Episode 54:Nü-Positioning
How do you update your positioning over time? And what if your work is more “touchy-feely”?
Summary
Nick and Kai walk through how they’ve each repositioned their businesses, always toward a narrower focus, and why that narrowing consistently produces more income and more client respect. The second half tackles a listener question about what to do when your work feels qualitative or hard to tie to dollars, and both argue there’s always a business reason behind a hire, you just have to find it.
Highlights
- Nick says every time he’s narrowed his positioning, he’s added another zero to his paycheck. The correlation is between tighter focus and higher fees, not just more inquiries.
- The fear that narrowing your positioning will cost you clients is wrong. Nick is direct: ‘there is no caveat on this.’
- Kai’s method is to iterate one variable at a time: keep the expensive problem fixed and adjust the target market, or keep the target market fixed and adjust the expensive problem. Do both at once and you have no signal.
- Kai’s own repositioning is staged over six months: first move the target market to educational product creators, then later shift the expensive problem from promotion to revenue growth. He’s building case studies for the second move before it goes public.
- On ‘touchy-feely’ or qualitative work: Nick says the job is to get as close to a client’s money as possible. If you can’t frame your work as increasing revenue or decreasing costs, you’ll be the first cut when budgets tighten.
- Kai figured out that his podcast outreach clients weren’t hiring him for trackable ROI, they were hiring him because they didn’t have time to do it themselves. That time cost became the anchor for all his updated copy.
- Nick’s read on innovation consultancies that did ‘theater for corporate executives’: that market is gone, and it’s not coming back.
Read the transcript
We don’t talk about positioning often on this podcast. I think we should talk about positioning more often.
I’ve changed my positioning a lot and it’s mostly been like a s like slow refinement and punctuated by occasional Torchings. I did a torching in like March or April when I was like, you know what? I’m not just doing interaction design. I’m also just doing Research-driven A-B testing. And now I’m iterating on that. I went a little bit more focused. I think every time I’ve reworked my positioning, it’s been to narrow that focus over the past like three or four years. But that’s also because I’ve been around a lot of people who are telling me to narrow the focus of my positioning. And also because every time I narrow the focus out of my positioning, I add another zero to my paycheck. So there’s that.
When you say you add another zero, do you mean you increase your rates? Or do you mean that You notice a strict correlation between narrowing your positioning and more people wanting to pay you more money. The latter. I also get more respect with client engagements. And we’ve talked about this quite a bit. One of the biggest pushbacks I hear from students in the W Freelancing Academy is: I have the fear that if I narrow my positioning People won’t want to pay me for the work or won’t want to engage me, yada, yada, yada. So I like hearing that as you refine, as you iteratively refine to a more narrow focus, you make more money and clients respect you more.
Yes. And the people that are saying these things are wrong. It’s okay to be wrong. I’ve been wrong a lot. I’m usually wrong. But that in particular is wrong, and you should recognize it as the wrong thing that it is. There is no way to make it right. There is no caveat on this. So yeah, I don’t know. As I’ve iterated, it’s been either focusing my target market or Focusing the thing that I’m doing, more often focusing the thing that I’m doing. I threw away a lot of offerings in 2016.
Yeah, I always see it as an iteration between target market and expensive problem, where I don’t want, I think. Not that it’s too risky, but I prefer a conservative approach of I’m going to iterate on one at a time. So I’m going to keep the expensive problem the same, but slightly adjust the target market. Or keep the target market the same, but slightly adjust the expensive problem. And I think we could see this iteration in your business as you went from A-B testing for software businesses to. AB testing for e-commerce businesses to research-driven A-B testing for e-commerce businesses. We have that iteration on target market and then expensive problem.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that’s fair. How have you narrowed down? Uh with lots of fear. Now I’ve narrowed down multiple times by Following the money, I’m continually trying to identify where the value is in my client’s business and move my positioning statement to be as close to that money as possible. I’m in the middle of repositioning my business right now to focus exclusively on educational product creators, people who make online courses, e-books, things of that nature, like we discussed in the previous episode. The type of advice I was giving Nick in that episode is the type of advice I give my clients, dear listeners. But I’m iterating on this positioning because I noticed that my most valuable clients The clients I enjoy working with the most, and the clients who get the highest return on investment from working with me are educational product creators. And I’m looking at it and saying, like, oh, gee, these are really good signs. So I’m iterating based on two years of market research by working with people in different industries, even though my positioning was focused before. It wasn’t as focused as it could have been. And I’ve worked with a lot of different people, which I think is a good thing. And through that, I gained enough data to say, okay, educational product creators are where I want to focus on. And so right now, I’m looking at a new positioning statement of I help educational product creators promote their best products and products and services or products and content. And that’s because a lot of my existing services and my existing books, Podcast Outreach and Outreach Blueprint, are focused on promotion. How do you build relationships? How do you promote your stuff? And because, like I said before, I’m cautious and only want to iterate on one element at a time. Even though I want to move towards a positioning statement, I help educational product creators increase their revenue by optimizing their systems and identifying new lines of business. I don’t want to make both moves at the same time. I’d much rather have it be a six-month or a four-month game plan where step one is change the target market to focus on educational product creators. Step two is then iterate from Promote your stuff to help you identify new lines of revenue. And in the background, I’m doing that work already with a number of my clients. So I’m building up case studies and testimonials that support it. So when it comes time for me to make that new positioning, Public facing, I’ll have the content, I’ll have the case studies, I’ll have the testimonials, I’ll have the service offerings ready to launch. So somebody who comes to my website, they’re like, Okay, this looks right. Everything matches up. Nothing seems out of place. And so it becomes this slowly iterative process to move forward one step at a time.
