Megan Lynch Adler

How great positioning can elevate your brand and increase revenue

February 14, 2023 by Megan Lynch Adler Leave a Comment

It’s a noisy, saturated market out there. Every day we are inundated with information – text messages, emails, LinkedIn ads, TikTok videos, whitepapers, newsletters, billboards, the list goes on. We’re told to buy this, do this, think this. Last year more than 1 billion hours of new content was introduced online, and that is going to get even worse with the advent of generative AI in sales and marketing.

As someone selling a service, how do you compete with it all? Where do you even begin to compete with it all? Hint: it might not be where you think.

When someone is making a decision to buy, you may be inclined to think it’s driven by facts and rationale. However, more often than not, there’s something much deeper at play. Buying decisions are also driven by an emotional connection that an individual feels to a brand, past experiences and more.

Your company’s positioning is a big piece of both the rational and emotional connection you have with customers.

What is positioning and why is it important?

Positioning is essentially the meeting point between your customers’ pain points and your unique solution to their problems. It’s the messaging you take to market that defines and differentiates your company; it separates what you do from all the other noise out there.

Developing great positioning isn’t easy. It’s not something you can type into ChatGPT and out comes the perfect answer. It requires insight, outside-in thinking and perhaps most importantly, making choices. This is partly why positioning is so daunting to companies and leaders. Because it puts a box around what you do and who you serve. It informs employees, partners and customers about how they should view you.

However, the right positioning is an accelerant. It makes it easier for the people who you want to connect with to more clearly understand what you do, why they need you and why they should work/engage/buy from you over someone else. In a world where people are inundated with so much information, that clarity goes a long way. The companies and solutions that are everything to everyone will just get lost in the noise.

The best positioning can be found at the intersection of two elements: 1) your unique offerings and 2) Your customer pain points

And it’s influenced by three things: 1) the market; 2) competitors; 3) current events

Where do I start with positioning?

When developing your positioning, the best place to start is with your customers. Your customers hold the answers you’re looking for: what they want, need, why they buy from you and why they don’t. You need to get those answers. A word to the wise: you may think you know what your customers want and need, but it’s important to go beyond assumptions and talk to them directly. This will help you sell more, scale more, land better accounts, and truly differentiate yourself from others who may be making similar pitches.

Start by identifying the specific segments of customers you’re trying to reach. Not all customers are exactly the same. In the B2B world, you could break this down by industry, company size, departments or functions, and role. Narrow it down to between two and four segments. It won’t be easy but part of this exercise is to prioritize and create clarity, and if you have 10 different segments, that’s not prioritizing. Try to target multiple customers from each segment so you can see patterns and consistencies versus one-off outlier situations.

When developing your positioning, the best place to start is with your customers. Your customers hold the answers you’re looking for: what they want, need, why they buy from you and why they don’t.

The best approach to get solid input from your customers is through one-on-one interviews. If you’re looking to reach a broader group of people, a survey can be helpful, but it’s not as effective as live conversations where you can see people’s emotional reactions and dig deeper.

For customer interviews, it’s tempting to have the sales person or account owner manage the interview. However, it works best to have someone a bit more objective (and less inclined to try and sell), such as an executive or an agency or consultant (if you can afford one). This process takes time. Don’t rush it.

The questions you ask should cover emotional and rational topics, such as:

What keeps you up at night when it comes to your job?
How did you hear about our company?
Why did you choose us over _______?
What made you trust us?
How are we making your life easier?
How would you describe what we do in 2-3 sentences?

Take a look around before you get started

Once you’ve completed your interviews and have identified key themes, it’s time to combine those insights with some market research, a competitive analyses, and a review of current events. This will help ensure your positioning is both relevant and differentiated.

A market analysis can help identify where there is white space or gaps in the market, or where it’s oversaturated. A competitive analysis can give you context for how others are positioning themselves so you can more clearly articulate why customers should choose you over someone else. Surveying current events can help you avoid potential landmines, and fit what you’re offering into your customers’ current priorities.

