Your messaging is blocked on a decision nobody has made

Generally, when a company comes to us asking for an outbound engine, they describe it as a writing problem. The emails are not landing. The website needs a refresh. Someone should tighten the LinkedIn posts. So before we touch any of it, we ask one question: who buys this, and what are we best at for them? More often than I would like, the room goes quiet, or two people answer differently and neither notices. That is not a messaging problem. That is an open decision, and while it stays open, every channel quietly invents its own answer to it.

Why this matters now

The old version of this problem was survivable because the buyer only ever saw one surface at a time. That is over. Forrester’s buying research puts a typical decision at 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers, and it finds that AI search tools often hand those people incomplete or unreliable information, which pushes them to go validate your claims against other sources. In parallel, 94% of business buyers now use AI in the purchase process, up from 89% the year before, and twice as many of them rate generative AI and conversational search as more meaningful than vendor websites, product experts, and sales. Buyers consider more vendors in less time, and they do it before you know they exist.

So the practical consequence is this: nobody reads your cold email in isolation anymore. They read it, then an answer engine’s summary of your website, then your last three LinkedIn posts, then a peer’s opinion. Your messaging is no longer four separate assets, it is one composite the buyer assembles without you in the room. If those four surfaces disagree, the buyer does not sit down and reconcile them. They just discount you and move to the next vendor, which is exactly why Forrester now sees B2B budget shifting toward website, digital, and social programs: those are the surfaces that feed the machine doing the summarising.

Positioning is the decision. Messaging is the output.

The two get collapsed constantly, and the collapse is expensive. Positioning is a decision: who cares about this, what are we best at for them, and what alternative are we beating. Messaging is the output: the words each surface uses to carry that decision. Teams almost always try to fix the output, because the output is visible and the decision is uncomfortable. That is how a messaging brief ends up on the desk of a marketer who was never handed the decision it is supposed to express.

So for example, take a data-infrastructure product. You can sell it to the marketer who wants their campaign data in the warehouse without filing a ticket, or you can sell it to the data engineer who wants connector reliability and a clean schema. Same product, same features, completely different message. The marketer needs to hear about the ticket queue disappearing. The engineer needs to hear about the schema surviving a source change. If nobody picks, the website talks to the engineer, the cold email talks to the marketer, and the blog splits the difference and reaches neither. That is not four messaging problems. That is one unmade decision showing up in four places.

How the gap shows up on the ground

You rarely get told “our positioning is unresolved”. You get told these symptoms instead:

• The demo converts, but sourcing does not. The message that books the meeting is not the message the product actually delivers, so the meetings that do land go well and the ones that never happen stay invisible.
• The website and the sales deck are on different releases, and everyone knows which one to trust.
• Every campaign needs a brand new angle invented from scratch, because there is no messaging spine to hang it on.
• The content reads as random smatterings rather than a story told week over week.
• Someone proposes a messaging workshop and the date keeps moving, because the input it needs is a product decision that has not been made.

That last one is the tell. When the workshop slips twice, the blocker is not calendars. That is why we now treat “we need better messaging” as a symptom to diagnose rather than a brief to accept.

What to ship while the decision is open

Here is the part that gets missed. The decision is real work and it takes weeks, but it does not follow that you sit still until it closes. Split the campaign backlog in two.

The first group depends on the decision: the category story, the AI-first vision, the new homepage, the repositioning against the incumbent everyone benchmarks you against. Those are genuinely blocked. Park them and stop relitigating them weekly.

The second group does not depend on it at all: a narrow, provable claim aimed at a segment you can name today. Users of a specific incumbent tool who are paying for capacity they do not use. Teams with a known gap between two systems you already bridge. This is a filter and a claim, not a position. So for example, “you are on this tool, this does the same job for less, and it handles the case you complained about publicly” needs zero repositioning to ship, and you can have it live this week. It will not validate the positioning, and this needs to be taken a little bit with a grain of salt, because a displacement campaign tells you about one segment’s pain and nothing about your category. But it buys meetings and evidence while the decision matures, which beats a quiet quarter.

Sequence the build around the real constraint

The other reason not to wait is that the infrastructure has a clock on it. Email addresses warm per address, not per domain, and that takes two to three weeks before you can send at any volume. Teams treat that window as dead time. It is not. It is exactly the window in which the decision closes and the messaging and landing surface get rebuilt behind it, and if you have sequenced it properly the two finish together.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn needs no warming. Two or three existing personal accounts can start manual outreach immediately, and the replies are the cheapest positioning test you will ever run. When the marketer answers and the engineer does not, you have learned something the workshop was going to argue about for an hour.

A pattern from the field

We recently worked with a Series A data-infrastructure company in DACH that had two plausible buyers and had not picked. The website was written for one, the outbound draft for the other, and the messaging document had been in review for a month waiting on a feature roadmap that kept moving. We stopped trying to write the words. Instead we built a competitor evidence base that refreshed weekly, handed it to the founders as the input to their decision, and separately shipped a displacement campaign against one incumbent that required no repositioning at all. The campaign ran while the decision matured. Neither waited on the other.

The mirror case, a founder-led product where the demo converted and sourcing did not, had the same root: the website described the product, the emails described a use case, and the two had never been reconciled. If you say one thing in an email and the prospect clicks through to a page saying something else, you have not lost a click. You have lost the credibility that would have made the reply worth writing.

The playbook

1. Write the decision down as a question, not a task. “Who buys this: the marketer or the data engineer?” beats “improve messaging” on any list, because a question has an answer and an owner and a date.
2. Name the input only the company can give. Which features actually ship, and which one are you prepared to be best at? No agency, consultant, or contractor can decide that for you, and pretending otherwise is how workshops slip.
3. Build the evidence base underneath the decision: what each alternative claims, where they are weak, which objections recur. Refresh it on a schedule rather than assembling it in a panic the day before the workshop.
4. Pick one segment and a target list you can actually read, a couple of hundred accounts rather than the whole addressable market. It is an assumption at this stage, so test it at a size where a flat response rate still tells you something.
5. Ship the decision-independent campaign now, and start LinkedIn while the inboxes warm.
6. Record your calls, if you are not already. The way your own people explain the product on a live call is the raw material for the message, and it is usually better than anything in the document.
7. When the decision closes, push the messaging spine to every surface in one pass: website, email, LinkedIn, blog, deck. Same claim, same order, same proof. Messaging that is only fixed in one channel is not fixed.

Most teams get sold a messaging engagement when what they needed was a decision, an owner, and a date. That is why our GTM strategy work starts at the decision and treats the words as the downstream artifact they are, and why the outbound engine piece argues for building the engine before the campaign rather than after. If your website and your cold email are telling two different stories right now, that is the thing to fix first, and if you want a second pair of eyes on it, get in touch.

Sources

• Forrester. “The State Of Business Buying, 2026.” January 2026. forrester.com
• John Buten, Forrester. “B2B Buyers Make Zero-Click Buying Number One.” January 2026. forrester.com
• Karen Tran, Forrester. “AI Is Reshaping B2B Brand And Communications Investments.” July 2026. forrester.com