Business Storytelling

The 70-Word Offer: A Positioning Diagnostic for Founders Whose Niche Got Fuzzy

Every service founder who grows past the early years hits the same quiet crisis. In year one, the offer was sharp because it had to be: you did one thing for one kind of client, and everyone who met you knew exactly what you were for. Then you got good, said yes to adjacent work, added services clients asked for, and hired people with different strengths. The business got healthier and the positioning got blurrier, and one day you notice the referrals slowed, the inbound got vaguer, and prospects ask "so what exactly do you do?" more than they used to. The instinct is to treat this as a marketing problem: new website copy, a fresh tagline, a rebrand. That's usually the wrong diagnosis. The actual question is not "how do we describe ourselves better?" It's "have we let the offer sprawl to the point where there's no clear thing left to describe?" Vague copy is almost never a writing failure. It's an accurate reflection of a business that has stopped being able to say what it's best at. The 70-word offer is a diagnostic, not a slogan. If you cannot state who you serve, what changes for them, and why you specifically, in about 70 words, the failure is in the positioning, not the prose. And it costs real deals: buyers already drown in complexity, with roughly half of B2B purchases ending in no decision because buyers lack the confidence to choose , and a fuzzy offer adds exactly the confusion that produces that outcome.

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

By Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Founder, Business Growth Accelerator

Executive summary

When a service business grows, its niche blurs and referrals slow. Compress your offer to 70 words to diagnose exactly where positioning went vague and fix it.

Section 1

Why fuzziness costs you deals, not just clarity

Founders tend to treat a blurry niche as a cosmetic issue: annoying, but not urgent, because the work is still coming in. The revenue lags the problem. By the time the pipeline visibly slows, the positioning has been vague for a year. And the mechanism by which it costs you is not that prospects dislike a generalist. It's that a generalist offer makes the buyer's job harder at exactly the moment they're least able to do it. B2B buying is already overwhelming. Gartner's research found more than three-quarters of buyers describe their purchase as complex or difficult, and buyers spend only 17% of their journey with suppliers, doing most of the work alone . Into that overloaded state, a fuzzy offer lands as one more thing to figure out. HBR's work on this, Brent Adamson's "Sensemaking for Sales," found that even when buyers are convinced a solution is the best option, many still can't decide, and roughly half of deals end in no decision because buyers lack confidence, not because they lack a good option . A vague offer directly attacks confidence. If the buyer can't tell precisely what you're for, they can't be sure you're for them, and uncertainty is what stalls the deal. Specialists don't win because generalists are worse at the work. They win because a specialist offer is easier to be confident about. April Dunford's core positioning argument is that clear positioning is the input to everything downstream, and that a specialist framing beats a generic one precisely because it lets the buyer place you fast and trust the fit . The fuzzy offer isn't losing on quality. It's losing on the buyer's ability to feel sure, which is the actual bottleneck in modern B2B.

Section 2

Running the diagnostic

Sit down and write your offer in 70 words or fewer. Not a tagline, the whole thing: who it's for, what changes for them, and why you specifically. Then read what you wrote and check it against four failure signatures. Each one points to a different underlying positioning problem. If you clear all four in 70 words, your positioning is fine and you genuinely have a copy problem, fix the website. But most founders who feel the blur will fail two or three of these, and that's diagnostic gold: it tells you the vagueness in your marketing is downstream of a real decision you've been avoiding about what the business is for.

Section 3

The most common finding: you serve too many people

The single most frequent result of this exercise is that a founder cannot name one buyer, because the honest answer is "several." A firm that started serving early-stage SaaS now also serves e-commerce brands, a couple of professional-services clients, and one manufacturer, because each engagement was good work and good revenue at the time. Every individual yes was defensible. The accumulation is a positioning that can't compress, because there's no longer a single "who." This is uncomfortable to fix because the fix sounds like turning away money. It isn't, quite. Positioning is about what you lead with, not the only work you'll ever accept. You can still take the occasional off-niche project. What the diagnostic pushes you toward is choosing the one buyer you lead with in your offer, your site, your outbound, so the market has a clear thing to refer and remember. Dunford's framing is that trying to be relevant to everyone makes you compelling to no one . The 70-word constraint forces the choice the growing business kept deferring: which buyer is the front door.

