Interview with Sayanta Goswami, B2B Positioning Strategist specialising in Buyer Perception

This interview is with Sayanta Goswami, B2B Positioning Strategist specialising in Buyer Perception.

To start, how do you describe your work as a B2B Positioning Strategist specializing in buyer perception?

I shape how enterprise and Fortune 500 buyers form perceptions about B2B firms before any sales conversations begin, and how those perceptions influence who gets shortlisted or eliminated.

Most B2B firms assume they lose enterprise deals in the sales calls or during the procurement process. What they often ignore is that these deals are won or lost in the weeks and months before the buyer ever talks to their sales reps. The sales conversations exist mostly to confirm what the buyer has already decided.

I work with leadership teams at 8- and 9-figure B2B firms who have the capability and expertise but are still finding it difficult to close enterprise deals at the rate they would like.

I use a framework that I call the Buyer Perception Architecture™ to build the right perception for the firm. Together with the firm, my goal is to make sure the right buyers categorize them as a strategic partner rather than just another vendor.

I also publish The Buyer Perception Brief, a LinkedIn newsletter read by experts at Amazon, Gartner, EY, PwC, IBM, Barclays, and 30+ other global institutions.

Looking back, what pivotal experiences led you from serving solopreneurs to partnering with enterprise-facing B2B firms?

What drove me towards partnering with B2B firms that wanted to close enterprise deals was a realisation that happened while I was working with a client.

It was a retainer with Kode89, a B2B firm whose founders had a combined 20+ years of experience. They understood the constraint they were removing for their ideal clients at a foundational level. They also had the discipline and perseverance to implement the positioning changes I asked them to immediately, and then wait for the results to show, instead of wanting them yesterday.

Within 14 weeks, we generated $5.5 million in qualified pipeline, compressed their sales cycle from six months to eight weeks, and secured a referral partnership with ServiceNow.

It was during those 14 weeks that I realised my framework, The Buyer Perception Architecture™, produces the best results when it closes the gap between capabilities that are already there but are hidden beneath the wrong signals the firm is sending, because the market never offered feedback on them.

While I have tons of respect for the newbies and love guiding them time and again, this is the work I find the most joy in.

Building on that, when you begin an engagement, what is your first diagnostic step to map current versus desired buyer perception?

The first step is always what I call the Buyer Perception Audit.

Before any repositioning work begins, I need to understand what perception the firm’s existing signals are building and what a decision maker concludes about the firm based on those signals during their research.

The audit covers multiple areas, including the firm’s and its leadership’s LinkedIn presence, the website, any media publications or bylines, how they’re showing up in AI searches, and many other touchpoints a buyer might come across before a sales conversation begins.

The gap I look for is between two things:

1. How the firm sees itself
2. How the enterprise buyer categorises them based on the publicly available signals

I’ve found that gap is always larger than leadership expects and is always upstream of the fixes they’ve been applying.

Most B2B firms invest a lot in what they say about themselves. What they don’t stop to analyse is what buyers think of them based on those claims.

The Buyer Perception Audit reveals that gap. Everything else builds from it.

Once those gaps are clear, what specific positioning move have you found most effective for compressing long B2B sales cycles?

The next step is working with the leadership team. Buyer perception problems always originate in how leadership understands and communicates the firm’s identity. Until we’re clear on that, every downstream signal, such as content or outreach, will continue to amplify the wrong signals.

In these sessions, I’m working through multiple elements simultaneously. What are the firm’s genuine strengths, and where are they being undersold or ignored entirely? What are they over-amplifying? Where does the firm actually do its best work, and is that where they’re positioning themselves? Which channels are they over-indexing in because they feel productive, without generating the returns that justify the investment?

And most importantly, what gap exists in the market that no competitor is targeting, or not targeting with enough precision for the firm to own it?

That analysis gives us the specific repositioning direction to change how enterprise buyers categorise the firm before a sales conversation begins.

When you enter conversations with buyers categorising you correctly, sales cycles compress without you trying.

Shifting to competition, how do you distinguish true buyer‑considered alternatives from similar‑looking competitors?

