you consider what’s actually at stake.
Emotion is the most rational response to high-stakes B2B decision-making. When a bad recommendation could cost you your standing with the board, you don’t just evaluate the product. You evaluate whether you trust the people behind it. And that trust comes from every conversation with the company feeling like it’s coming from the same place, which only happens when the people having those conversations believe the same thing.
The Pattern of Belief as Accelerant
Over 16 years and more than 200 B2B engagements, one thing has become clear. The companies where brand actually accelerates growth are the ones that treat belief with the same seriousness they bring to positioning.
When it works, you can show up anywhere around the globe—and every employee sells on brand, and builds product on brand. Not because they memorized the messaging framework, but because it captures what they believe really matters.
Customers feel the difference, evangelists show up on their own instead of being manufactured, and top talent arrives because the people inside are proud enough to recruit from their own networks. The company becomes something rarer than a unicorn: an enduring brand.
The Burning Question for B2B Enterprise
The fundamental question for most enterprise B2B companies isn’t whether their positioning is accurate. It’s whether their team could defend it to a skeptic without reaching for the deck.
If the answer is no, you don’t have a positioning problem. You have a conviction problem–just ask your sales rep at the bar.
