Your firm’s position is the foundation of your marketing strategy. Positioning is going to help play a role in differentiating your company, helping you generate the right leads and win new business that is in line with your business goals, capabilities, and overall business operations.
Positioning is often discussed as part of a branding strategy or a marketing strategy, or even when you are first putting your company together, writing your business plan — the position that you want to hold in the market is something that you dive into. Positioning affects your ability to win work, it also determines how you get noticed. Basically, it’s your reputation.
What expertise or experience are people coming to your firm for?
Consider…if you are a retail firm and you mostly design or build high-end retail, which presumably has a larger budget and a more flexible schedule. Now you’re trying to start to bid college work where there’s a low budget and a very tight schedule…You might not be in the right position to get that college work because the college or the university is seeing you as a retail builder with a different methodology to delivering the work than you would if you were in a tightly constrained environment, like a small college, with a very small budget.
In this case, your position in the market is that of a “retail high-end firm”, not the “municipal smaller budget firm” that can execute in a tightly constrained environment. Neither position is good or bad. They are just different. And if you are trying to switch from one position to another you really need to work to present the new position to your clients and partners, so they start to see you as somebody who resonates with what they need.
Your position again is really your role in the marketplace.
How do you see yourself?
How do others see you?
The perception of your firm or your organization, or your people is just as important as what YOU think you can do.
As a professional service firm, you need to balance both of these and analyze these areas – both internally and externally. Perhaps talk to your clients, talk to your people, talk to prospects that have seen your site signs or understand your firm or work in your industry and see what they say about your company.You want to look for the key differentiators in the feedback you receive.
Often price is a bottom-line driver in our industry and firms should want to carve out a position on their pricing strategy. Are you known as a company that does these high-end luxury projects, or are you known as somebody that handles those municipal projects with smaller budgets? Which, which pricing do you fall into? Under your process and your delivery methods, where are we really finding that sweet spot? If you are a design firm you might be known for somebody that’s really, really great at executing complicated construction drawings, or you might be somebody that’s a visionary, doing some crazy design. And most, most firms are not both.
You want to find your position in the marketplace as the firm that knows where you fit and the kind of work that your company is built to do. Understanding your position and capabilities will help you find the right work or the right partners to do different work.
You also want to look at your client types and take an analysis of your portfolio. Quite often, as an example, companies think they are getting all their revenue is coming from healthcare, but really most of it is coming from residential construction. Go through your portfolio, look at your numbers and find out which clients are you really serving.
Find out which projects your staff want to work on. And then which ones are you perceived as a leader in executing. Maybe you do a lot of healthcare work, but most everyone in the region knows you as a residential firm because your site signs are everywhere.
You also want to assess your project types because you might be a healthcare or university firm that does a lot of those client type projects, but perhaps your niche is really laboratories. And, more specifically, high-end labs are used at a university R&D or are found in hospitals. Take a look at those project types as well to which position your firm is in. Are you able to handle big general overhauls and fit-out renovations, or are you really focused on very specific types of projects within those different client types?
Look at processes and delivery within your firm. Are you in a position to really focus on specific contract types – stand alone or IDIQ? Maybe you are built to manage small task orders that are happening all the time, all over the place, or maybe you are built to focus on those large signature projects. Just as you analyze your projects and clients, look at those delivery methods and the processes in your firm.
Another asset to evaluate as you define your position is your intellectual property and any technology that you might be bringing to the table. Years ago, BIM was new. And firms that were early adopters were positioned in the marketplace as someone that used cutting edge technology. As such, they were in a position to draw in those clients who wanted cutting edge technology and were not afraid of trying something new. Those are assets that you might be looking at within your organization. And it might not be something big like BIM that impacts all of your clients. It could be a really thorough QA/QC process that you implemented that helps you get known as somebody that delivers solid drawings that has zero RFIs.
Geography is a pretty large constraint and positioning tactic. Look at your position where you are – your firm headquarters or main regional offices. If you are looking to grow outside of your traditional geography, what can your position be in that new place? Some firms may have saturated their local market, so they are looking to other areas nearby that they can easily expand into and perhaps use some of their local positioning in a new place. Maybe they have been doing healthcare, but focused on labs in Baltimore, and they want to go up to Philadelphia. But there, they want to focus on more of the operating room and emergency room design. Think about how you can take your position from one place and translate it to the next. Do not be afraid of defining a geography as your position, and you only work in specific regions. Allowing yourself to say, we only work here or there is an excellent position to have because you can use it to make smart decisions.
We always argue that in the professional services the traditional marketing jargon that we hear about – price, product, place, promotion for service-based firms is really about our people, projects, process and position. Our people and our projects are really where our firms shine in terms of “our product.” We are creating an experience; we are providing a service. The expertise of our people and the experience that we are bringing to our clients is really where we need to focus when we are looking at our position.
What are our core competencies?
What expertise are we bringing to our clients?
What solutions are we really providing to solve their problems?
For proposals, this position and understanding your expertise and experience that you have can help you better qualify those opportunities you are pursuing.
Another way to find your position is to look at your differentiators. You discuss differentiators when you are looking at your brand, when you are creating your marketing messaging, when you’re doing a capability statement or writing a brochure. Your differentiators are really important for your proposals because they are what separates you from the competition. If you are the expert on everything that has been built on a certain campus because your team has been there and they have been inside every building, that is an excellent differentiator. If you have existing contract vehicles, you have already worked with that customer. You have already worked with that prime. Those are differentiators for a specific pursuit that can help you win that work. These are things that can help you either win the work or at least build the relationship because you are reminding them, “Hey, we’ve done 10 of these projects with you guys on this same campus.”
The position also looks at your value proposition. These are pieces that we build into every single proposal — what are the features and benefits of working with our firm? Some of the things we mentioned, you have already worked in every building on your campus, or you have done 15 projects in the same jurisdiction, or your project manager just left that agency and now works for you, so they already know all the inner workings. Those are some features. To find what the benefits are ask: Why does that matter to the agency or to the prime that you are working with? Why does it matter that your PM knows all the inner workings? Perhaps, the benefit is that you have a streamlined process. You are probably able to save them some time and money. You are going to end up having a seamless transition because your team can just roll right into the project. If you know your client, the benefits can be tailored specific to their needs and project requirements.
When you are talking to your prospects or when you’re putting together your proposal, you’re putting together your website content, what value are you really providing and why is it going to matter to that customer?