As I was reading Tim William’s Positioning for Professionals: How Professional Knowledge Firms Can Differentiate Their Way to Success , I repeatedly found myself thinking “Tim, your preaching to the choir”. This isn’t a complaint, sometimes it’s nice to be in the choir, to hear other “preaching” the same message you do, to hear how they do it differently and perhaps more clearly.
Regular readers here know that I am part of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant network. In Duct Tape Marketing we always start out an engagement by stressing the importance of having a narrowly defined target market. As Tim so clearly points out in the first few chapters of his book, narrow doesn’t mean small. Narrow is specialized and there are plenty of large firms that have gotten that way by being specialized.
Duct Tape Marketing fans are also familiar with the concept of “differentiate or compete based on price”. Tim (and other members of Verasage) have a lot to say about pricing based on value to the customer. Chapters 9 and 10 cover pricing and value.
Another common theme I found in Tim’s book is the idea that a well defined position (or marketing strategy) actually becomes the centerpiece of your business strategy. If marketing is about setting expectations, then it is vital to make sure those expectations are held up when we interact with customers. Chapter 5 elaborates on this idea of positioning as a business strategy.
Positioning is a key component to building a profitable professional service firm. Read Tim’s book and put yourself in position to make 2011 your most profitable year yet.
