When Positioning Your Firm, a “Happy Medium” is Rarely Happy

By Tim Williams

Have you ever had the frustrating experience of trying to execute a “multi-pronged strategy?” It never goes well for the simple reason that a strategy with multiple prongs isn’t a strategy at all — it’s just a wish list. 

By definition, you can’t have multiple priorities. You can’t win a battle if you send your army off marching in multiple directions, and you can’t have a winning positioning strategy if it is constructed like a Swiss army knife.

Running fast in multiple directions

Some recent studies show that half of top executives aren’t clear about their company’s priorities, and two out of three middle managers say they don’t understand their company’s strategic direction. This phenomenon is exacerbated in professional services firms, where most professionals firms are running in many different directions serving diverse client organizations in multiple categories.

Several years ago 60 Minutes did a story on a leading digital agency. During an interview with two of the agency’s leaders, the reporter was trying to understand the agency’s business model. When asked the question “What do you do?” the answer from the agency executive was “We’ve recontextualized what it means to be a services business.” Still confused, the reporter asked for clarification. “We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them” replied the agency executive. Still confused, the reporter pushed further and asked, “Tell me what you do, in English.” The agency exec replied, “We provide services to companies to help them win.” Replied the reporter, “So do trucking companies.”

Specific solutions offered to specific markets

The unfortunate truth is that most agency leaders have a profoundly difficult time explaining their business strategy not because they lack the eloquence, but because they lack a strategy. They haven’t made the difficult but essential decisions around the specific markets they serve and the specific solutions they provide.

The planner Richard Huntington compares great strategy to great photography. Remarkable photography lives at the two extremes of the focal lengths. Focusing on the middle produces little of interest. “The middle distance,” says Huntington, “is where most, ‘insight’ lives, dulled and lifeless representations of real people’s lives. It’s a place of corporate wishful thinking and cliché ... A place of statistics and not data, of averages, not outliers. This is marketing’s comfort blanket, a kind of make-believe land of middle-distance mediocrity.”

Strategy is about removing, not adding

An effective strategy lives at the edges of a bell curve. In the center we only find the average. Strategist Jon Kolko argues for the concept of strategy as “thoughtful restraint.” This restraint manifests as deliberate decisions about not only what a company should do, but what it should not do. The best business strategists are focused more on removing features than adding them. This is the opposite of the typical company offsite meeting where the leadership team papers the walls with lists of “things we should do.”

Strategy making is difficult but it doesn’t have to be complicated. In its simplest form, a compelling positioning strategy lives at the intersection of these two crosshairs:

Be something …

You can be excellent at some things, but you can’t be excellent at everything. To define your core competencies, start with the question “What are the main types of problems we solve for our clients?”

From there, identify the primary solution sets you bring to bear against these problems. Not a bullet point list of services (which does nothing more than make you look like every other agency), but a distinctive set of programs and solutions — benefits, not features.

… for someone

Just as you advise your clients to be precise about their target markets, your firm must have a clear view of the types of organizations and industries you know best. Time and again, marketers report that “knows my category” is the leading selection factor in agency reviews.

In professional services, clients are buying your expertise. They’re not looking for a firm with “a wide range of experience,” but rather one with deep experience with their business segment.

If you think a focused business strategy is limiting, consider that what really limits growth is the false belief that you need to provide every type of service and appeal to every kind of client. Trying to be all things to all people is not only an impossible mission certain to frustrate everyone on your team — it’s also an unfortunate admission that your firm doesn’t yet have a positioning strategy.