Positioning for Professionals: How Professional Knowledge Firms Can Differentiate Their Way to Success(Wiley Professional Advisory Services)

It’s not the best companies that prevail in the marketplace, but rather the best brands. The goal of business strategy is not just to be better, but different. Learn how to build a differentiating value proposition by clearly and carefully defining your brand boundaries: Calling, Competencies, Customers, and Culture. Positioning for Professionals shows how a well-defined value proposition can help professional service firms create their own success instead of copying the success of others, including such concepts as: How and why professional service brands become homogenized Why standing for everything is the same as standing for nothing Why there’s no such thing as full service Deep and narrow as a strategic imperative Why it’s better to be a profit leader than a market leader Differentiation and price premiums How to map your brand on the matrix of relevance and differentiation How to define a value proposition that will make your firm intensely appealing to the customers who want you for what you do best Based on the proven premise that the most profitable business strategy is not to aim at the center of the market, but rather at the edges, Positioning for Professionals is written for leaders, managers, and other senior executives of service companies in with a particular emphasis on professional service firms.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
TIM WILLIAMS leads Ignition Consulting Group (www.ignitiongroup.com), a business consultancy devoted to helping professional knowledge firms create and capture more value. As a recognized thought leader in marketing, Tim is a frequent speaker for marketing and business organizations worldwide. He is a regular contributor to business and professional publications and is author of Take a Stand for Your Brand, ranked by Amazon as one of the top ten books on brand building. As an adviser in developing professional service brands, Tim has worked with both large and small professional service firms—most notably advertising agencies and other marketing communications firms—in both the U.S. and abroad. He began his career on Madison Avenue working for large multinational advertising agencies and later served as president and owner of several midsize independent firms.