Positioning for Professionals

TIM WILLIAMS leads Ignition Consulting Group (www.ignitiongroup.com), a business consultancy devoted to helping professional knowledge firms create and capture more value. As a recognized thought leader in marketing, Tim is a frequent speaker for marketing and business organizations worldwide. He is a regular contributor to business and professional publications and is author of Take a Stand for Your Brand, ranked by Amazon as one of the top ten books on brand building. As an adviser in developing professional service brands, Tim has worked with both large and small professional service firms—most notably advertising agencies and other marketing communications firms—in both the U.S. and abroad. He began his career on Madison Avenue working for large multinational advertising agencies and later served as president and owner of several midsize independent firms.

• Introduction xiChapter 1 Size Is Not a Strategy 1Maintaining Pricing Integrity 2Better to Be a Profit Leader than a Market Leader 3Why Bigness Doesn’t Lead to Greatness 5Hired to Be Effective, Not Efficient 6Chapter 2 How and Why Brands Become Homogenized 9The Urge to Copy 10The Folly of All-in-One 11Line Extension Is Not Branding 12There’s No Such Thing as Full Service 13The Natural Fear of Focus 14Chapter 3 The Mature Company ’s Identity Crisis 17Differentiation and Price Premiums 18Columbus, Not Napoleon 19The Diffusion of Identity 22Landing in No-Man’s Land 22Strategy at the Edges 23Not Best Practices, But Next Practices 25Chapter 4 Expanding Your Business By Narrowing Your Focus 29There’s No Such Thing as a General Market 30Vertical Success versus Horizontal Success 32The Strategic Value of Going Deep 34Chapter 5 Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy 37What Are You Really Selling? 39Becoming Hard to Imitate 39Two Critical Dimensions of an Effective Value Proposition 41A Category of One 43A Brand Is the Customer’s Idea of the Product 44Natural Outcomes of a Powerful Value Proposition 46Chapter 6 Building Brand Boundaries 47Brand Boundary 1: Calling 49Brand Boundary 2: Customers 55Brand Boundary 3: Competencies 60Brand Boundary 4: Culture 66The Confluence of Calling, Customers, Competencies, and Culture 72Chapter 7 Validating Your Value Proposition 75Be Rooted in the Future, Not the Past 76The Value Proposition Team 77Asking the Right Questions 80Chapter 8 Without Execution, There Is No Strategy 83Services 85Staffing 92Self-Promotion 100Systems 107Staging 112Executing a Positioning Strategy with Alignment Teams 116Rebuilding Your Ship While at Sea 119Chapter 9 Getting Paid for Creating Value 121The Perils of Cost-Based Compensation 122Changing the Language 124Pricing as a Core Competency 125Why a Value-Based Approach Is in the Client’s Best Interest 126The Alignment of Incentives 128Creating a Virtuous Circle 131Chapter 10 A New and Better Way to Price Professional Services 133Forms of Value-Based Pricing 133The Right Clients for Outcome-Based Agreements 136The True Meaning of Partnership 138Uncovering Missed Opportunities to Make Pricing a Core Competency 139Key Questions in Setting a Value-Based Price 140If Complex Global Companies Can Do It, So Can You 142Better Time Tracking Is Not the Answer 144Thinking of Compensation Plans as a Stock Portfolio 147Setting the Stage for a Value-Based Approach to Compensation 150A Declaration of Value 154Appendix A: The Before-and-After Survey 157Appendix B: More Ways to Differentiate Your Brand 161Appendix C: Indicators of the Firm’s Success 165Notes 173About the Author 179Index 181