Sports Tech | Porter Wills

Your product is better than your brand. It is costing you.

In B2B sports tech, if the product is great and the brand is weak, buyers assume you should be cheaper. That is the quiet tax most founders pay without noticing.

This is how Porter Wills takes a sports tech company from indistinguishable to investable. A diagnosis, an intervention and a set of commercial signals that move inside 90 days. A worked example of the method, applied to a company in exactly this position.

The Business Today

4 signals the founder sees every week.

01 | Sales
Emails go unanswered.
Outbound lands in inboxes and dies there. Prospects do not reply. The ones who do reply send generic one liners that close nothing. The founder is writing more messages than ever and hearing less back.
02 | Product
Trials stall before anyone uses them.
Sign ups happen. Activation does not. The product sits idle inside the account and the renewal conversation never opens. The team blames onboarding. The cause is upstream.
03 | Website
Traffic arrives and leaves.
Bounce rate sits above 80%. Time on page is seconds. The pricing page gets almost no traffic because visitors leave before they get there. The site is a brochure, not a commercial asset.
04 | Pricing
Deals close at the category average.
When deals do close they close at whatever the category benchmark is. Discounting is routine. Premium pricing feels unavailable. The founder suspects the product is worth more than the market is paying for it.
The Diagnosis

The commercial signals are symptoms. The underlying problem is that the brand reads like every other platform in the category and the buyer has no reason to treat it differently.

In B2B sports tech, a weak brand is a pricing problem, a sales cycle problem and a fundability problem. Fix the brand and every signal downstream moves with it.

The Work

3 interventions.
1 coherent shift.

01 | Positioning
Positioning built around the actual buyer.
The engagement starts by stripping out every piece of language that could apply to any platform in the category. What emerges is a point of view built from a single minded truth about who the buyer is, what they are trying to do and what the company uniquely helps them achieve. The biggest B2B brands in the world have a point of view. Harvey has one. Claude has one. ChatGPT has one. They are the biggest brands in their categories because they are brands.
02 | Narrative
Investor ready commercial narrative.
Positioning is the engine. The narrative is how the engine gets described to the people writing cheques. Porter Wills carries the positioning into every surface an investor or acquirer encounters. The pitch deck. The website. The LinkedIn profile. The outbound sequences. The sales deck. One truth across every surface. Most consultancies fix the website and leave the sales deck speaking a different language. A single narrative across every touchpoint is the only version that compounds.
03 | Authority
Authority plan that compounds.
Positioning and narrative work inside 90 days. Authority takes longer and matters more. The founder gets a 90 day content, speaking and network map. What to say. Where to say it. Who to say it to. Inside the first month the founder starts publishing one piece a week built around a single argument the category is not making. Stops using the word platform. Takes the first two podcast invitations that come in. Once the founder is known for a specific point of view, inbound arrives with that point of view already accepted.
What Changes

Commercial signals move first.
Authority compounds after.

Tier 01
Inside 90 days
Emails get answered. Trials get used. Website bounce drops. Generic replies stop and prospects start engaging with the argument instead of the pitch. Deals close faster and at better rates.
Tier 02
6 to 12 months
Inbound pipeline from buyers the founder is not chasing. Category recognition. Commercial partnership conversations that open with "we have been watching you". A team that recognises itself in its own marketing for the first time.
Brand is the mechanism. These outcomes are the return.
The Next Move

If your raise is 12 months out, your positioning is 11 months late.

Investors do not fund products. They fund companies with a commercial narrative they can see returning capital. If that narrative is not ready, the raise is harder than it needs to be and the valuation is lower than it should be. Porter Wills runs a Brand Relevance Audit. One call. One page. 48 hours. It names exactly what is holding the commercial narrative back.

Book the Audit
porterwills.co | confidential April 2026