You may have a hunch your positioning is off. It shows up as awkward pauses on sales calls, prospects who need convincing instead of showing up already sold on working with you, not being sure of content to write, or updating the headlines on your website so many times you lost count.
What’s less obvious is what actually fixes it, what changes once it’s fixed, and whether fixing it means blowing up everything you’ve already built.
Last week I promised you answers to that. So let’s get into it, shall we?
What a positioning strategist actually does
Here’s my job: make sure the right people remember you, trust you, and choose you, even when they’re standing in a room full of options who all solve the same problem you do. This is the work that lays the foundation for all your marketing, and it’s how you close the gap between the value you actually provide and how you show up.
Your positioning also impacts and is impacted by every other area of your business. I’ll show you exactly how in a future issue.
Most positioning strategists only focus on one or two of the three pieces that actually make this work.
I use three pillars: know your brand, know your audience, know your market. If you skip any one of them, you end up with positioning that’s either generic or distinctive but disconnected from what your buyers actually care about.
(Side note: I’m still working on a name for this framework. I put a poll out on LinkedIn, and apparently the word ‘brand’ is a bit of a hot topic. Who knew. 🤷🏻♀️)
Know your brand
What drives you, how you got here, and how you want to show up, so the way you talk about your work actually sounds like you
Know your audience
Who you’re really built to serve, what triggers them to finally act, and what almost stops them from choosing you.
Know your market
Where you actually stand against every option your buyers are weighing, including the option of doing nothing at all.
The most critical thing a positioning strategist does (or should do) is research. And by research, I don’t just mean interviewing you and your team. All that leads to is assumptions about what makes you different.
There was a week where I happened to speak to 3 different accounting firms. When I asked them how they were different from other firms and why someone would choose them, they all said the exact same thing. And they all wholeheartedly believed it.
This is the piece that comes before any marketing, which is exactly why it determines whether your messaging and tactics actually work. And you’re too close to your own business to trust yourself to see past your own blind spots.
Take the “know your audience” pillar. A lot of us go straight to our testimonials to see why people work with us. (I’m not knocking it. There’s gold in the language they use, but it’s not the whole picture.) But research isn’t just about why your clients say they worked with you after they’ve already seen the transformation.
It’s about understanding why they truly hired you in the first place: what triggered them to call, why they chose you over every other option they had, how things were showing up in their day to day while they were still in the mess of the problem.
Most of the time they can’t even articulate those things without some further digging. So why would you be able to?
💡My favorite customer interview moment was when I was talking to someone and when we got down to why they really hired my client, he said “Huh. I’m going to need to sit with that for a minute. I didn’t even realize what I was carrying and how it was impacting my day to day before I hired them.”
What he said just prior ended up becoming the foundation for their positioning, once we confirmed it wasn’t just a one-off situation.
Okay, so now you have some sense of what the work is, but how do you know if this is what you actually need in your business right now?
Since you asked…
5 signs you need a positioning strategist
- You lost a deal, or a shot at one, because of your website. You know it wasn’t really about the website. Yes, you were embarrassed. Yes, it felt outdated. But you knew the real problem was that it wasn’t doing the actual work of helping someone understand why they should work with you.
- There was a big opportunity, like a grant, a speaking invitation, or a partnership that could genuinely move things forward. You sat down to write the pitch and realized the way you show up doesn’t match the value you actually provide so you struggled through the proposal, second-guessing every word (again).
- You’ve watched someone doing the exact same thing you do, getting all kinds of visibility for it, and thought, that should be us too.
- Someone sent you the perfect referral. They sang your praises, maybe even sent a warm introduction over email, and then…nothing. They never even reached out.
- You’ve grown through referrals and relationships and you’re grateful for it. But you also know it might not be a sustainable way to get to the next level of growth you’re looking for. I call this the Proximity Trap™, when you’re limited by the people closest to you recommending you.
If one or more of those felt uncomfortably familiar, you’re in good company. These are all almost verbatim statements from conversations with previous clients. As frustrating as this might feel right now, this work literally changes how people see you. And that changes everything.
The 3 C’s I swore I wouldn’t use
What clients are really after, underneath all of it, is confidence, clarity, and consistency. I know, three of the most overused words in this, and most, industries. But they’re real, and not having them comes at a cost.
