How to Stand Out in a Crowded B2B Market

Building a product is easier than getting the right people to notice and remember it. Louis Grenier’s view is that B2B teams need to work on two different problems: differentiation, which gives a buyer a compelling reason to choose you, and distinctiveness, which makes you easier to notice and remember.

That distinction matters when your category matures. A new company can begin with a specific problem that established alternatives handle poorly. Over time, competitors may solve the same struggle while the company expands into adjacent segments to grow. Positioning still has to stay clear, but a hunt for one more supposedly unique feature becomes less useful once the products have converged.

Give buyers a reason to choose you, then show up consistently enough to be remembered. You can do both without inventing a grand claim or posting on LinkedIn every day.

Build strategy from things people have done

Louis calls predictions about future behavior “poisonous” inputs. Someone can sincerely say they would buy a feature, switch tools, or pay more and still do none of those things. Compliment-heavy surveys can produce the same problem: reassuring answers with little evidence behind them.

Start with people who recently bought from you or a competitor. You can also study people who spent serious time, money, or reputation trying to solve the problem. Reconstruct what happened rather than asking what might happen.

Capture five pieces of the buying situation:

• Job: What progress was the buyer trying to make?
• Alternatives: What else did they consider or use?
• Struggles: What blocked progress or made an alternative inadequate?
• Segment: Who experiences those struggles?
• Triggers: What changed and pushed them to act?

Interviews are only one source. Louis’s “insight foraging” can include reading communities such as Reddit, watching behavior, mystery shopping, and using direct category experience. He doubts synthetic personas can surface the specific human language that changes a strategy.

A research prompt that stays in the past

Ask a buyer to take you back to the moment the problem became urgent. What happened? What did they try first? Where did that option fall short? What did they risk or spend before choosing? Which event finally moved the decision forward?

Those questions give you a sequence to inspect. “Would you use this?” gives you a prediction.

Where a useful ICP starts

A job title is useful for ad targeting or list building, but it is a weak starting point for differentiation. Begin with the specific struggle you solve better than the available alternatives. Then ask who faces it most often or most acutely.

Louis uses a simple comparison. A taxi driver feels vehicle breakdown and maintenance problems more frequently than someone who drives mainly to take a child to school when it rains. The relevant segment follows from the frequency of the struggle, not from a demographic profile created in advance.

Use this sequence:

• Identify the goal buyers are trying to reach.
• List the struggles that block that goal.
• Mark the struggles your offer handles better than the alternatives.
• Find the people who experience those struggles most often or most severely.
• Translate that group into practical targeting filters only after the strategic segment is clear.

This does not ban firmographics. It gives them the right job. Industry, company size, geography, and role can help you find people after you know why those people should care.

Specificity creates the opening. In a commoditized category, the broad job, common alternatives, and category label may look much the same across vendors. A narrow group may still have an overlooked problem that larger competitors do not care to solve well. That can give a smaller company a credible beachhead.

Give buyers a reason to choose you and cues to remember you

Differentiation and distinctiveness support different parts of a buying decision.

Discipline	The job it does	The question to answer	Typical inputs
Differentiation	Raises the likelihood of preference	Why should this buyer choose us?	Ignored struggle, segment, solution, alternatives
Distinctiveness	Raises the likelihood of notice, memory, and consideration	How will buyers recognize and recall us?	Color, shape, tagline, sound, face, mascot, visual device, behavior

One unnamed road-management software company differentiated itself by closing the full reporting loop. Competing smartphone tools detected road problems and supplied raw data. This company identified problems, planned the fixes, reported back to the council to justify the budget, and compared later road conditions with the starting point. The customer gained a clearer way to prove that the work had been completed.

The same company’s wrapped vehicles, conference behavior, logo, colors, and brochure devices belonged to distinctiveness. Those elements did not solve the road-management problem. They helped the company look like itself and stand apart when buyers encountered it.

Louis’s purple-beret rooster nods to his French identity but does not explain his service. Its value is recognition. PostHog’s hedgehog, Mutiny’s raccoon, and Linear’s dark visual system and sphere-like line device take different routes to recognizability.

The examples should not push every B2B brand toward a quirky mascot. Louis’s more useful instruction is to find negative space:

• Inventory the visual, verbal, sonic, and human assets in your category.
• Note what direct competitors repeatedly use.
• Find a color, shape, phrase, face, behavior, or other device that the category leaves open.
• Check what customers and peers already notice about the founder or company.
• Choose assets and repeat them with enough intensity to become recognizable.

Louis also recommends leaving some assets “meaning-free” when obvious category symbols would make every competitor look alike. The asset can be recognizable without carrying the full product explanation.

In Louis’s 2026 audit of 100 B2B SaaS and AI companies across eight distinctive brand assets, one reached the study’s “ownable” band while 78 fell into generic territory. The full methodology and examples are available in Louis’s research.

