Something came up in a client session last month that I keep coming back to.

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We were looking at their positioning alongside some recent sales call recordings. Anna, our Head of Insights, had run them through the Jobs To Be Done prompts I mentioned in last week's PS. The language was all there: what triggered the search, what buyers were doing before, what fear was sitting underneath the buying decision.

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Almost none of it matched the website.

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The product hadn't changed at all. The market around them had.

The tech stack doesn't stand still

When you built your positioning, you built it against a specific moment. A set of tools your buyers were using. A workflow they were trying to fix. A problem nobody else was quite solving.

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That moment has moved.

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Other tools have shifted into adjacent spaces. Some of what you built your value proposition around is now handled by something already in their stack. Integrations that didn't exist two years ago now cover pieces of what you do. A different problem has surfaced that you actually solve well, but you've never framed it that way because it wasn't there when you wrote the copy.

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The buyers showing up now are shaped by a different environment. Their behaviour has changed because the options around them have changed. They're describing their problem in words you're not using.

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That gap doesn't announce itself. It builds slowly, quietly, until your close rate starts slipping and nobody can quite explain why.

PMF is a habit, not a milestone

There's an assumption in B2B tech that product-market fit is something you find, confirm, and move past. Evidence you gathered in year one. A box you ticked.

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The companies holding their position through market shifts treat it differently. For them, PMF is something you check. Not once a year in a planning session. Regularly, in real conversations, against what's actually true right now.

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Because the answer to "what problem are we solving?" looks different today than it did 18 months ago. For almost every SaaS business I work with. The product is the same. The competitive context has changed. Buyer behaviour has shifted. New solutions have appeared that handle pieces of the job. And if you haven't gone back to look, your messaging is running on old information.

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The businesses getting caught out aren't the ones with bad products. They're the ones who answered the PMF question once and assumed it would hold.

What we listen for in week one

When we start with a new client, one of the first things Anna does is listen to recent sales calls for signs of market shift. Not just what the buyer wants, but what they mention in passing about their existing setup. What tools they're already running. What they've tried. What they've switched away from and why.

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That peripheral detail is where the shift shows up first. Before it hits your close rate. Before anyone raises it in a board review.

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A few things worth listening for:

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• When a prospect mentions a tool in their current workflow that didn't exist two years ago
• When the trigger for their search is different from the problem your positioning was built around
• When the objection keeps shifting and nobody can pin it down (that's usually a sign the real question is upstream of the sales conversation)
• When buyers use your category name differently to how you use it on your website

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None of this requires a research project. Ten recent calls and one honest question: does what they're describing match what we say on the homepage?

The one thing to do this week

Pull up your homepage headline and your last five sales call recordings.

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Write down, in the buyer's own words, what problem they say they're trying to solve. Then hold it next to what your headline says.

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If they match, you're in good shape. If there's a gap, that's worth fixing before anything else in your marketing.

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Drop me a line and tell me what you find. I'm keeping a running picture of where this shows up across B2B tech, and the patterns are telling.