So this episode was the result of a question. Somebody said, iterations of your positioning statements and both your positioning tied to results. And then there was another question here, and I’m going to tackle this briefly in the middle, because I think it’s good to hook off of what you’re saying before about getting closer to the money. The question was, what if your work is more touchy-feely? Now, I don’t really know what touchy-feely means, um, in specific, but I I’m a little concerned about that.
When I read Touchy Feeling, my interpretation was, what if it’s more qualitative than quantitative?
Yeah. Okay, so um I I spend a lot of time talking about the economic impact of design. So I’m just going to take this one and run with it. I used to have a business that spent a lot of time working on creating new software, defining better functionality for software for a variety of small businesses. And Neither of those things were terribly specific to talk about the positioning, right? Small businesses, what does that mean? Well, there are millions of small businesses. Draft is a small business. But also making software. Well, hmm. Well, everything should be software within the next five to ten years, and that’s terrifying, but true. So that’s not even terribly actionable. Like, what kind of software? Is it cool software? Is it functional software? Is it easy-to-use software? Well, that’s still all very terribly hand-wavy, right? And I was lucky enough to coast from project to project on people who knew what I was doing better than I did and were willing to support me in my stupid, you know, misguided behavior. Which does not say that the asker of this question is behavior is stupid or misguided, but I had stupid and misguided behavior for sure. But I ended up getting more focused because I found something that was not touchy-feely. And if your work is more touchy-feely, then you are not doing the work of positioning in order to get in front of money. The name of this podcast is literally Make Money Online. You make money most effectively, in my experience, by Increasing the revenue or decreasing the costs of your clients? And so, dear listener, whomever asked this question, my most humble entreaty upon you, find a better way of articulating the problem it is that you’re solving. Touchy feely is not enough. It’s and it’s not going to be enough during a down market. You’re going to be first against the wall, man. I’m sorry.
It’s hard advice, but this is a problem I directly run into with promotional services and podcast outreach and get you on podcasts. It’s hard to draw a strict line from we got you on the podcast to look, we made XROI from that podcast placement. It’s possible, it’s doable, but It might be a, you know, a one-week to a four-month lag between subscriber to purchaser. So it’s not as direct as, say, running Facebook ads to a course and hey, great, we made money. It’s Hard to track it back effectively. So, one of the challenges I experienced over the last few years was dealing with what I think of as a squishy, more qualitative Return for my clients and like, well, how do I frame this in a way that presents the value to them? And what I discovered through market research, just talking with past clients about The value they discovered in our work together, talking with prospects about why they why choose me? Why not somebody else? What I discovered was people most often, even though It was a what I see as a qualitative results-oriented service were hiring me because they did not have the time to do it themselves. And That I think directly connects to your point about profit versus cost. It’s costing them too much time to do it themselves. We know if we hire an expert, they’ll be able to do it for us in less time and to a higher quality. So. Even if your work is more on the qualitative, touchy-feely side, there’s a reason, there’s a business decision somebody is making to hire you. Talk to them, figure out what that business reason is, and then use it as the anchor. In my updated marketing copy right now, I talk about how you don’t have the time to do outreach yourself. You don’t have the time to get placed on podcasts yourself. You should focus on running your business, not emailing podcasts to get placed on there. You should just show up and talk about the thing you’re great at. So, by identifying that the value for my clients has been in having somebody do it for them so they don’t have to spend the time doing it. It’s been easy for me to, even though it still is qualitative, shift it over to say, hey, the value for you here is you don’t have to do it yourself. And that’s worked wonders.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that The whole crux of the thing that we talk about when we talk about solving an expensive problem for a client is to get away from the touchy-feely sort of stuff. I think that that line of thinking is toxic to business and it’s only going to get more so. And that. I don’t have good advice for you, man. I really don’t. I wish I did, because it would be nice for everybody to feel self-actualized by doing quote unquote touchy-feely qualitative stuff. That’s how a lot of innovation consultancies have made their business. They do theater for corporate executives with too much money. People don’t have too much money anymore. And they’re not going to. It’s only going to get worse. And maybe I’m crushing your dreams. I personally found a way. To practice design every day more and more so that I can run a more successful business. And make more money than I’m spending. And it has resulted in a commensurate increase in quality of life. I travel more. I own a house now. I have a dog. He’s sniffing at the door. He wants to snuggle me. And I, right? Slow clap, right? And I Wouldn’t trade that for the world. If you tell me, Nick D, is it a Faustian bargain to go all in on AB testing and would you be doing anything differently? No. No. No, it’s not. And this is not something I’m just saying, and then I close the Skype call and break down crying because I’m actually miserable every day. It is not easy to find that line of work. But trying to do the qualitative thing, that is a way out motivated by fear of facing how a business works. If you don’t want to go down that path, Google is calling. Have fun.