Hi, I'm Val.
Most positioning is built from the inside out, handed off as a framework, and never activated. I build it from what your buyers actually say. Then I activate it across sales, lifecycle, and partner channels.
Most positioning is built from the inside out, handed off as a framework, and never activated. I build it from what your buyers actually say. Then I activate it across sales, lifecycle, and partner channels.
When a business grows past a certain point, something breaks. The voice of the customer gets lost, the why behind the what is buried. Sales is pitching features. Emails announce updates. Partners explain your product the way they understood it two years ago. Everyone is winging it from their own version of the message.
That's not a messaging problem. That's an activation problem. And it shows up in three places:
Prospects sit through demos and don't see their problem in what's being pitched. Not because the product is wrong, but because the story never got to them.
Customers get onboarded to part of the product. Churn climbs. The full story exists somewhere, just not in the touchpoints that were supposed to tell it.
Referrals fall flat. Affiliates want to advocate but don't have the language. Co-sell conversations go nowhere because nobody gave them the right frame.
This is the gap I close.
The results aren't coincidental. A 60% co-sell close rate when the baseline was 30%. Lifecycle email growing to 25% of revenue. NRR at 97%. Those numbers came from the same place every time: knowing who the buyer actually is and building everything from that.
Your sales team is pitching features. Lifecycle emails are product updates. Partners are still using messaging from your last rebrand. The framework you need is already in your customers' words. Nobody has gone and gotten it.
Most teams considering this work look at three other paths first. Each one delivers something. None of them get the framework into the channels where it has to perform.
Six months later, nothing has changed in your sales talk track, your onboarding, or how partners describe you. The framework was the deliverable. Activation was never in scope.
You get a constant feed of voice-of-customer themes, sentiment tags, and quotes flowing into your dashboards. What you don't get is a rewritten cancel flow, a sales talk track in your buyer's language, or a partner one-pager.
Your Head of Marketing blocks off two weeks. A few customer calls, a Notion doc, a Slack share. By the next planning cycle, sales is back to pitching features and the doc is in someone's archive.
This is the work that picks up where each of those stops short.
My experience comes from being embedded in this ecosystem for over a decade, not just as a consultant to the vendors, but as an actual buyer. I know what your customers are thinking when they get on a sales call because I've been that person. I know what questions to ask to surface the language that moves deals, reduces churn, and makes partners effective advocates instead of confused ones.
Most positioning consultants build from the inside out. They interview your team, synthesize the themes, and hand you a framework that reflects what your org believes about itself. That's not where the signal is.
The signal is in what your buyers say when nobody's selling to them. Getting to it requires knowing what to listen for, and knowing what to do with it once you have it.
That perspective didn't come from a straight line.
A messaging framework only works if the team can reach for it. Most don't. It lives in a Notion doc nobody opens, a deck from six months ago, or in the head of one person who's about to leave.
The fix is an AI layer that holds the framework: buyer language, competitive talk tracks, objection handling, partner co-marketing templates. Your sales, lifecycle, and partner teams can query it the moment they need it.
Ask it how to handle a specific objection. Run a role-play before a discovery call. Generate a Better Together draft for a new partner conversation. The framework stops being a deliverable and starts being infrastructure.
I either set this up inside your existing AI infrastructure (Claude Projects, ChatGPT Team, Glean, Notion AI) or build it from scratch and hand it over. Either way, the messaging stays current because the same engagement that builds the framework also populates the system that holds it.
Most positioning work delivers a messaging framework and stops there. This doesn't. The framework gets activated in the channels where it has to perform: sales conversations, lifecycle email, and partner co-marketing. Your team gets trained on how to use it.
The core engagement. For companies that need positioning built from the buyer up and activated in the channels where it has to perform.
What's included
AI activation layer available as add-on. Set up in your existing AI stack or built from scratch and populated with the framework. See the standalone package below for scope.
Not included: partner co-marketing activation, ongoing management, platform implementation
For companies that want positioning activated across every channel, and a direct line throughout the engagement for decisions that can't wait for a scheduled check-in.
What's included
Standalone. For teams who already have positioning and want it operationalized: an AI layer your sales, partner, and marketing teams can query on demand.
What's included
Requires existing positioning. If you don't have a current messaging framework that holds up, start with Buyer-Led Positioning above. The AI layer amplifies what's there. It doesn't replace the work of getting it right.
For clients post-engagement. Keeps the framework current as the product evolves and the team changes.
Available to clients who have completed a project engagement. If the foundation isn't there, the retainer won't hold.
What's included each month
Month-to-month. 30 days notice to cancel.
Tell me what's broken. I'll let you know if I can fix it.
Fill out the form and I'll follow up with next steps.
Engagements are three months, project-based, and start at $8,500/month. Every engagement ends with your team trained on how to use what we built, not just a document in a shared drive.
A decade in this industry and my multi-faceted experience has put me in every function, watching what moved the needle and what didn't. Each role since has added a lens.
What a sales team actually needs from positioning. What a customer success org sees that marketing misses. What a founder is really asking when they say the messaging isn't working.
The non-linear path is a feature, not a bug. It's the thing that lets me sit across from a head of sales, a CMO, and a VP of CS in the same week and know what each of them needs from the same framework.
Yes. The methodology is the same, the activation channels are different. For ecommerce brands, the work replaces sales and partner materials with full lifecycle and retention programs: email, SMS, subscription loyalty, and referral. Learn more about the ecommerce work →
Engagements are three months, project-based. The first month is research and synthesis: buyer interviews, sales call analysis, stakeholder interviews. Month two is framework development and activation: copy, talk tracks, enablement materials. Month three is delivery, training, and handoff. Every engagement ends with your team knowing how to use what we built.
This work requires enough customers to interview, which typically means post-product-market fit with at least 20-30 active customers. If you're pre-revenue or very early, the signal isn't there yet to build from. If you're post-PMF but pre-Series A, you're likely in the right window: enough customers to surface real patterns, early enough that getting the positioning right has an outsized impact on what comes next.
Access to customers for interviews, a few hours of internal stakeholder time across sales, marketing, and CS, and existing sales call recordings if you have them. You don't need to have your positioning figured out before we start. That's the work. The more raw material you can share at the outset, the faster we move.
Depends on what you mean by positioning. If you have a messaging framework that your sales team actually uses and your lifecycle emails are converting, you probably don't need the core engagement. If you have a Notion doc nobody opens and a deck from last year, you have a starting point, not positioning. If the framework is solid but it's not living anywhere your team can reach for it, the Buyer-Led AI Activation package is built for exactly that situation.