Dunford's 10-Step Positioning Exercise for Service Businesses
April Dunford's Obviously Awesome provides the most rigorous positioning framework available. Here's how to adapt each step for a methodology-driven service business.
Positioning is one of those words that everyone uses and almost nobody does well. Ask ten service business founders what their positioning is, and you'll get ten vague answers: "We're a leadership consultancy." "We help companies with digital transformation." "We're an AI advisory firm." These aren't positions. They're descriptions so broad that they apply to hundreds of firms — which means they differentiate none of them.
April Dunford, in Obviously Awesome, provides something most positioning advice lacks: a rigorous, step-by-step exercise that produces a defensible result. Not a tagline. Not a marketing message. A structural understanding of where you fit in the market and why that position matters.
Dunford developed her framework in technology companies, but its application to service businesses — particularly methodology-driven firms — is natural. Here's each step, adapted for founders who sell expertise rather than software.
Clear a full day for this. It's the most important strategic work you'll do this quarter.
Steps 1-3: Understanding Your Competitive Reality
Before You Position, Know What You're Positioning Against
Step 1: Identify your competitive alternatives. Not your competitors — your alternatives. What would your ideal client actually do if your firm didn't exist? This distinction is critical. Your competition isn't just other consulting firms. It's every alternative path a buyer could take instead of hiring you.
For a methodology-driven service business, the alternatives typically include five categories: do nothing (the most common and most underestimated competitor), hire a large consultancy (McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte), adopt a generic framework without expert guidance, hire a boutique specialist with a different approach, or build internal capability without external help.
List them all. Be honest. The alternatives your clients are actually considering — not the ones you wish they were considering — determine the competitive context you're positioning within.
Step 2: List your unique attributes. What do you have that none of your alternatives offer? A proprietary diagnostic tool? A certified partner network? A specific methodology with a track record? Deep expertise in a narrow vertical? Data from hundreds of previous assessments that creates benchmarking capability?
Be ruthless here. "Experienced team" isn't unique — every firm claims experience. "Proprietary 30-question diagnostic that produces a maturity score benchmarked against 500 organizations in your industry" is unique. Specificity is everything.
Step 3: Map attributes to value themes. Translate features into outcomes the buyer cares about. Features are what you have. Value themes are what the buyer gets. "30-question assessment" becomes "board-ready maturity score in 90 minutes." "Certified partner network" becomes "local expert, global methodology." "500-organization benchmark database" becomes "know exactly where you stand compared to peers."
Three to four value themes is the target. More than four diffuses your message. Fewer than three may not be enough to justify premium pricing.
At the end of these three steps, you should have a clear-eyed view of the competitive landscape, an honest inventory of what makes you different, and a translation of those differences into buyer language. Most firms skip straight to messaging. These steps ensure the messaging is built on structural truth rather than wishful thinking.
Steps 4-5: Finding Your Best Customers and Category
The Two Decisions That Determine Everything Else
Step 4: Identify your target customers. Who cares most about the value themes you identified in Step 3? Not "everyone who needs consulting." The specific buyer profile that finds your unique attributes most compelling.
Baker, across 900+ advisory engagements with expertise firms, confirms that narrow targeting outperforms broad targeting in every measurable dimension — revenue per engagement, close rate, client satisfaction, and referral rates. The instinct to cast a wide net ("We help companies with digital transformation") catches nothing because it fails to differentiate.
Define your target customer with uncomfortable specificity. Industry. Company size. Buyer persona (CTO? COO? Board member?). Triggering situation (what event makes them start looking for help?). Budget range. Previous approaches they've tried and been disappointed by. The more precisely you define who you serve, the more powerfully your message resonates with that audience.
Step 5: Define your market category. This is the single most important positioning decision you'll make. Your category determines what buyers compare you to — and comparison determines whether you win.
Dunford outlines three category strategies. You can position in an existing category where you have a clear differentiation ("We're the AI maturity assessment firm" within the broader management consulting category). You can create a subcategory that you own ("We invented diagnostic-led transformation for mid-market logistics companies"). Or you can create an entirely new category — the riskiest and potentially most rewarding approach.
Russell Brunson, in Expert Secrets, frames this as the difference between an Improvement Offer and a New Opportunity. "Better consulting" is an Improvement Offer that invites direct comparison. "A certified methodology with a proprietary diagnostic and a global network of specialist practitioners" is a New Opportunity that sidesteps comparison entirely. Brunson puts it memorably: "How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess."
Choose a category where your unique attributes make you the obvious winner. If you can't win in the category you're in, you're in the wrong category.
