193. Two ways to think about positioning

How to Sell Advice

This post originally appeared at https://kevin.me/ways

You can think about niching in a lot of ways.

In many cases, the tighter you go, the easier it can be to sell what you offer. People are swimming in options, they want specific when they can get it.

So there are two angles to consider when deciding on how specific you should go with your business.

1. You can get specific about who you serve

The more specific your target market, the broader your focus can be in terms of what you help people with—while still being credible.

If I help multi-location coworking spaces do better marketing, that's a specific target market and a fairly broad way of helping them. It can be reasoned that you can have rare knowledge about marketing in a way that is uniquely applied to multi-location coworking spaces.

If I said I help anyone do better marketing at scale, you can begin to see where the skepticism may come in.

2. You can get specific about the problem you solve

When you're highly specific about the problem you solve, it makes sense that you could solve it credibly for a wide range of industries.

For example, I could say I help people sell their expertise through membership programs. And that could be a reasonably credible positioning given the specificity of the problem being solved.

I don't need to say "I help faith-based dog groomers sell membership programs." The market would be too small. And the same skills or lessons could be applied to far greater contexts.

And this is what strategy is all about.

There's no perfect way to position your consulting business. Specificity helps—but how you apply specificity is where the hard choices are made.

So what trade-offs are you making? How are you being specific about either what you do or who you do it for?

As they say, hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.