Positioning for Professionals How

Why are some professional service firms so much more successful than their competitors? The difference isn't just talent, but focus. The best firms know that standing for everything is the same as standing for nothing. Instead of trying to be good at everything, they do what they do best and find resources for the rest.

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.

Introduction	p. xi
Size is not a Strategy	p. 1
Maintaining Pricing Integrity	p. 2
Better to Be a Profit Leader than a Market Leader	p. 3
Why Bigness Doesn't Lead to Greatness	p. 5
Hired to Be Effective, Not Efficient	p. 6
How and Why Brands Become Homogenized	p. 9
The Urge to Copy	p. 10
The Folly of All-in-One	p. 11
Line Extension Is Not Branding	p. 12
There's No Such Thing as Full Service	p. 13
The Natural Fear of Focus	p. 14
The Mature Company's Identity Crisis	p. 17
Differentiation and Price Premiums	p. 18
Columbus, Not Napoleon	p. 19
The Diffusion of Identity	p. 22
Landing in No-Man's Land	p. 22
Strategy at the Edges	p. 23
Not Best Practices, But Next Practices	p. 25
Expanding Your Business By Narrowing Your Focus	p. 29
There's No Such Thing as a General Market	p. 30
Vertical Success versus Horizontal Success	p. 32
The Strategic Value of Going Deep	p. 34
Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy	p. 37
What Are You Really Selling?	p. 39
Becoming Hard to Imitate	p. 39
Two Critical Dimensions of an Effective Value Proposition	p. 41
A Category of One	p. 43
A Brand Is the Customer's Idea of the Product	p. 44
Natural Outcomes of a Powerful Value Proposition	p. 46
Building Brand Boundaries	p. 47
Brand Boundary 1: Calling	p. 49
Brand Boundary 2: Customers	p. 55
Brand Boundary 3: Competencies	p. 60
Brand Boundary 4: Culture	p. 66
The Confluence of Calling, Customers, Competencies, and Culture	p. 72
Validating Your Value Proposition	p. 75
Be Rooted in the Future, Not the Past	p. 76
The Value Proposition Team	p. 77
Asking the Right Questions	p. 80
Without Execution, There Is No Strategy	p. 83
Services	p. 85
Staffing	p. 92
Self-Promotion	p. 100
Systems	p. 107
Staging	p. 112
Executing a Positioning Strategy with Alignment Teams	p. 116
Rebuilding Your Ship While at Sea	p. 119
Getting Paid for Creating Value	p. 121
The Perils of Cost-Based Compensation	p. 122
Changing the Language	p. 124
Pricing as a Core Competency	p. 125
Why a Value-Based Approach Is in the Client's Best Interest	p. 126
The Alignment of Incentives	p. 128
Creating a Virtuous Circle	p. 131
A New and Better Way to Price Professional Services	p. 133
Forms of Value-Based Pricing	p. 133
The Right Clients for Outcome-Based Agreements	p. 136
The True Meaning of Partnership	p. 138
Uncovering Missed Opportunities to Make Pricing a Core Competency	p. 139
Key Questions in Setting a Value-Based Price	p. 140
If Complex Global Companies Can Do It, So Can You	p. 142
Better Time Tracking Is Not the Answer	p. 144
Thinking of Compensation Plans as a Stock Portfolio	p. 147
Setting the Stage for a Value-Based Approach to Compensation	p. 150
A Declaration of Value	p. 154
The Before-and-After Survey	p. 157
More Ways to Differentiate Your Brand	p. 161
Indicators of the Firm's Success	p. 165
Notes	p. 173
About the Author	p. 179
Index	p. 181
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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

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