Imagine you’ve just received a notice from the IRS that they’re going to audit your most recent tax return. You’ve never been through an audit before, and because you’re in the habit of preparing your own tax returns, you decide it’s time to get some professional help.

Has your billable time ever been scrutinized? If you work for an advertising agency or other type of professional services firm, chances are you have been subject to a battery of billable time evaluations, all designed to achieve one thing in the mind of the agency owner: maximize productivity.

Does this look like a familiar list of criteria for new business prospects?

When you think about the concept of positioning your firm, what comes to mind? A tag line you can put on your business card? A headline for you the home page of your website? A theme you can give to a new business presentation?

Most businesses start out with a fairly simple business model. As time goes on, they add new services and capabilities and extend out to new markets. Some of this diversification is strategic and deliberate, but most of the time companies start sprawling in ways they never intended.

Countless agencies confuse having a philosophy with having a positioning. A positioning is a strategy, not a tag line.

When creating an investment portfolio, no reasonable person would put all their money in just gold, just Certificates of Deposit, or just stocks (especially in today’s economic climate).

It’s true that most clients want an objective outside point of view from their agency. But not until their agency has bothered to take the time to first understand the client’s expectations.

Agency professionals everywhere are frustrated by the master-servant dynamic that increasingly characterizes client-agency relationships.

Agencies are indispensable partners in helping marketers differentiate their brand. Differentiation is, after all, the essence of branding. But when it comes to their own brands, most agencies haven’t thought through their own brand touch points to look for opportunities to stand out.

As agencies become more and more convinced that they should be selling their services based on value instead of costs, they need to learn a new set of skills to help sell the concept of value and get a better price for what they do.

Imagine three agencies presenting to a prospective client. The client has provided all three agencies with a list of guidelines for the presentation, which includes explicit instructions to outline the agency’s proposed compensation approach, including hourly rates, expected hours, and staffing plans.

Consider the deceptively simply question, “Where do profits come from?” When you pose this question to a group of agency professionals, the answers will typically include such things as clients, hours worked, and even efficiency. But the real answer to this question is that profits come from risk.

If you’re like a lot of business executives, you may be concerned that you haven’t adequately defined your “mission” or “vision.” These often feel like buzzwords, and that offsite planning sessions that seek to define them often end in a bland statements that reflect more compromise than courage.

Agencies want to capture more of the value they create for their clients; in other words, earn more for what they do. The important first step is to understand the nature of value, including how, when, and where value is created.

At a time when prospective clients are scarce, it’s easy to be lured into the belief that some new business is better than no new business. The self-talk among agency executives is that the account “will help keep the lights on.”

Somewhere in the notes from last summer’s offsite agency planning meeting, do you have a statement similar to any of these?

A lot of advertising industry pundits preach the value of agency positioning and differentiation, but not many of them can really define it. Positioning isn’t just about being different. Featuring a laughing hyena on your home page is different, but it hardly qualifies as a positioning …

Faster. Cheaper. Vendor. Three words that characterize one of the leading issues agencies have with their clients right now. Many agencies feel they have been pushed down the client value chain into the same category as printers, having lost their status as professional advisors.

Would a prospective client travel 1,000 miles to do business with your firm? That’s one of the litmus tests of a strong agency positioning strategy. Unless you’re satisfied attracting local business from the local market (and some agencies are), you should devote some thought to how you can become what I call a “destination agency” …