Sam Jones, founder of The Niche Doctor
Sam Jones is the founder of The Niche Doctor, a UK positioning consultancy for established B2B service businesses: consultancies, agencies and advisory firms that want to stop relying on referrals and win bigger, higher-value clients.
What I do
I decide positioning with the founders of B2B service businesses: which buyer they are for, what they should be known for, why that buyer should choose them, and what to stop saying. Then I write it into the places buyers look and stay involved until it has produced revenue. The engagement is the 21-Day NPM. The work is the same three decisions every time, in the same order: niche, positioning, messaging.
How I came to this work
I have been the marketer behind industry-leading experts since 2015. For most of that time I ran an agency, which I built to a team of five. Its clients were people with audiences in the millions, the kind an agency of five is not supposed to be able to get in front of. We got in front of them because the agency’s own positioning was built to attract exactly that client: the inaccessible one, the large project, the long retainer. That is the work I now do for other people’s businesses.
The agency’s success had a cost I did not expect. The bigger it got, the less of the one-to-one work I did, and the one-to-one work was the part I was good at and the part I wanted. So in 2023 I started The Niche Doctor to do that work in a different market: established B2B service businesses that are better at the job than at being chosen for it.
The proof
More than 70 businesses through the engagement. £6.7m in revenue attributed to the work.
Evolve, a Pipedrive consultancy, nearly doubled its average order value after it was repositioned as a Revenue Recovery System. Maddox Dixon went from £5k packages to a £90k package and just over £1m in 18 months, and later sold part of the business. Both are written up in full, with what the work did and did not do.
Workshops
I have delivered positioning workshops to in-house marketing teams at ASOS, Unilever, P&G and News UK, at their offices.
Where else to find me
The Niche Doctor is a registered trade mark.
If your firm is good at the work and still not chosen for the clients it could serve, the first call establishes whether positioning is the problem. If it is not, I will say so.