How to choose a positioning consultant

Founders who hire a positioning consultant are usually doing it for the first time. They are buying something they cannot see in advance, from people who describe their work in similar words, at prices that run from a few thousand pounds to six figures. This is how I would choose one if I were in your seat, including the questions that would rule me out.

What a positioning consultant should leave you with

Positioning is a set of decisions: which buyer you are for, what you want to be known for, why that buyer should choose you over every alternative, and what you will stop saying. A good consultant gets you to those decisions faster, and with more confidence, than you would reach alone. Then they help you put them where buyers look: your website, your profile, your proposals.

So the test of the work is simple. At the end, can you state each decision in a sentence, and has your website changed because of them? If what you have is a seventy-slide deck you have not acted on, you have paid for research.

Check they work with firms like yours

Much of the published thinking on positioning was written for software companies, and it is good thinking for that job. A service firm has different problems. The founder is often the product, the buyer is buying trust before they buy a deliverable, and most clients arrived through a referral. Ask for examples from firms with your shape: a consultancy, agency or advisory practice, at roughly your size, selling at roughly your prices. If every example is a product launch, the consultant may be excellent, at something else.

Ask for named results with dates

"Helped hundreds of businesses" tells you nothing. Ask for two or three named clients, what changed, and over what period. Then ask what else was going on at the time. A consultant who says the positioning changed what was sold and to whom, while the client did the selling, is giving you a more honest picture than one who claims every pound that followed. Case studies that state their own limits are the ones worth believing.

Find out who writes the words

Some consultants deliver the strategy and leave you to turn it into copy. Some write everything. Either can work, but you need to know which you are buying, because the translation is where most positioning work stalls. If your team will be doing the rewriting, budget the time for it now. If the consultant writes, ask to see something they wrote for a client, live on that client's site.

Ask how they will know it worked

Positioning should change commercial numbers: the size of the clients you win, the price you can hold, how quickly calls turn into proposals. Ask what they will measure, over what period, and what happens if it does not move. The answer tells you how much of the risk they are prepared to carry.

My own view is that a consultant who believes in the work should carry some of it, so part of my fee is only paid once the work has produced the attributable revenue we agree at the start. That is one model among several. Whichever you choose, the consultant should be able to tell you plainly what they expect to change and how you will see it.

Questions to ask before you hire

• Which decisions will I have made by the end, and how long will it take?

• Who have you done this for, and can I see the result?

• Who writes the website and proposal copy, you or us?

• What happens if I disagree with the direction you recommend?

• What will we measure, and over what period?

• Who is this not right for?

The last question is the most revealing. A consultant who cannot name the firms they would turn away has probably not decided who they are for, which is an awkward position for someone selling positioning.

Warning signs

Three are worth taking seriously. The first is a promise of leads or a guaranteed number of clients: positioning changes who enquires and how they buy, and anyone promising volume is selling something else. The second is a method applied identically to every client, which shows up in their portfolio as websites that all read alike. The third is a scope that ends at the deck, with no plan for getting the decisions into the places buyers look.

When you do not need one

Some firms do not need a positioning consultant at all. If you can name your best buyer, explain in one sentence why they choose you over the alternatives, and everything a client see's already says so, your problem is probably traffic or sales, and the money is better spent there. A consultant earns the fee when the decisions keep being deferred because nobody inside the firm can make them with enough distance.