This is one of the most consistent blind spots I come across in my work. I use what I call Replacement Mapping to find the right answer.

B2B firms build their competitive positioning by looking sideways at other firms offering similar services or products. I get the urge to do so, but that’s not the only place an enterprise buyer—or any B2B buyer for that matter—looks when searching for alternatives.

They can compare a firm to:

• Internal hires
• Adjacent service providers that might look like they’re solving the same problem
• AI tools that perform tasks for a fraction of the cost

And the biggest one I’ve found is the status quo: the buyer deciding they will stay with their existing vendor, or worse, continue to live with the constraint. Both of those choices seem familiar, and that’s a huge motivator for humans to stay the same.

So, we map out every alternative and then begin the positioning work that shows why the firm is different and a safer choice compared with all conceivable alternatives.

Given AI now shapes early research, what is your process for auditing and influencing what models say about your category?

I audit LLM visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. My approach operates on two tracks simultaneously: Audit and Influence.

1. Audit: I run a 15-query audit across four LLMs once every month. The queries are designed to mimic what my buyers are actually asking, such as “Why do we keep losing enterprise deals?” This kind of question tests authority attribution.

   I score each response between 0–10 across four dimensions:

   • Attribution strength
   • Framework accuracy
   • Proof point accuracy
   • Competitive positioning relative to established experts

   I use Google’s AI Overview as a leading indicator between monthly audits: what it surfaces today predicts what ChatGPT and Gemini will cite in 2–4 weeks.

2. Influence: I build category ownership in LLMs through three compounding mechanisms.

   1. Proprietary terminology density. I use my proprietary terminology in every newsletter edition, every post, and every public asset. Seven editions in six weeks produced Google AI Overview dominance — seven of twelve citations pointing to my content.

   2. Cross-referenced content architecture. Each edition of my newsletter links to two previous editions. This builds an internal citation network that search systems interpret as an authoritative knowledge base. Seven interconnected editions carry significantly more weight than seven standalone articles.

   3. External authority signals. LLMs distinguish between self-published volume and externally validated authority. I layer Fortune 500-adjacent quotes into every edition, including:

      • HSBC
      • Accenture
      • LinkedIn
      • Wiley
      • IE Business School

      I also tag publications and institutions like the Harvard Business Review, The B2B Institute, and Ehrenberg-Bass. Each signal tells LLMs that this framework is endorsed across industries.

The core principle is this: you influence what models say about your category by becoming the densest, most cross-referenced, and most externally validated source for a proprietary concept that no one else owns.

Bringing this into the funnel, where do you intentionally add or remove friction to align with buyer psychology?

I add the heaviest friction at the top of my funnel. It’s built directly into my positioning and content. Every post, every newsletter edition, and every public-facing signal is designed to repel the wrong buyer while attracting the right one.

If someone is looking for growth hacks, tactical shortcuts, or entry-level advice, my content quickly makes them uncomfortable. That’s intentional.

I also use association signals as a friction mechanism. The rooms I’m in, the people I work alongside, and the names that read my newsletter and are featured in it set a standard that self-selects for buyers who operate at that level.

Where I add friction back is at the point of conversation. I don’t publish a calendar link; every call is booked manually by me. It’s a deliberate signal that tells the buyer I control my schedule differently from someone who will take any meeting. It creates a more considered entry point for both sides and produces a more premium experience from the first interaction.

The goal is a funnel that filters aggressively at the top and opens deliberately at the bottom for the right buyer, at the right moment.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I9d leave the B2B leaders with a specific observation: the buying decision about your firm is almost certainly already in progress.

Somewhere right now, a buyer is quietly researching you, forming a perception, and deciding whether you belong on their shortlist before your sales team has any idea the evaluation has begun.

The firms that consistently win the largest enterprise deals aren9t always the most capable. They9re the ones who9ve built the right perception in the right buyer9s mind during the weeks and months before any conversation begins.

If that gap exists in your firm, I9d invite you to reach out and have a conversation with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sayanta-goswami/

Everything else starts from there.