Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

How to properly categorize your products and services

Mindshare Pro used to be a premium upgrade to the free Mindshare Community membership.

But in my opinion, that was a mistake. It should have been positioned as Group Coaching.

And the templates/resources should be categorized separately as knowledge products.

Why does all this matter to you? Because miscategorization creates confusion for you and your clients/prospects.

In this episode, I talk about how to properly categorize your own products and services, how to break them down, why it matters, and also how to apply it to an industry like web design.

Give this a listen and let me know if your products and services have had similar categorization issues.

Click to listen and subscribe.

A question of value

Just for fun, I’d love your thoughts on this question.

Is value contextual or fixed?

Reply with your vote. Even if it’s a one-word reply.

No wrong answers.

I made a categorical mistake

I made a mistake. A categorical one, you could say.

Mindshare Pro, a $99/month program, was positioned as a premium upgrade for the Mindshare community.

But that was the wrong category for what the value really is.

Mindshare Pro is not a primarily a content membership—a core factor of most paid community memberships.

Sure, it comes with my core templates and resources. And those are game changers for many of the people who have used it.

But it’s not about those. I plan to sell those separately and give away additional content for free.

At its core, it’s group coaching. That’s the real category. And it just hit me the other day.

When you miscategorize your offerings, it’s confusing to you and your target market. You don’t know what features to include/exclude and people sign up for the wrong reasons.

I want people who sign up to be most interested in having a sounding board. To be challenged, coached, and supported above all else.

So that was my mistake. My offers are properly categorized again: 1:1 Coaching, Group Coaching, Community Membership (Free).

If you’re interested in any of these programs, hit reply and I’ll sort you out.

My best definition of positioning

Positioning is the place your company holds in the minds of your current and prospective customers on any given factors, relative to your competition.

I had to pull this from one of my old conference talks because, frankly, I thought it came from the seminal book, Positioning, by Al Reis and Jack Trout.

But it turns out, it’s more like a mashup of the ideas they talk about.

The takeaway is this: positioning isn’t something that exists objectively in the market.

You can’t simply say what you do better or differently than the competition.

That’s messaging. It helps, but it’s not positioning.

Positioning lives in the minds of your current and prospective customers relative to the competition.

Those two bolded parts matter.

What matters most is whether your intended positioning sticks in the minds of current and prospective—and how it fits in relation to the competition (their other choices).

You can help guide your company or product positioning with good product, marketing, and messaging strategies, but that’s it.

Much like brand, it’s an ongoing dance.

The relationship between hourly and commodity work

Listen to this post (in more detail) or subscribe to Mindshare Radio.

On a long drive today, I re-listened to some of the book, The Passion Economy, by Adam Davidson.

It spoke to me the first time I read it. It’s about craftsmanship in your business and working on something you’re passionate about.

It’s about the power of building small-scale, high-quality work instead of mass-produced commodity work that can be scaled infinitely.

The book has a lot of great rules, quotes, and stories. I’ll share one quote that came up because it fits so well into how we price our work.

Here’s the quote:

“I recently hired a lawyer who told me that he would not charge me by the hour but would, instead, agree to a fixed fee for the work we were going to do together. He explained that charging by the hour contradicted his core values of serving his clients; it would create an incentive for him to spend more time even if it wasn’t strictly necessary. Or, on the other hand, he might choose to rush some work to save me some money. He preferred not to think about time at all but, instead, to focus on providing me with the greatest service. I found this comforting.”

— The Passion Economy: Nine Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century by Adam Davidson

Selling by the hour often doesn’t feel good for either party, nor is it always aligned with the best interests of your clients.

The incentive structure is broken.

I’ve noticed hourly is most often the best option when you’re doing commodity work, like website support or odd design tasks, for example.

I’m not bashing hourly work or these kinds of support roles. They may be necessary to grow and/or sustain your business. They can be profitable.

But I am pointing to the fact that hourly work—when it is required—is closest to commodity work and therefore should come with an orange flag.

The longer you do commodity work, the harder it will be to do great work.

Listen to this post (in more detail) or subscribe to Mindshare Radio.

The right amount of work

How much work should you take on?

When does the quality of your work suffer?

What are the ethical implications of it all?

I talk about this and more in today’s episode.

Listen and subscribe.

The story of the auto detailer

A while back, I had my car detailed at a new shop around the corner.

When I called to book, the new business owner asked how dirty it was.

I said it was decent but it had some dog fur in parts of the back seat.

He grumbled and told me (reluctantly) to come in.

They were closed a few months later.

In this episode, I get into a few lessons we can all learn, including the importance of:

  • Doing work that you’re intrinsically motivated by
  • For people you enjoy working with
  • At prices that excite you to bring your best
  • So you can build a sustainable business
  • Which allows you to become great at what you do
  • Which becomes a continued flywheel for your business

Give this a listen if it feels timely for you.

The problem with generalist positioning

There are a lot of problems with having purely generalist positioning.

The main one, though, is that potential clients don’t know what you’re actually good at.

So they’re left to figure that out for themselves—and there’s no way to tell what you’re actually good at until they work with you.

But by then it’s too late.

The best prospects will go to someone who looks the most qualified on paper. They will spend top-dollar with them to do things right.

And that means you’ll be left with the less-than-ideal clients.

The ones who don’t understand just how nuanced the work is to do right—which means they won’t value your work enough to pay you well.

They’ll be price shopping and have unrealistic expectations based on naive perceptions that things are easy.

Yes, I believe you can be a generalist and specialist at the same time. You can build around your best skills and ideal niche until you don’t need to take on other clients.

But that’s largely out of necessity and to hedge your bets while you build a more specialized business.

Having purely generalist positioning is a recipe for running a business you won’t enjoy running. And that means something.

Listen to this 15-minute episode of Mindshare Radio for a more detailed perspective or subscribe via your favourite podcast player

When is enough… enough?

You may never feel like you have enough.

We’re hardwired to collect more resources. It’s deep inside our DNA.

So we take on more clients. Work longer hours. The stress layers on and becomes part of the scenery. You begin to think it’s a normal way of being.

At what point is enough, enough? When do you give yourself permission to do less?

Only you can decide.

What to do when a client wants to cancel before the term ends

What do you do when a client wants to cancel before their minimum term ends?

You let them go.

Sure, you could hold them to a contract. Or make them pay you a break fee. Or guilt them into staying until they end.

But in most cases, it’s better for everyone if you part ways.

In fact, go above and beyond in letting them go.

Make sure they are transitioned out properly. Tie off loose ends. Hand over everything they need.

It may not be fun or easy to make or easy to exit your engagements early, but it’s usually the right thing to do.

Keep the long-term view and decisions like this become obvious.