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

Introduction.

Chapter 1 Size Is Not a Strategy.

Maintaining Pricing Integrity.

Better to Be a Profit Leader than a Market Leader.

Why Bigness Doesn’t Lead to Greatness.

Hired to Be Effective, Not Efficient.

Chapter 2 How and Why Brands Become Homogenized.

The Urge to Copy.

The Folly of All-In-One.

Line Extension Is Not Branding.

There’s No Such Thing as Full Service.

The Natural Fear of Focus

Chapter 3 The Mature Company’s Identity Crisis.

Differentiation and Price Premiums.

Columbus, Not Napoleon.

The Diffusion of Identity.

Landing in No-Man’s Land.

Strategy at the Edges.

Not Best Practices, but Next Practices.

Chapter 4 Expanding Business by Narrowing Focus.

There’s No Such Thing as a General Market.

Vertical Success versus Horizontal Success.

The Strategic Value of Going Deep. 

Chapter 5 Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy.

What Are You Really Selling?

Becoming Hard to Imitate.

Two Critical Dimensions of an Effective Value Proposition.

A Category of One.

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

Natural Outcomes of a Powerful Value Proposition.

Chapter 6 Building Brand Boundaries.

Brand Boundary 1: Calling.

Brand Boundary 2: Customers.

Brand Boundary 3: Competencies.

Brand Boundary 4: Culture.

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

Chapter 7 Validating the Value Proposition.

Be Rooted in the Future, Not the Past.

The Value Proposition Team.

Asking the Right Questions.

Chapter 8 Without Execution, There Is No Strategy.

Services.

Staffing.

Self-Promotion.

Systems.

Staging.

Executing a Positioning Strategy with Alignment Teams.

Rebuilding Your Ship While at Sea.

Chapter 9 Getting Paid for Creating Value.

The Perils of Cost-Based Compensation.

Changing the Language.

Pricing as a Core Competency.

Why a Value-Based Approach is in the Client’s Best Interest.

The Alignment of Incentives.

Creating a Virtuous Circle.

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

Forms of Value-Based Pricing.

The Right Clients for Outcome-Based Agreements.

The True Meaning of Partnership.

Uncovering Missed Opportunities to Make Pricing a Core Competency.

Key Questions in Setting a Value-Based Price.

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

Better Time Tracking Is Not the Answer. 

Thinking of Compensation Plans as a Stock Portfolio.

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

A Declaration of Value.

Appendix A: The Before-and-After Survey.

Appendix B: More Ways to Differentiate Your Brand.

Appendix C: Indicators of the Firm’s Success.

Notes.

About the Author.

Index.

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.