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Positioning is strategy articulated and then proven.
We must choose a focus Then articulate that focus via a consistent claim of expertise And finally, we must work to add the missing skills, capabilities and processes necessary to support our new claim.
The first step – focus – is to answer the strategy question of “What business are we in?”
Too often, we decide to not decide and so, in our minds, leave open the possibility that we may continue to do all things for all types of clients. In creative firms the world over – firms populated and run by curious problem solvers – the avoidance of The Difficult Business Decision remains the root cause of most business development problems.
A Sales Advantage → To possess a sales advantage means that when and where we choose to compete, we win more often than not. A Price Premium → To command a price premium means that when we win, we do so not by cutting price, but while charging more.
If we do not win while charging more then it is likely we are attempting to run a business of ideas and advice from a position of weakness; or we are trying to compete outside of our area of focus; or we have avoided The Difficult Business Decision altogether and have chosen, by not choosing at all, to run a business without a focus or a fundamental business strategy.
We are hired for our expertise and not our service. It is a mistake to believe that the service sector mantra of “The customer is always right” applies to us. Like any engagement of expertise, we often enter into ours with the client not truly knowing what he needs, let alone recognizing the route to a solution. For us to do our best work we need to leverage our outside perspective. We need to be allowed to lead the engagement.
We are optimistic, enthusiastic people, but it is time to admit that our enthusiasm has not always served us well.
But as business owners we need to accept that loving our craft is no substitute for making intelligent business decisions.
Once we choose to make our passion our business, we take on responsibilities to our clients, families and employees. Among other things, those responsibilities include the need to generate a profit above and beyond the salaries we pay ourselves. It is from this profit that we build strength and create many forms of possibilities for ourselves and everyone involved in our enterprise.
We can choose to remain a “full service” firm doing all things for all people. This lack of strategy will make us relevant to everyone with marketing or communication needs. It will indulge our desires to do something different every day, and to make every engagement different from the previous ones. When we make this choice, however, we invite all kinds of undifferentiated competition as well as some highly differentiated, specialized competition. We invite numerous alternatives to hiring our firm and we place the power squarely with the client. In this competitive environment we will never
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But we cannot escape the fact that money is both a necessity in life and the most basic scorecard of success in business. Even if it is not the validation we seek, it is the most basic of tests that we must pass: Is there a need for our efforts great enough to sustain and nurture them?
Until we make a brave decision, success will elude us and we will look at the market and complain about the economy or the clients, all the while knowing that it was us. The problem has always been us, and our struggle with focus.
Even when we pitch and win, we lose. We devalue what should be our most valuable offering and set up the wrong dynamics between the client and us.
We must move away from the place where the client sits with arms crossed in the role of judge, and we take to the stage with song and dance in the role of auditioning talent. While both parties find the showmanship of our craft titillating, the practitioner’s is a stronger place than that of the performer. It is this practitioner’s position from which we must strive to operate. Practitioners do not present. Stars do not audition.
We will agree with the client on the strategy before any creative development begins. By including the client in our strategic development processes, we will help ensure we never find ourselves presenting creative rooted in ambiguous strategies.
Any time we come back to the client to share new ideas or concepts we will set the stage first by reviewing, once again, the strategy that guides us.
One of the benefits we bring to our clients is the advantage of an outside perspective, one that is not saddled with perceptions of bias or a hidden agenda. We will not allow proper guidance to be sacrificed at the altar of company politics.
While we dislike routine, the client – and ultimately, any consistency of success – demands it.
Without a presentation, all that is left is conversation – intermingled talking and listening un-separated by one party performing for the other.
Presenting is a tool of swaying, while conversing is a tool of weighing. Through the former we try to convince people to hire us. Through the latter we try to determine if both parties would be well served by working together.
Presentations build buying resistance; conversations lower it.
While our mission is to position, our objective at each and every interaction in the buying cycle is simply to see if there is a fit between the client’s need and our expertise suitable enough to take a next step. That’s it. It is not our objective to sell, convince or persuade. It is simply to determine if there exists a fit suitable enough to merit a next step. Our mission is to position; our objective is to determine a fit.
We must never allow ourselves to be placed in this presenter/complier role where the terms and next steps of the relationship are dictated to us. If we assume this lowly role that is offered to us early, we will never be able to exchange it for the loftier expert practitioner role that is required for us to do our best work.