With that being said, truly innovative companies are often ahead of the market and their positioning will reflect that. Their positioning won’t always hinge on what others are doing or saying at the time, which is why this element should be secondary to your customers and offerings.

Develop the positioning and messaging

Once you have the foundation in place, you’re ready to write your positioning. Whether you’re focused on corporate positioning or solution positioning, it should be:

Different
Cohesive
Simple
True to the brand mission and values
Connected to customer needs

There are many different templates available to help put pen to paper (or hands to keyboard) but all positioning should include:

A main value proposition
The pain points you’re addressing
The value/benefit you bring to customers
Key differentiators
Your approach
The industries or verticals that you specialize in (if applicable)

Make sure you focus on the value and benefit you’re delivering, not what you are doing/selling. It’s not about “integrating Salesforce” or “migrating to a new cloud data warehouse”, it’s about what problem you are solving and the outcome of what you do. How are you making their lives easier? Are you saving them time by automating a piece of their work so they don’t have to work nights and weekends? Are you helping them look good to their superiors?

When in doubt, dig deeper.

How do you know if the positioning resonates?

It’s important to test your positioning prior to rolling it out across a company, and to refine it along the way. Your position in the market is constantly evolving, just as markets and customer expectations evolve.

Before rolling it out, test it with a few of your best salespeople or customer success leaders. Make sure it doesn’t just sound good, but reflects what the product or services actually deliver. When it’s used in a sales pitch, do customers’ eyes light up? Can people remember what you do and identify similar differentiators? If not, chances are the positioning may be off. If that’s the case, go back and talk to your customers.

Once you’ve made a commitment to that positioning, test slight variations of it on your website, with ads or at events. Which versions are people responding to or interacting with the most? Check in with salespeople where the positioning is actually helping to accelerate conversations, or where it’s falling flat.

Ultimately, great positioning will make it very clear who you help, how you help them and why you are a better choice than other options. That clarity will not only make it easier for customers to buy, but also for your team to sell. It will provide a level of consistency that will help a brand break through and take root. And if you take the time to really get to know your customers, you won’t just be well positioned to make a sale, you’ll create lifelong relationships in the process.

Why service companies need to prioritize brand

December 15, 2021 by Megan Lynch Adler Leave a Comment

For product and consumer-oriented companies where name recognition and brand preference are so important, it may seem obvious to invest in branding from the onset. Yet services companies often overlook the value in doing the same for their own businesses. When people are your product and differentiation is hard to come by, having a solid brand (and ensuring your company embodies it) may be even more important.

Here are just a few examples of what investing in your brand will do:

It builds trust and loyalty — internally and externally. A differentiated and consistent brand that truly reflects who you are as a company will help people remember you and stick with you. This is true for customers and employees alike. Brand advocates and evangelists are created when people connect emotionally with your approach, mission, values or philosophy. This is the foundation of a brand. The visual identity and messaging just brings it to life.

It can help you make money. Being the preferred brand in a competitive space, gives you pricing power. Customers will pay more for a brand they trust and who they know does quality work, which means you can charge more for services than a non-name competitor.

It creates the foundation of your marketing operation. Having a solid brand will provide you with the “how” to do everything. How you talk about your company, how you talk about your services, and provides consistent design elements and language that can be used across all your marketing (from your website to your events to the boilerplate on your press releases). When it comes to brand, consistency is critical.

It makes it easier for your sales team to talk about your company. If your sales team has a solid understanding of who you are as a company, what you do and what you stand for, it will make their jobs of selling the benefits of your services and what it’s like to work with you that much easier. That can directly translate to your bottom line.

It can help you save money. Having a well defined brand will also help you get staff and freelancers up to speed quicker and more efficiently, and reduce rework. Without a brand guide to inform them on what voice to use, messaging to lean on, and designs to utilize, you’ll end up with a splintered, inconsistent experience and a lot of extra cycles.

It helps you stand out from competitors. Take one look at Salesforce AppExchange (pictured below) to see what I mean. A whole lot of blue, and a whole lot of clouds. Thousands of companies list their services on AppExchange, and the ones that stand out are those who have not chosen the Salesforce-inspired visuals. When you dive deeper, some of their messaging has the same problem – it all sounds the same.

