All Audiences

The purpose of positioning isn’t just to help the market see you as a credible option.

The purpose is to give you a competitive—and defensible—advantage. To be uniquely qualified to help.

A big part of that process is reducing your competition.

Good positioning focuses on key factors others can’t easily replicate. You go tighter and deeper. More specialized in the areas people care most about. You make the necessary—and difficult—trade-offs.

The more suitable alternatives there are to hiring you, the less leverage you will have.

And the less leverage you have, the less you can charge, the fewer deals you’ll win, and the harder it will be to earn a highly profitable living.

Pick a game you can win.

Pick something you’re uniquely qualified at. Find your sweet spot. Make it your thing.

If you can’t tell the difference between you and your competitors, your clients certainly can’t either.

Reduce the number of suitable alternatives.

—kw

Selling to other companies who serve your target market—not just the end companies themselves—can open up an entirely new market you may never even have considered.

The key is to establish yourself in the niche before trying to expand to other parts of the ecosystem. It helps a lot if you have a strong track record and if you’ve already built a little following in the industry.

In fact, your following can even be part of your value proposition. You can vouch for your client and transfer trust by association (as long as you are transparent about your involvement).

One way I’ve done this before is by helping the industry association of the niche I serve. It opened many more doors for me and was mutually beneficial for them.

If I had more bandwidth, I’d be more intentional about using this strategy to expand my practice.

Have you done this before? Would love some other examples.

—kevin

P.S. You can see a video of me explaining this idea in more detail over here. Drop me a comment if you feel so inclined!

I used to play squash for fun in high school.

It’s not nearly as difficult as it looks. And it’s way more fun than tennis.

The thing about squash is, if you’re running around the court chasing the ball, you’re not doing it right.

The better player is able to spend most of their time standing in the centre of the court. The weaker player person runs back and forth trying to stay in the game until they eventually lose the point.

It almost looks effortless to the victor. Surely harder work would reap better dividends, no?

It turns out, not so much.

It’s the same with marketing. Most of what we do simply doesn’t matter very much. 

Roughly 20% of your efforts generate 80% of the results. But we often spend the majority of our time on the remaining 80% because it feels like the right thing to do.

We feel like we need to be busy to do our job well.

That’s where strategy comes in.

If you are doing your job right, you can focus your marketing efforts on relatively few key areas and do them extremely well. The rest becomes optional or unnecessary.

Good strategy makes the important activities obvious. Not just what to do but how you do it, too.

It also makes execution far less labour intensive—and most of it unnecessary.

The key is knowing what to do and what not to do. Strategy provides those guide rails.

If anyone is busy in an organization, it’s the marketing managers trying to do it all. It’s a tough job no matter how you measure it.

The most effective marketers spend their time sharpening their strategy and thereby make most of the tactical work they do optional or unnecessary.

After all, do CEOs want you to be busy or successful?

—kevin

There’s the age-old dilemma when it comes to niching:

Do you follow the money or your interests?

If you follow your interests, you get the personal satisfaction of doing work you enjoy for people you genuinely enjoy serving.

If you choose a niche primarily for the money, you can use your business to fund your interests outside of work. You might not love your work as much, but the money can be a lot better in some cases.

There’s no right or wrong way to do it. But there are risks no matter what choice you make around niching.

The conventional wisdom in consulting is to build a niche business. And it’s generally good advice.

It’s easier to market, sell, and deliver services that are the best in their category—and that can help you earn more money for less work than you could otherwise.

But what if I said you could also have the best of both worlds: to be a niche specialist and a generalist at the same time?

Would you believe me? If you know anything about my track record, I’m living proof that you can. And it’s served me quite well to do it this way.

Which is why I’m not convinced it needs to be one or the other. It can be both. At least for the vast majority of people. But I do believe it’s worth exploring your options so you can make an informed decision.

Tomorrow at 11 am EST, I’m hosting a members-only webinar, How to Choose a Niche for Your Marketing Practice.

As usual, this will be a deep-dive training that goes about 90 minutes with Q&A. It will look at both sides of the equation: pragmatic market opportunity AND fit with your existing interests.

The follow-up to this training will be How to Gain Traction in a New Niche, which will be available next month.

I try to make every workshop into a definitive guide you can come back to later on. You’ll have to become a member to attend.

