Mikhail B.

B2B Positioning & Brand Strategist | Messaging & GTM

Most companies that struggle to sell don't have a product problem. They have a positioning problem. The offer is strong, but the system that turns it into revenue - positioning, messaging, and how the company goes to market - is misaligned, so conversion drops, deals stall, and pricing slips. I'm a B2B positioning and brand strategist who fixes these problems at the root and builds the strategic systems founder-led companies use to sell in complex markets: positioning and messaging built into how the company goes to market and sells designed to lift conversion, deal quality, and close rates - not a strategy deck that gets shelved. When sales underperform, the instinct is to jump straight into a rebrand, a website redesign, or more ad spend. That treats the symptom. The real issue is almost always upstream: unclear positioning, a fuzzy value proposition, an undefined ICP, and messaging that doesn't translate what you offer into what buyers need to hear. Until that gap closes, every downstream fix - new logo, new site, more marketing spend - just makes an unclear position more visible, while conversion, lead quality, and ROI stay flat. This work is built for a specific structure, not an industry: founder-led and senior-led B2B companies, B2B SaaS, MedTech and technology ventures - including pre-launch and investor-facing - and boutique professional services. What they share is the shape of the sale - each deal is high-stakes and carefully evaluated, the sales cycle is long and often involves several decision-makers, trust matters more than price, and the offer is genuinely valuable but needs translation before a buyer can see why this company over another. If pipeline volume can paper over weak positioning, I'm not the right fit. If every deal matters, I am. Before any brand decision, I run a structured diagnostic: stakeholder and leadership interviews, customer and buyer interviews, win-loss and competitive analysis, category analysis, and market-perception research, both qualitative and quantitative, to find exactly where the gap sits between what you offer and how the market reads it. That diagnosis drives a connected system, each stage implementing the one before it: strategic positioning (category definition, ICP, value proposition, differentiation); messaging architecture (the messaging system and narrative hierarchy that make the position legible); naming and brand identity (a new name when the strategy demands it, and the visual trust and recognition system that carries the position); and go-to-market and sales implementation - turning the positioning into the assets, messaging, and repeatable sales approach the team actually uses to win deals. Most strategy work stops at the deck. This doesn't: the goal is a position that shows up in the pipeline, not just the brand book. The diagnosis goes deeper than a typical brand engagement for a reason. I hold a PhD in sociology and spent 15 years teaching and conducting research in research methods, statistics, and qualitative analysis at universities in the US and Australia. My methodological research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, and I secured a competitive $180,000 National Science Foundation grant to fund it. Positioning is, at its core, a research problem - understanding how a market perceives value and where that perception diverges from reality - and that rigor is what I bring to it. What the work has produced: a B2B MedTech venture renamed and repositioned from another scanner into a new category, the first 3D dental camera, closing its VC funding round within six months; a founder-led B2B consultancy renamed and repositioned out of a commodity category into a defined one, closing a $2.5M enterprise contract within weeks of the new strategy, before the new website even launched; 45% sales growth in six months for a brand that didn't raise its marketing spend; and a launch that reached $2.6M in revenue in its first year. Different problems, same mechanism: the positioning gets fixed at the root, then built into how the company sells - so it shows up in revenue, not just the brand. If your offer is strong but the market isn't seeing it clearly enough to act, let's talk.