Paru Tanna.
Eight years inside B2B technology companies fixing the same problem from the inside. Now doing it from the outside.
Built from the inside.
I've spent the last decade inside B2B technology companies where the product was genuinely good and the market wasn't responding to it yet. The pattern was always the same.
A founder team who had built something technically real. A small marketing function executing campaigns. Content going out consistently. Pipeline that looked acceptable from the outside but felt brittle from the inside. And the persistent sense that the company knew what it was building but couldn't quite explain it to the people who needed to hear.
At UnlikelyAI we commissioned primary research with a thousand senior leaders across regulated industries — financial services, government, healthcare, legal — and used it to name a problem the market was feeling but couldn't articulate. We called it the trust gap. We built the narrative around it, launched it through The Times, BBC and The Daily Telegraph, and ran a press event with senior leaders from J.P. Morgan, UBS, PwC, Cabinet Office and Deloitte in the room. Within six months the founder of Starling Bank was using our language to brief the FCA on AI in banking. None of that was a marketing outcome. It was a commercial outcome that started with getting the positioning right.
The same pattern existed at every company I worked in before that. At Triptease we re-positioned a B2B travel tech product for the buyer stages we'd been ignoring — and surfaced a £612,640 revenue opportunity in the first cycle, a +206% lift. At Mindvalley we built a content architecture for a seven-product launch programme that generated $3M in revenue and 42% month-on-month traffic growth, because launches stopped competing with each other for attention. At Jumptech and Recyclium the work was earlier — taking a technically strong cleantech product and finding the language for buyers who didn't yet realise they were buyers.
Every time, the gap was the same: technically strong product, vague or interchangeable market language, and buyers at completely different stages of understanding all being spoken to in the same way. Every time, closing the gap was a strategic decision that nobody in the company felt qualified to make, because positioning is not a marketing problem and it is not a brand problem and it is not a product problem — it lives in the space between all three, and so it tends to get dropped.
Marketann is me doing this from the outside, for companies that need someone who has lived that problem, knows what it costs to leave it unresolved, and knows how to fix it. The work is small enough to stay senior — I take two new Sprint clients a month — and the engagements are short enough that the strategy actually gets used, instead of sitting in a drawer.
A decade across B2B tech.
Four operating principles.
Positioning is a commercial decision, not a marketing one.
The companies that get positioning right treat it as a board-level question about what the business is willing to be known for. The companies that get it wrong treat it as a deliverable for the marketing team to figure out. Almost every positioning project I've done has started by moving the decision back up the stack, where it belongs.
Most market research is decoration. Primary research changes commercial outcomes.
Secondary research and analyst reports are useful for context. They almost never change what a company can credibly say about itself. Original primary research — properly designed, with a cohort that actually matters to your buyers — does, because it gives you language nobody else owns. That's the difference between participating in a conversation and setting the terms of one.
Buyer-stage language matters more than messaging frameworks.
Most companies have a single message they show to everyone. The problem-aware buyer, the solution-aware buyer and the product-aware buyer all get the same homepage, the same content, the same sales deck. The fix isn't a better message — it's three different conversations, each one designed for the stage the buyer is actually at. This is the single highest-leverage change most B2B companies can make to their marketing without changing the product.
If your team can't repeat it in a sentence, it isn't positioning yet.
The test for whether a positioning project has worked isn't whether the document exists. It's whether the CEO, the head of sales, the head of marketing and the most recent hire all describe what the company does in roughly the same sentence — without checking the slide. Until that happens, the work isn't done.
A few things I think about often.
The writers on positioning I keep coming back to are April Dunford on the strategic side and Bob Moesta on the buyer side. Most weeks I'm reading something that has nothing to do with marketing — at the moment it's economic history. I think senior strategy gets better the further it sits from the day-to-day language of marketing tactics.
Outside the work, I'm London-based, I take running too seriously, and I'll happily talk for an hour about why most B2B sales calls would be better if everyone stopped reading from the deck. If you want to know whether we'll get on, the discovery call is usually the fastest way to find out.
Selected Results
- AI Trust Report 2026 — The Times, BBC, The Daily Telegraph
- Research launch attended by senior leaders at J.P. Morgan, UBS, PwC, Cabinet Office and Deloitte
- £612,640 revenue opportunity (+206%) — B2B travel tech GTM strategy
- $3M revenue across 7 product launches — B2C edtech
- 42% MoM traffic growth through content and SEO strategy
- Shortlisted EVies Award — Best Marketing Campaign 2025
Write to me instead.
The best engagements often start with an email. Tell me what's not landing in your market and I'll write back.
Book a call with Paru.
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