Positioning for Professionals: How Professional Knowledge Firms Can Differentiate Their Way to Success

Introduction xi

Chapter 1 Size Is Not a Strategy 1

Maintaining Pricing Integrity 2

Better to Be a Profit Leader than a Market Leader 3

Why Bigness Doesn’t Lead to Greatness 5

Hired to Be Effective, Not Efficient 6

Chapter 2 How and Why Brands Become Homogenized 9

The Urge to Copy 10

The Folly of All-in-One 11

Line Extension Is Not Branding 12

There’s No Such Thing as Full Service 13

The Natural Fear of Focus 14

Chapter 3 The Mature Company ’s Identity Crisis 17

Differentiation and Price Premiums 18

Columbus, Not Napoleon 19

The Diffusion of Identity 22

Landing in No-Man’s Land 22

Strategy at the Edges 23

Not Best Practices, But Next Practices 25

Chapter 4 Expanding Your Business By Narrowing Your Focus 29

There’s No Such Thing as a General Market 30

Vertical Success versus Horizontal Success 32

The Strategic Value of Going Deep 34

Chapter 5 Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy 37

What Are You Really Selling? 39

Becoming Hard to Imitate 39

Two Critical Dimensions of an Effective Value Proposition 41

A Category of One 43

A Brand Is the Customer’s Idea of the Product 44

Natural Outcomes of a Powerful Value Proposition 46

Chapter 6 Building Brand Boundaries 47

Brand Boundary 1: Calling 49

Brand Boundary 2: Customers 55

Brand Boundary 3: Competencies 60

Brand Boundary 4: Culture 66

The Confluence of Calling, Customers, Competencies, and Culture 72

Chapter 7 Validating Your Value Proposition 75

Be Rooted in the Future, Not the Past 76

The Value Proposition Team 77

Asking the Right Questions 80

Chapter 8 Without Execution, There Is No Strategy 83

Services 85

Staffing 92

Self-Promotion 100

Systems 107

Staging 112

Executing a Positioning Strategy with Alignment Teams 116

Rebuilding Your Ship While at Sea 119

Chapter 9 Getting Paid for Creating Value 121

The Perils of Cost-Based Compensation 122

Changing the Language 124

Pricing as a Core Competency 125

Why a Value-Based Approach Is in the Client’s Best Interest 126

The Alignment of Incentives 128

Creating a Virtuous Circle 131

Chapter 10 A New and Better Way to Price Professional Services 133

Forms of Value-Based Pricing 133

The Right Clients for Outcome-Based Agreements 136

The True Meaning of Partnership 138

Uncovering Missed Opportunities to Make Pricing a Core Competency 139

Key Questions in Setting a Value-Based Price 140

If Complex Global Companies Can Do It, So Can You 142

Better Time Tracking Is Not the Answer 144

Thinking of Compensation Plans as a Stock Portfolio 147

Setting the Stage for a Value-Based Approach to Compensation 150

A Declaration of Value 154

Appendix A: The Before-and-After Survey 157

Appendix B: More Ways to Differentiate Your Brand 161

Appendix C: Indicators of the Firm’s Success 165

Notes 173

About the Author 179

Index 181