When you don’t know exactly how to talk about your work, it makes you feel smaller in rooms where you should take up space. You hedge and over-explain, adding three extra sentences to something that should’ve taken one. After a while, that uncertainty starts to feel like it’s about you. (It’s not.)
There’s also a version of this that isn’t just about feeling more confident. It’s about being seen as a credible authority in your space, someone with a specific point of view, not someone juggling ten different ideas at once and hoping one of them sticks.
That clarity is exactly what shifts once the work is actually done. Here’s what it looks like on the other side.
What changes once the work is done
One organization I worked with had a clear goal: get their cofounder on more stages delivering keynotes. Once we nailed the positioning, she had the confidence to actually pursue those stages with a pitch that was clear and compelling. She started showing up, building the organization’s authority and credibility in their industry.
For another client, the shift happened before we’d even landed on his exact positioning angle. Just having clarity changed how he talked about his work: how he introduced himself, the content he wrote… Two things followed immediately:
Better-fit leads started booking discovery calls, and the calls themselves changed.
Instead of him spending the whole conversation validating and explaining his value, prospects showed up already convinced of it, asking what it would look like to work together instead of why they should believe him. This is one of the first things that shifts for almost every client I work with, and is not the exception.
And sometimes the shift is immediate and structural. I worked with a tech startup where, once the positioning and messaging were locked, they were able to hand the work straight off to their PR team, no extra hand-holding required. That clarity has carried them through a $60 million Series A and industry recognition ever since.
You don’t need a Series A or a PR team to see this play out. The mechanics are the same whether you’re a solo consultant, small team, or a funded startup: once the position is right, everything downstream gets easier to hand off, including to yourself.
Is now actually the right time to do this work?
You might have seen yourself in one of the five signs above, but recognizing a problem and acting on it are two different things. So I went back through my onboarding forms and pulled the patterns around what was happening right before people finally scheduled a call. Here are the four that show up repeatedly.
- Your next move requires visibility, and you’re not positioned for it yet. Getting invited to speak at summits, getting tagged in someone else’s LinkedIn post, getting quoted in a publication. None of that happens when you sound like everyone else in your space. It happens when you’re impossible to confuse with the next option.
- You’re being proactive about the Proximity Trap™ instead of waiting to hit the ceiling of your network. This is you deciding not to wait until it the costs are too much to ignore.
- Your positioning is outdated. Your business evolved, or the market did, or your buyers did. Usually it’s some combination of all three, and what worked when you built it doesn’t hold up anymore.
- You’re staring down a rebrand as the alternative. Sometimes that actually is what you need, once positioning and messaging are nailed down first. But if they’re not, you’re just, well, putting lipstick on a pig.
Which brings up three concerns I hear constantly.
→ Does this mean we have to blow up our whole business and start over?
(It doesn’t.)
→ Will we just have to pay for this all over again in a year or two?
(You won’t, if it’s done right. Yes, the work is an investment. But you know what’s more expensive? Getting ghosted on a five-figure contract because you couldn’t get across why it should be you.)
→ And then there’s the question of where this even fits against everything else competing for your attention and budget. Sales, operations, content, all of it feels urgent.
(I’ve got something coming soon on how to prioritize where to invest next. Keep an eye out.)
All three are common hesitations, and none of them should be the thing holding you back.
Let’s talk about it
If any of this hit close to home, I’d love to talk it through with you.
No pitch, no pressure. We’ll talk through what’s going on in your business and figure out together if this is even the right move for you right now. If it’s not, you’ll walk away with clarity either way.
Book your free call here, or if that feels like too big a step, just hit reply. We can start there instead.
Until next time,
Stacy
When you’re ready…
1. Pitch decks don’t sell. Stories do. Grab my story-first case study guide.
2. Clarity call: Not sure what’s working? Get clarity on the problem that’s been spinning in your head. (One client called it “therapy for her brand.”)
3. Website audit: Get a fresh set of eyes on your website, sales page, or key asset. You’ll walk away with a prioritized roadmap of what to fix first and how to fix it.
4. 1:1 positioning, messaging, & copy projects Curious if it’s a good fit? Let’s chat. (Don’t worry. It’s just a conversation. No pressure or hard pitch.)
