The Position · Edition 8

The Consultant and the Vendor Are Reading the Same Market — Backwards

31 July 2026

A consultant sits down with a client to recommend a piece of software. Across town, that same software vendor is sitting down with their own team to figure out how to position against the competitor the consultant is about to compare them to.

Neither one realises they're answering the same question from opposite ends of the table.

Here's the position: the consultant who finds real value for a client and the company that wins the deal are running the exact same analysis — market landscape, fit-to-need, and proof of best result — just pointed in opposite directions. Whoever builds the sharper version of that analysis, on either side of the table, wins the moment. Most companies still don't realise they can build it once and use it for both.

The consultant's three questions

A consultant earning their fee isn't recommending "a good tool." They're recommending the right tool, for this client, for this reason — and defending that recommendation when someone asks why.

That comes down to three questions, asked in order, every time:

What does the market actually offer? Not the four vendors the consultant already knows from the last three engagements — the full landscape, including the newer entrant that's quietly better suited to this client's shape and size.
What's genuinely best for this client? Not the most feature-rich option, not the cheapest, not the one with the best sales deck — the one that maps to this client's specific constraints, workflow, and growth stage.
What does the best result actually look like — and can I prove it? A recommendation without a defensible outcome attached is an opinion. A consultant's value is the evidence behind the pick, not the pick itself.

A consultant who can answer all three, quickly and credibly, is worth their invoice. A consultant who's working from stale vendor comparisons and a mental list of "companies I've heard of" is doing the client a disservice — even if they don't realise it.

The company's three questions

Now flip to the other side of that same conversation. A company trying to win that consultant's recommendation — or the client's decision directly — is answering a mirror-image set of questions:

What does the market actually offer? Including us, honestly. A company that doesn't know where it sits relative to the full landscape is negotiating blind, and it shows the moment a sharp buyer or consultant asks a comparison question they haven't rehearsed.
What does this specific buyer actually see as their best interest? Not what the company wishes buyers cared about most — messaging teams are notorious for falling in love with a differentiator the market has stopped rewarding. What the buyer, in front of them, actually weighs.
What makes us the best result — and can we show it, not just say it? "We're the best choice" is a claim. "Here's the win data, the client outcomes, the specific gap we close that the alternative doesn't" is evidence. Consultants and sophisticated buyers can tell the difference in the first two minutes.

Strip away the framing and it's the same three-part structure a consultant runs, aimed the other way: landscape awareness, buyer-specific fit, and proof of outcome.

Why this correlation usually goes unnoticed

If a consultant's diligence and a company's positioning work are structurally the same exercise, you'd expect the two sides to be talking the same language. In practice, they almost never are — and that gap is where deals go sideways for reasons neither side can quite name.

The consultant is working from whatever landscape view they've assembled themselves — often dated, often incomplete, built from a handful of vendor briefings and whatever came up in the last engagement. The company is working from whatever internal view of "what buyers want" survived the last positioning workshop — often built on the loudest internal opinion rather than the client's actual stated priority.

Neither side is short on effort. Both are short on the same thing: a live, evidence-backed view of the market that isn't filtered through one person's memory or one team's assumptions.

When that view is missing on the consultant's side, a genuinely well-suited vendor gets passed over because the consultant simply didn't have it on their radar. When it's missing on the company's side, a genuinely well-suited buyer walks away because the company pitched the wrong differentiator to the wrong priority.

Both failures look, from the outside, like a mismatch. They're actually the same failure, wearing two different jackets: nobody in the room had a current, complete picture of the landscape and the fit.

What closes the gap on both sides

The fix isn't a better sales deck for companies or a better spreadsheet for consultants. It's the same underlying asset, built once and used from both directions: a continuously updated view of the market that ties landscape, fit, and outcome together.

For a consultant, that looks like a market map that doesn't go stale between engagements, a fit comparison built on structured feature and pricing data rather than the last vendor call, and outcome evidence — win/loss patterns, not marketing claims — for the recommendation they're about to put their name behind.

For a company, that same underlying structure looks like an auto-updated battlecard that reflects what a sharp consultant will actually ask, a SWOT built against the real competitive set rather than the three logos everyone already knows, and win/loss intelligence that shows, with numbers, which buyer priorities the company actually wins on — so the pitch matches the buyer's actual best interest instead of the company's favourite talking point.

It's the same data. It's the same discipline. The only thing that changes is which side of the table is asking the question.

How Pro-Position.AI does both at once

This is the exact structure [Pro-Position.AI](

Market maps give either side the full competitive landscape, continuously refreshed — so a consultant isn't working from memory, and a company isn't guessing where it actually sits.
Auto-updated battlecards and pricing comparisons turn "what does the market offer, and how does it stack up" from a research project into a standing, current answer — usable by a consultant building a shortlist or a company defending its position.
SWOT analysis and win/loss intelligence connect the landscape view to actual outcomes — the difference between "this looks like a good fit on paper" and "this is what's actually worked for buyers in this situation," which is the evidence both a consultant's recommendation and a company's pitch need to hold up.

The consultant gets a sharper, faster, better-evidenced recommendation. The company gets a sharper, faster, better-evidenced position. Neither has to build their own version of the same market intelligence from scratch — and neither has to trust the other's homework, because both are working from the same live data.

The framework to steal

Whichever side of the table you sit on, run the same three questions before your next recommendation or pitch:

Do I actually know the full landscape, or the landscape I remember? → If your view of "the market" hasn't been refreshed since your last engagement or your last positioning review, you're working from a snapshot, not a picture.
Am I matching to what the other side actually values, or what I assume they value? → A recommendation or a pitch built on assumption instead of stated priority is a coin flip dressed up as expertise.
Can I prove the result, or am I asserting it? → "This is the right call" needs evidence behind it — outcome data, not conviction — whether you're the one recommending or the one being recommended.

If you can't answer all three with current data, you're not doing the analysis. You're doing a version of it that was accurate a while ago.

Where this bites first: any consultant whose landscape view is a mental list, and any company whose positioning is built on what they assume buyers want, are running the same outdated version of this analysis from opposite sides — and a sharper competitor, on either side of the table, is one live data source away from making that gap visible to the client.

First published as an edition of The Position, Pro-Position.AI's newsletter on competitive intelligence, product strategy and go-to-market.

Keep exploring: