You can’t differentiate your brand by using what’s expected. Let me explain with an example. Go to 20 management consulting firm websites. You’ll see that they claim to be different by providing high-quality work. Or by bragging about years of experience. But here’s the problem. These are expected by buyers. All management consultancy firms are…
Category: Positioning
How To Legally Reduce Your Competition In Crowded Markets
Who wouldn’t want less competition in the market? How easy everything would be. You could charge much more. Clients would stick with you longer, maybe forever. And you’d grow like there is no tomorrow. It’d be a dream come true for every executive. Well, there are ways to reduce your competition legally. The obvious option…
12 Differences Between Incumbents And Challengers (And How Challengers Win)
Every industry has its incumbents. Established players who come at the top of buyers’ category ladders. Like McKinsey and Accenture for consulting. Salesforce and Hubspot for CRM. Or Adobe and Canva for creative software. And then you have the challengers. New and upcoming players who try to get a hold in the market. They compete…
Three Marketing Bottlenecks That Keep Consulting Firms Stuck (And Their Symptoms)
Three marketing bottlenecks keep consulting firms stuck at a certain revenue level: These problems keep the business from growing to its next stage. Some businesses just have one. Some others might have all three to a certain degree. They have different symptoms: 1. Wrong Positioning You create the wrong value and/or for the wrong clients.…
How Clear Positioning Creates a Natural “Flow State” Inside Your Firm
Having clarity around your consulting firm’s positioning has a hidden upside. We usually talk about how it helps you win clients. It raises your perceived value. It makes buyers choose you over others. But it also changes things inside the business. You know what they say. Constraints breed creativity. A blank page is scary because…
The How Chain: A Simple Questioning Method to Reveal Your Consulting Firm’s Onlyness
You might have seen it on the news. On Monday, there was a blackout in Spain (where I live) for 12 hours. No electricity. No phone line. No traffic lights, no metros, no trains. Some people got stuck in elevators for hours. Some others couldn’t buy food since they didn’t have cash. Total chaos. When…
Why Serving Multiple Client Types Kills Growth (And How To Choose The Ideal One)
In 2012, Hubspot was bleeding customers. They spent a lot of resources on customer acquisition. But customers didn’t stick around and churned out after a few months. So their customer lifetime value was low. That meant they couldn’t increase marketing budgets further and hire a bigger team to scale. Hubspot’s executive team realized they had…
Category Ladders: How to Get Buyers To Think Of Your Brand First
What brands come to your mind when you hear “accounting firms”? You can probably list 3-4 brands. First, you’d think about Deloitte. Then you’d continue with the other ones you know, like PwC, Ernst & Young, your own accountant, etc. The same applies if I tell you “toothpaste” or “energy drink.” Buyers remember a shortlist…
12 Differences Between B2B Product vs. B2B Service Businesses (And Why They Matter)
There are key differences between B2B product (e.g. software) vs. B2B service (e.g. consultancy) businesses: All these differences impact how to position the brand, what messages to convey to the market, and how to attract potential customers. Obviously, some other factors affect these differences. Like the price point of the offer. But the moral of…
3C Analysis (Customer): How to Make Your Consulting Services Something Customers Want
We’ve talked about the 3C’s that drive a brand’s positioning in our Profit-Led Branding Framework: Company, Competition, and Customer. In this article, we’ll look into the last C: Customer. There are two parts of Customer Analysis. We’ll cover the “What are our customers trying to achieve?” part here. The second part “Who are the customers trying to make…
