Positioning for Consulting Firms

Try a small experiment the next time you are at an industry event. Ask five consulting firm founders what their firms do. You will hear the same sentence five times, with the nouns rearranged: "We're a strategy consulting firm working with growing businesses." Then ask the person standing next to them to repeat what they just heard. They cannot. The sentence passed through their head without leaving a mark.

That is a positioning problem, and it is the most expensive quiet problem in consulting. Not because the firms are bad at the work; most of them are excellent at the work. It is expensive because a firm nobody can describe is a firm nobody can recommend, shortlist, or remember when the problem it solves finally shows up. I spent years building and exiting an IP consulting practice, and the single biggest lesson from that time was this: the firms that get called by name have made a decision the others have not.

Why "Strategy Consulting for Growing Businesses" Positions Nobody

A position is not a description of your firm. It is a claim on a slot in the buyer's memory. Buyers do not store firms the way a directory does, with the full profile attached. They store labels: "the pricing person", "the firm that fixes founder dependence", "the one who does distribution for D2C brands". When a problem arrives, they reach for the label, not the profile.

"Strategy consulting for growing businesses" claims no slot because it is true of everyone. Every strategy firm serves growing businesses; the shrinking ones are not buying. A sentence that could be pasted onto a competitor's website without anyone noticing is not a position. It is a category name, and a category name only helps the firms that are already famous within it.

You will also find no shortage of frameworks offering to solve this: four types of positioning, five positioning strategies, the three C's. I have read most of them, and they share a flaw. They treat positioning as a labelling exercise, something the marketing layer does with words after the business is built. In consulting it works the other way around. The words come last. What comes first is a set of decisions about the business itself, and if those decisions have not been made, no framework can write the sentence for you.

The Three Choices That Make a Position

A consulting firm's position is the sum of three choices. Each one narrows you, and each one is a business decision, not a copywriting decision.

Which problem you solve. Not which services you offer; which situation, in the client's life, triggers the call. I have written before about why naming the problem beats naming your profile: buying is triggered by a symptom, and a firm positioned on a symptom gets called the morning the symptom appears. "Process improvement" is a service. "Your delivery costs are eating the margin your sales team fought for" is a problem. Firms that lead with the problem get to skip the part of the sales conversation where they explain why anyone should care.

Which buyer you serve. Not a demographic band; a specific person in a specific type of firm, whose world you know well enough to write about without interviewing them. When you know the buyer this well, everything downstream gets easier: you know where they spend attention, what they have already tried, and what the problem costs them in a year. When you serve "businesses", you know none of this, and your marketing reads like it.

Which method you use. This is the choice most firms skip, and it is the one that separates a positioned firm from a merely niched one. A method is your named, repeatable way of getting the client from problem to outcome. It answers the question every buyer silently asks: why you, and not the identical firm one WhatsApp forward away? On this site the method is called CLEAR, and the point of naming it was never the acronym. A named method turns twenty years of judgement into something a buyer can see, evaluate, and ask for. It is also the one part of your position a competitor cannot copy by editing their website, because a method has to be true.

Problem, buyer, method. Most firms have made none of these choices; some have made one. Make all three and you have a position competitors have not claimed, because the intersection is yours alone.

The Narrowing Fear

Every founder I have taken through this reaches the same moment of resistance, usually at the second choice. "If I say I only serve this buyer, I lose everyone else." The fear feels especially sharp in India, where founders worry the niche is too small to feed the firm.

The arithmetic says otherwise. Pick a genuinely narrow position, say, pricing strategy for B2B software companies in India, and the market still holds thousands of firms; far more than a consulting practice can ever serve. You do not need the market. You need a few dozen right-fit clients a year, and a narrow position is precisely what makes those few dozen able to find you.

The commercial effect runs the opposite way from the fear. Generalists get compared, and a comparison between firms that look the same collapses to the one line the buyer can read: the price. Specialists get chosen, often without a comparison at all, because the buyer is not shopping a category; they are calling the label in their head. That is why the narrow firm bills more for the same calibre of work, a pattern I have covered in detail in value-based pricing for consultants. The fee follows the position, not the effort.

And narrowing your position does not mean refusing work outside it. It means you stop marketing for that work. The out-of-position engagement still arrives through referrals and history; it simply stops being the thing you spend your visibility on.

How to Test a Position Before You Commit

A position is a commitment measured in years, so do not choose one by rebranding and hoping. Test it first, cheaply. Three tests, in order of increasing cost.

The history test. Open your delivery records from the last three years and look for the engagements that were profitable, repeatable, and enjoyable, all three at once. Somewhere in that list, a position is already operating undeclared: a problem you keep solving, for a buyer you keep attracting, in a way that keeps working. The strongest consulting positions are found in the order book, not invented in a workshop. This is the same archaeology I recommend when productising a service; positioning and packaging draw on the same evidence.

The list test. Write down one hundred real firms that fit the position: names, not categories. If you cannot get past thirty, the position is too narrow or you do not know the market as well as you thought; either finding is useful. If you can list a hundred without straining, the niche fear is settled by evidence.

The conversation test. Before changing a single page, use the new position in live outreach and sales conversations for a month. Say the sentence, and watch what happens. A working position changes the texture of the replies: prospects start describing their situation back to you in your words, and the calls begin closer to yes. A position that produces polite nods and no shift in reply quality was a nice sentence, nothing more.

One Sentence a Stranger Can Repeat

When the tests come back positive, write the position down as a single sentence that carries all three choices: the buyer, the problem, and the method. Plain words, no adjectives doing the work of decisions.

The test of that sentence is not whether you like it. It is whether a stranger who heard it once at a dinner can repeat it to someone else a week later, accurately enough that the right buyer would perk up. "They fix pipelines for B2B service firms that have outgrown referrals" survives the week. "They deliver bespoke growth solutions" does not survive the walk to the car park.

Then the sentence goes everywhere, unchanged: the website, the LinkedIn profiles, the proposals, the way the team answers "so what do you people do?". Repetition is what converts a decision into a reputation. Most firms dilute their position not by choosing badly but by saying it seventeen slightly different ways until no version sticks.

One warning as you write: the sentence records the decision; it cannot replace it. If the three choices have not actually been made, the copywriting will be vague in exactly the way the business is vague, and no editor can fix that. Positioning is the most upstream fix there is. Get it right and everything downstream, the offer, the visibility, the lead generation system, suddenly has something solid to stand on.

Not sure what your firm should be known for? Get in touch and tell me what you do, who you do it for, and the last five engagements you closed. I will tell you honestly whether you have a positioning problem, and where I would look for the position hiding in your order book.