Which brings me to a small announcement…

I’m opening a new membership tier for people who prefer independent learning, without the coaching component.

For a modest annual fee, you get access to all of it: my growing library of training, templates, private podcast episodes, and more—including this Wednesday’s workshop.

It comes with a 7-day trial so you can see what it’s all about before committing to a membership.

If you want to explore new ways to strategize, advise, and teach what you know, this is a great way to get started.

If you just want to get this and past training free for a week, that’s fine, too.

To learn more and sign up for the membership, head on over to howtoselladvice.com/membership.

Hope to see you there!

—kevin

P.S. I’ll be super honest with you—giving away a free test drive of all my content and materials feels risky. But I also know you have to take risks to grow, so I’m willing to take this risk. Are you willing to take the risk of a risk-free trial?

Value is a funny thing.

Let’s look at my assistant as an example. Let’s say I pay her an average of $1k/month.

But in that time, she does days of cumulative work I no longer have to do.

Did she create a more profitable outcome by her doing those tasks vs. me? Not directly.

On the one hand, the work does not directly generate more money than if I did the work myself. But by her doing it instead of me, my time is freed up to work on other areas of my business.

And my time is worth a lot more than hers.

It’s easy to get hung up on creating profitable financial outcomes for our clients—which, to be clear, is our primary job. But sometimes, value is created in other indirect ways.

It’s part of why fractional CMO/managed advisory work is so valuable. The value is still created in part by freeing up your client to work on other things. Or by saving them from having to hire a full-time person for the role instead.

Other times, your value comes from helping your clients avoid costly mistakes. Or by giving them clarity on a direction sooner—saving time and wasted energy heading in the wrong direction.

If you’re only looking at the immediate number of new leads or customers you generate, you might be missing a much bigger value calculation.

—kw

I took my wife and kids out for a picnic yesterday for Mother’s Day.

We also brought a kite in the hopes we could do some flying. Problem was, the wind speed was slow and sporadic.

We were able to catch a few gusts of wind and get the kite in the air, but it wasn’t long before the breeze stopped and it would come floating down again.

To keep it in the air, I had to do my fair share of running and pulling of the string. It was pretty funny to watch, actually.

And this is a perfect analogy for business. Right now, we’re all flying metaphorical kites in the market winds.

Some of us are catching air and letting our kites soar. Others can’t even feel a light breeze in their direction.

One thing is for sure, you can’t fly a kite if there is no wind, no matter how good your kite is.

Similarly, you can’t sell something if there is no demand for it, no matter how good the product or service is.

Either go where the wind is or expect to be doing a lot of running to keep your business off the ground.

—k

Yesterday, I asked you a simple question: if you could only be known for one specific thing, what would it be and why?

I had some interesting responses, ranging from the highly specific:

“…helping BVFLS people build/grow/scale successful solo practices.”

to philosophical in nature:

“Sowing Radical Futures” because the current trajectory isn’t good for our children; in other words, I had enough awareness to see and resilience to act.

Interestingly, what is also coming up now is:

Do I really want to be know for this? Wouldn’t I rather be known for the kindest, funniest, open-hearted, loving person by my close family, friends and community…! The interesting dilemma of integrating personal worldview and work worldview.”

Putting aside the topic of combining personal and professional worldviews, this question was meant to provoke you to think in specifics.

We’re all generalists.

We all have more skills and interests than we could possibly include in our work.

And if we’re not careful, it could send a confusing message to the market if you try to be known for too many things.

In my experience, a major key to getting noticed, hired, and recommended is to make intentional trade-offs around what you want to be known for.

If you’re lucky, people will associate you with one main thing. And that’s still a big if. Most people only have a vague notion in their heads about what we do.

The point is to get clear and specific on what you want to be known for by first eliminating the noise.

Sure, you can add flavour to your work. You can introduce your personal views if you feel so inclined. You can be multi-dimensional.

As long as you keep the main thing the main thing.  This is the heart of all marketing strategy.

It’s the trade-offs that make us successful.

—kevin

Quick thought for you today:

If you could only be known for one specific thing, what would it be and why?

If you feel like playing, hit reply and let me know.

—kw

P.S. I may share some responses tomorrow, so if you want me to anonymize your response, let me know in the reply.