Turn a point of view into visible behavior

A founder point of view is more useful when it protects a segment from a real source of harm. Louis calls that source the monster. It should explain the struggle honestly; a direct competitor is usually a poor monster because the competitor did not create the customer’s underlying problem.

Then connect four decisions:

• Monster: Name what causes or sustains the segment’s struggle.
• Point of view: Explain how you see that harm and how you intend to protect the segment from it.
• Spices: Define the “too something” behaviors that make the point of view visible, such as too simple or too direct.
• Assets: Select the words, colors, shapes, sounds, faces, or devices that express those behaviors consistently.

The “spices” turn abstract brand values into visible behavior.

A founder’s face can itself become a distinctive asset. The founder can discuss more than the product, provided the subject matters to the audience. Louis’s test is practical: the founder does not need to share personal life or chase virality, but should show up in a way that people can recognize and connect to a useful point of view.

LinkedIn without daily posting

Posting is optional in Louis’s LinkedIn approach. If the people you want to reach spend time there, comments and DMs can create notice, memory, and conversation without a daily publishing habit.

His own workflow begins when someone comments on a post, engages with him, or sends a DM. If that person fits his segment, he offers a physical copy of his book with no catch. When a relevant marketing leader accepts, he may send four or five copies rather than one.

The operational flow is simple even though Louis has automated parts of it:

• Notice a relevant engagement signal.
• Check whether the person fits the segment.
• Offer something genuinely useful and ask permission before sending it.
• Track delivery.
• Ask whether it arrived.
• Encourage the person to use it.
• Suggest a call only when the material connects to a problem they are working through.

Louis automates tracking and book fulfillment with a Chrome extension, HubSpot tasks, coding-agent skills, Amazon author copies, and a daily delivery check. The stack is optional. Ask permission, give something useful, and follow up when there is a real reason.

Louis guesses that roughly 40% of recipients read at least part of the book, but he has not verified the number. He also said the process takes time and does not always produce a response or call.

Keep the relationship open for the real buying cycle

The follow-up window should reflect purchase frequency and buying time. A weekly purchase and a service bought once every ten years need different strategies.

From Extrovert user interviews, Oleg sees outreach sequences that run for two or three weeks even when the seller expects the buying decision to take around six months. Systems can lower the effort required for each touch without forcing the relationship into a shorter window.

Louis extends his own conversations by changing channels. If LinkedIn stalls, he may switch to email or send an automated postcard that says the handwriting is not his but the words are. He also reactivates older conversations when he has genuinely useful new material to share.

Reconnect with something useful: a relevant study, a thoughtful comment, or material you offered to share. Let human judgment decide whether a drafted comment or DM is relevant before it goes out. Extrovert can flag relevant LinkedIn activity and draft comments or DMs for human review.

Before you change the homepage or outreach

Use this before rewriting the homepage or launching another outreach sequence:

• Evidence: Can you point to a recent purchase, attempted solution, or observed behavior behind the insight?
• Struggle: Is the problem specific enough that some buyers feel it more frequently or acutely than others?
• Preference: Can you explain why your offer handles that struggle better without exaggeration?
• Recognition: Have you chosen assets that do not blend into the category?
• Behavior: Does the brand act in a way that supports its point of view?
• Reach: Do your comments, DMs, and follow-ups give the buyer something useful?
• Timing: Does the relationship stay open for roughly as long as the buying decision takes?

The goal is to help the right buyers notice you, understand the fit, and remember you when they are ready.

Practical FAQ

Can positioning work when the product is not truly innovative?

Yes, but Louis advises against inventing a unique-feature claim. Keep the category and offer clear, look for a specific struggle that alternatives handle poorly, and use distinctiveness to improve notice and memory as the category becomes more commoditized.

Should an ICP start with job title and company size?

Louis recommends starting with the struggle you solve and the people who experience it most often or most acutely. Add job title, industry, and company size later when you need usable filters for ads, prospecting, or distribution.

Do founders have to post on LinkedIn?

No. Louis said founders can use comments and DMs if their prospects are active on LinkedIn. Posting can help with repeated exposure, but it is one route rather than a requirement.

How long should a LinkedIn nurture sequence run?

There is no fixed length in the session. Match the approach to purchase frequency and the category’s buying cycle, then stay useful rather than repeating sales asks. Louis’s own method may move from LinkedIn to email or postcards and return when he has relevant material to share.

Can AI-generated personas replace customer research?

Louis’s answer was skeptical. He sees synthetic personas as acceptable for a quick orientation, but believes the specific language, color, and surprising detail that can shape a strategy still come from real people and observed behavior. He presented this as experience, not research.

Watch the replay

Watch the full webinar replay on YouTube, read Louis’s B2B brand-distinctiveness research, explore STFO, or connect with Louis on LinkedIn.