Section 4

From diagnosis to a fixed offer

Once the diagnostic tells you where the blur lives, rebuilding the 70 words follows a fixed order. Do it in this sequence, because each step depends on the one before. Start with the buyer, chosen narrowly. Not "companies that need our help" but "Series A to B software companies with 20 to 80 staff and no full marketing team." Narrow enough that a prospect knows instantly whether it's them. This single choice resolves most of the fuzziness, because a specific buyer implies a specific problem and a specific proof. Then state the transformation as a from/to. "We take you from founder-led sales that stalls above $2M to a repeatable pipeline that runs without you." Buyers fund changes with a shape, not lists of services. This is where you convert activities back into the outcome clients actually buy. Then add the reason to believe you specifically: a proof unit, a named specialty, a track record in that exact buyer's world. This is the confidence lever, the thing that answers the "why you" that stalls deals when it goes unanswered . Then, and only then, count the words and cut. If it won't fit in 70, you haven't finished choosing. The remaining length is almost always an unresolved "and also" you're still unwilling to drop. Dropping it is the positioning decision. The word count is just the referee.

Section 5

Key takeaways

• A fuzzy offer is a positioning symptom, not a copy problem; new taglines can't fix a business that has stopped being able to say what it's best at. • Roughly half of B2B deals end in no decision because buyers lack confidence ; a vague offer attacks that confidence directly by making the buyer unsure you're for them. • Buyers are already overwhelmed, over three-quarters call purchases complex , so a generalist offer adds friction exactly when the buyer can least absorb it. • The 70-word constraint is a diagnostic: failing to name one buyer, stating activities not changes, needing repeated "and also," or using insider jargon each points to a specific positioning fix. • The most common finding is that you serve too many segments; positioning is choosing which buyer you lead with, not the only work you'll accept.

FAQ

Direct answers for operators.

How is this different from just writing a better value proposition?

A value proposition is the output; the diagnostic is about whether there's a coherent thing to write one for. If your offer won't compress to 70 words, no value-prop exercise will save it, because you'd be polishing prose over an unresolved decision about who you serve. Run the diagnostic first. If it reveals a clean single buyer and transformation, then write the value prop. If it reveals a split, fix the split before touching the copy.

I genuinely serve multiple types of clients well. Do I have to pick just one?

You have to pick one to lead with, not one to only ever serve. Positioning governs your front door: what your site, outbound, and referrals point at. Behind that door you can run multiple engagements. But a business whose front door says "we do many things for many people" gets remembered and referred by no one, because there's nothing specific to carry. Choosing a lead niche usually grows the off-niche work too, because clarity earns more referrals overall.

Won't narrowing my positioning shrink my market and my revenue?

It narrows who you speak to and usually widens who buys, because a specific buyer can feel confident you're for them, and confidence is the actual bottleneck in B2B buying . A generalist competing on "we can help with anything" competes with everyone and is chosen with conviction by no one. The revenue risk runs the other way: staying fuzzy is what quietly slows the referrals and inbound that a growing service firm depends on.

How often should I re-run this diagnostic?

Whenever the business changes shape: after a burst of hiring, a new service line, a pivot in your best clients, or any time you notice prospects asking "so what exactly do you do?" more often. Growth is what blurs positioning, so a growing firm should re-run it roughly annually. The 70-word test takes ten minutes and reliably surfaces service creep before it shows up as a slow pipeline a year later.

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Written by

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Founder, Business Growth Accelerator · Country Director, AVODA Group Uganda · EMBA

Joshua helps service-business operators turn scattered marketing into a clear path from first attention to booked call. He is Founder of Business Growth Accelerator and Country Director of AVODA Group Uganda.