Agency positioning matters so much because it helps your prospects feel safe and makes them feel willing to enter into a partnership with you. It creates the feeling of working together rather than being sold to.

That’s a crucial construct to understand. Positioning is a mechanism that creates a sense of “obviousness” where a prospect understands that you can address their issues. It also removes friction by a shared focus on desired outcomes. Together, those positioning benefits turn an in-market visitor into a prospect, and then from a prospect into a partner.

Earlier today, I recorded a podcast with someone, and we walked through his website step by step. Now, in the interest of not spoiling the launch of his podcast episode, I'm not going to give you all the details, but I'm going to walk you through each thing that we did.

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The first thing that you have to remember is, for the moment anyways, you are selling to human beings. Human beings are remarkably diverse in experience and culture, but our brains all work very similarly. The human brain is the most advanced and fantastic pattern-matching machine that our species has ever encountered.

The 2-second test, AKA "Is This For Me?", is something that happens really quickly. In order to pass the two-second test, you actually need to understand what your target market, generally speaking, thinks about itself. What are the words they use? What are their concerns? What are the functions that they value? What are the functions that they struggle with? In order to pass the two-second test, you need to provide something that allows the viewer's brain to match what you are saying with the pattern that they believe they embody. (This is a dividend that gets paid by the yield from how well you know your market. Check out my scintillating treatise - Return on Understanding.)

A we talked about above, you've got to be really clear about what you do. Nobody has the time, patience, energy, or obligation of doing the work of interpreting what you do when you could just explain it clearly. But because we are all pattern-matching machines, if your explanation does not match up to a pattern that already exists in the reader's mind, it's pretty likely they are gonna bail. That doesn't mean that you have to be dramatically blunt and say "SEO US GOOD", but you could say something like, “We create content that converts SaaS buyers and ranks where they search.” It's clear that you create content that gets good visibility…

Part 1 of this question allowed the visitor to categorize your business. That must fit into a pattern that makes sense to the reader. Part 2 is a little more nuanced because we have to show that what we do solves the problem that the prospect might have. For instance, if we're talking about our imaginary content agency, we're going to want to talk about how increased visibility & better content helps more qualified, better fit clients show up in your sales funnel. Because most people who are in market have already diagnosed their problem to some extent, they likely understand the symptom (e.g., poor quality pipeline entries), and they have already diagnosed some of the problem (e.g., our content sucks). When there's a match between what you do (part one) and the nuance where you explain how your service addresses their issues & delivers a transformative resolution, that's a winner!

Part of answering “What You Do - Part 2” is being able to explain either how you do it or the impact of your efforts. You want to highlight the cleverness of your workflow, but nobody buys your stupid-ass process, even if it is brilliant and you are very smart and the process is something that creates more impact than the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. You want your explanations of how it gets done and the impact to be excruciatingly clear for the person reading it. Don’t waste your time with jargon. You are selling a transformation. (Please read David C. Baker’s book, The Business of Expertise for a really good perspective on this.)

This is perhaps the most delicate part of positioning because you have someone who has self-identified as part of your target audience, having a problem that you can credibly solve, and they understand that it is a transformation that brings about the results they desire, getting them to want to be on the inside is a place where you can seriously oversell and undercut your credibility. So many folks try to create the desire to be inside the velvet rope by creating faux scarcity, or setting up a wait list, or making a limited-time offer…sophisticated buyers see through that. The desire to be behind the velvet rope is the desire to belong in the crowd of the people on the other side of the velvet rope. It is the classic case of wanting to be part of the cool kids. So this is where you either want to tell stories or share results without being braggadocious and ridiculous about it. This is where you want to show the benefits of having gone through all of this change. You want to show the benefits of transformation without being all cheesy and sleazy.

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Positioning often shows up as this abstract, high-level deck that says, "This is who we are and this is who we work with and these are values and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah….blech!”

Positioning is so much more.

Think about how a fine dining restaurant describes its food. It talks about the experience you are about to have when you eat it. It's emotional, it's sensual, it creates desire in you. The chef doesn't come out of the kitchen and say, "I spent three years in culinary school and five years on a kitchen line learning how to dice carrots so I could make this chicken dish."

But more than the description of that meal as the evocation of an experience you are about to have, every part of the restaurant prepares you for and reminds you of the experience of eating that fantastic dish. From the front façade to the interior design to the china and silver that is chosen, each one of those things that has nothing to do with the food is picked so it enhances your experience. The wait staff doesn't rush, doesn't bother you when you've just taken a bite of food the size of Toledo and makes sure that you feel cared for. Again, those things have nothing to do with the food - but they exist to amplify the experience of eating the food. After dinner, coffee, or drinks are an elegant experience that gives you time to remember the amazing meal that you just ate. They have nothing to do with the preparation of the meal. They are there to enhance your experience of just having eaten that fantastic meal.

Your positioning - from first contact through the day that your client decides to move on should be built around this concept of positioning. You want to continually show that your prospect/client is in the right place, they are understood deeply & you provide transformative outcomes. Your entire client experience is build from the core ideas and ideals of your positioning. It’s the biggest weapon that you have in attracting great fit clients, and it's your biggest weapon in retaining those same clients.

Positioning isn't a marketing thing. It's an operational imperative that will help you grow your agency in a way that feels right to you, your team, and your clients.

The first step in DemandOS is functionally a positioning exercise that is based on what you are really good at and what you understand about the market. But it's much deeper than that. It actually turns your entire team into a growth engine.

Once we understand your positioning and your value. We create your vibes, vision, and value axis, which is the center of not just founder messaging, but also team messaging that gets reflected in social posts from the entire team. Adjusted to their perspective and their value add, it turns into language that goes into weekly or monthly reporting. It turns into the way you address problems and opportunities.

Even better, DemandOS can help clarify the answer to "I don't know what to do" for you and your team. An easy & productive a way to make a decision about what's next is to look at all of the possible options of activities and take action on the ones that:

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