Steps 6-8: Testing, Refining, and Validating
Positioning Is a Hypothesis Until Buyers Confirm It
Step 6: Validate with Baker's five pre-tests. Before committing to a positioning, pressure-test it. Baker provides five validation criteria that predict whether a positioning will succeed:
- Competitor count: Can you identify 10-200 firms in this space? Fewer than 10 means the market may be too small. More than 200 means you're not differentiated enough.
- "Drop and Give Me 20": Can you immediately rattle off 20 specific insights, patterns, or recommendations for this niche? If not, you don't have enough expertise to claim it.
- Geographic reach: Can you serve this niche nationally or internationally? Geographic constraints limit scalability.
- Specialist hiring: Could you hire or train practitioners who specialize in this niche? If the talent pool doesn't exist, scaling through certification will be difficult.
- Purchasable lists: Can you identify and reach target buyers through existing databases, events, or publications? If you can't find them, you can't market to them.
A positioning that fails any of these tests should be reconsidered.
Step 7: Test with real buyers. Take your draft positioning to five current clients and five prospects. Don't present it as final — present it as a hypothesis. "We're thinking about positioning ourselves as X. Does that resonate with what you value about working with us? Does it match the problem you were trying to solve when you hired us?"
Their responses will either validate or demolish your positioning — and demolition at this stage is a gift, not a setback. Better to discover the positioning doesn't resonate in conversation than in market performance.
Step 8: Refine based on feedback. Positioning is rarely perfect on the first pass. Client conversations will reveal which value themes land and which fall flat, which competitive comparisons buyers actually make (often different from what you assumed), and whether your category choice matches how buyers actually think about the market.
Two rounds of refinement — initial draft, first round of feedback, revision, second round of feedback, final version — typically produces a positioning that's both internally authentic and externally compelling.
Steps 9-10: Deploying and Owning Your Position
From Strategy to Everyday Execution
Step 9: Create your positioning artifacts. The positioning must live in three documents, not just in your head:
A Positioning Canvas — one page capturing your competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value themes, target customer, and market category. This is the reference document for every strategic decision.
A Sales Story — a narrative that follows a simple arc: the world has changed, current options fail, your methodology exists, here's what happens when clients engage. This story should be tellable in three minutes and memorable after one hearing.
A Messaging Document — the master reference containing taglines, value propositions by segment, competitive differentiation statements, objection handling scripts, proof points, and the one sentence every practitioner uses to describe what you do.
Beckwith calls that last element the Cocktail Party Principle: "Communicate one thing memorably. Multiple messages communicate nothing." If someone at a party asks what you do, your answer needs to be specific enough to spark a conversation. Not "I'm a consultant." Something like: "We measure organizations' readiness for AI and show them exactly what to do next."
Step 10: Own the words. Harnish's "Words You Own" concept: choose a specific phrase and associate it relentlessly with your brand. Volvo owns "safety." FedEx owns "overnight." What phrase do you own?
The phrase must be narrow enough to be ownable — you can't own "consulting" or "strategy" — and broad enough to be valuable. Test it with the Google Autocomplete method: if your target phrase auto-completes with competitors' names, the territory is contested.
Once chosen, use it everywhere. In every piece of content, every presentation, every conversation. Repetition isn't boring. It's branding. If every practitioner in your network delivers a different version of the positioning, the brand fragments and pricing power evaporates.
Baker distinguishes between vertical positioning (industry-specific: "We help healthcare organizations measure operational maturity") and horizontal positioning (discipline-specific: "We help organizations of any size build data infrastructure"). His data shows 85% of successful expertise firms position vertically. Both work. The critical rule: pick one. Trying to be both is doing neither well.
The Big Domino That Makes Everything Follow
Brunson adds one more element that most positioning frameworks miss: the Big Domino. This is the one belief that, if your prospect accepts it, makes every other objection irrelevant.
For a diagnostic-driven service business, the Big Domino is usually some version of: "If you believe that your area of expertise can be accurately measured on a structured scale, then everything else follows." If the prospect believes the diagnostic works, the need for expert guidance becomes obvious. The pricing becomes justified. The ROI argument is self-evident.
Build every presentation, every case study, and every marketing asset around proving this one belief. Brunson is explicit: "Pick ONE belief and hammer it." Trying to prove ten things simultaneously proves nothing.
Positioning isn't a marketing exercise. It's a strategic decision about where you choose to compete and how you choose to win. Dunford's ten steps provide the rigor. The books mentioned throughout provide the depth. But the work — the honest, sometimes uncomfortable work of defining what makes you different and for whom — is yours alone to do.
Clear a day. Do the work. A defensible position is worth more than a year of unfocused marketing.