We will take seriously our professional obligation to begin at the beginning, and we will never put our clients or ourselves in the position where we are prescribing solutions without first fully diagnosing the client’s challenge.
We owe it to ourselves and our clients to stand firm on this most basic of professional practices and to never agree to begin working on a creative solution to a problem that we have not fully explored.
To reverse the trend and live up to our professional obligation to diagnose first, we must map out and formalize our own diagnostic process.
Then, when we are next in a situation where the prospective client is dictating to us, we must make the case that the consistency of our outcomes is rooted in the strength of our process, therefore we must be allowed to employ it.
Just because it is in the client’s nature to lead, does not mean he should be allowed to do so at all times. It only means that, like the scorpion, he will attempt to do what it is in his nature to do.
Does he see us as the expert who merits the reins of the engagement, or does he see us as the order-taker supplier that needs to be directed?
Possessing our own formalized diagnostic methods, whether they are proprietary to us or not, goes a long way to our positioning in this matter.
A good client will begin to relinquish control once he has the confidence that the expert practitioner knows more than he does, or has the tools to learn more. Formalized diagnostic processes are such tools.
Making things and selling things are the two basic functions in business. For our business to succeed we must succeed at both.
No matter how good we are there will be times when we are required to sell.
We cannot be in business without embracing selling.
The good news is that selling, when done properly, has nothing to do with persuading. It is not our job to talk people into things. The first salesperson had it right: selling is about determining a fit between the buyer’s need and the seller’s supply (our very objective) and then facilitating a next step. Sometimes the proper next step is to part ways, sending the client on to another provider who is better able to serve him.
We might argue that the high-pressure salesperson is going to sell more stereos than the respectful facilitator, but it is not stereos that we sell. We sell ideas and advice – the very contents of our heads – and so how we sell impacts what we are able to deliver.
If we have not specialized and set ourselves apart from our competition in a meaningful way then all we have left is convincing.
To sell is to: Help the unaware Inspire the interested Reassure those who have formed intent
for this future client, we must take the long road of helping him, over time, to see that perhaps he does have a problem. We do this primarily through the dissemination of our thought leadership – our writings on our area of expertise.
The role of our thought leadership is to educate, not to persuade. The future client should be smarter for reading it, we should be smarter for writing it, and, one day, when the client does experience a problem in an area on which we’ve written, our guidance may be helpful to him in seeing the opportunity within his problem. Until that day, we continue to cement our position as leaders in our field through our writing. Experts write.
We can build a business with enough people saying no to us every week, provided many of them agree to subscribe to our thought leadership and we are diligent about future follow-up.
Let us be clear: our goal with such a prospect is to inspire him to form the intent to solve his problem; it is not to inspire him to hire us.
Inspiration is the primary role of our website, our brochure, our sales collateral and our in-person portfolio review. It need not even be our own work that we show here to inspire the interested, just inspirational outcomes.
Trying to inspire someone who does not recognize that he has a problem is a recipe for defensiveness and resentment. Inspiration is something we must save for the interested.
Inspired by what his company could become, he summons the resolve to commit to solving his problem. In this moment he says to himself, quietly, “I’m going to do this.” His arrival at the decision triggers a change in brain chemistry that brings a euphoric lift; the bigger the decision, the higher the lift.
We speak of an organic approach to problem solving when the client would be soothed by the logic and consistency of hearing about our defined approach. We continue to talk big-picture when the client now needs to process sequentially and seeks to understand what the steps are that we would take together.
Win Without Pitching firms offer alternative ways forward. Phased engagements, pilot projects, money-back guarantees and case studies framed in defined methodologies are among the many viable alternative forms of reassurance. The key is to respond to the motivation and not necessarily the request.
We walk away when we cannot Win Without Pitching, when we cannot derail the pitch and when we are unable to gain the inside track. Good prospective clients who recognize and value our expertise will grant us one of the above. The others are not worth sacrificing our mission on in a long-shot attempt to out-pitch others, one of whom almost certainly has gained the inside track ahead of us.
Those that see us as experts will grant us at least some of the concessions we seek and allow us to Win Without Pitching, to derail the pitch or to gain the inside track. From the rest, we will walk away.