If your brand is differentiated, it will automatically make you stand out from the crowd and will make it easier for customers to remember you and keep coming back to you.

The basics of branding for services

Needless to say, the benefits of having a strong brand are endless, if done right. So how do you make sure you have a strong brand? Below is an overview of the basics:

Talk to your customers. The best way to know who your customers are, how they buy and why they like working with you, is to ask them. Customer interviews are invaluable and can give you insight into what they value, why they are buying, why they chose you over competitors, and what they want in the future. This can help you position your brand and ensure it’s connected in a real way to customer needs and pain points.

State your mission. Your brand’s mission should explain to the world why your organization exists. This clear and concise message should be something that both inspires and motivates. It should also benefit people outside of the organization. If your mission starts with “to be the leader in…”, time to start again. That’s a goal, not a mission. Your mission should be your organization’s North Star. One that helps define you but also guides your strategy and decisions. A great mission will also help you attract and retain talent. Employees who believe in a company’s mission are more likely to not only stay at a company, but perform better, too.

Define your values. Values are the principles and beliefs of a company that shape culture and drive behavior. Essentially, they are how you need to act in order to make your mission a reality. They should be in an active voice, clearly stated, differentiated, and there should not be 10 of them. Consumers and employees want to spend their time and their money with brands whose values align with their own.

Think about how you position your brand in the market. Do you know what makes you truly different from your competitors? This starts with knowing your customers (per the first point), the space you play in, and the competitive set. This is why it’s important to do real research into your competitors, where they are weak, and how you can stand out. Get to the heart of that, then infuse it into your brand and use it to position yourself in the market.

Find your brand voice and personality. Just as every human has a personality, so do brands (yes, even yours). Is yours confident with a dash of curiosity? Adventurous with a specific destination? Or more professional and straightforward? Your personality should reflect your culture while keeping the audience in mind. Brainsell is one example of a brand that I think conveys their personality – witty, snarky, and smart – both thoughtfully and consistently throughout its marketing. The key here is knowing what works for your customer base.

Language is important. When it comes to talking about your services, the most important thing is to frame them in the same way that your customers think about buying. If your customers are looking for integration services, just call it that. Don’t try to name your service “systems synthesis” or something else that customers can’t relate to.

With that said, while you should certainly be straightforward about the services you offer, there is room to take something like “people centric” and reframe it in a way that’s playful and clever, like how Korn Ferry states that they are “a radically human organization”. Personally, I find metaphors work well. Just as your design helps you differentiate your brand, so do your words.

Invest in a differentiated design. The reality of service-based businesses is that many different companies may be offering the same service out there. Therefore, as I noted earlier, it’s worth making sure your design will stand out in a crowd visually to help differentiate your brand. A few ways to do this include:

Colors. Perform a color study to look at what competitors are doing and find out what colors you can use to position your brand to stand out.
Photo Styles. We’ve all seen the generic stock images of hands on a keyboard, generic men shaking hands, and workers in an office. Don’t do it! Your brand should be a representation of who you are as a company, your culture, and your personality. Think out of the box when it comes to imagery. Imagery taken from a different angle or in unusual lighting, for instance, can make a difference. You can also consider applying a treatment such as filters, or adding illustrations, textures or patterns to the image in order to make it unique and eye-catching. Hakkoda is a great example. We used stock images to create beautiful collages that represent the company’s culture — including mountains, flowers and beautiful patterns that hail from Costa Rica, where the company has a large presence. The images are all treated and brought together in an interesting way to make it look totally unique.

Consistency. When you’re creating graphic styles, think about the need for consistency across all touch points. Be strategic about how it all looks, from your website and social feeds, to your invoices, and everything in between.

Establishing your brand at the onset is no small task, but it’s one that will pay dividends in the long run. When you think about the most successful companies out there – whether product or service-based – chances are you’re remembering them because of their brand. A brand that is memorable, easy to identify, reflective of who they are and one that you connect with personally.

Don’t you want your customers, partners and employees to feel that way about your company?