Positioning for Professionals (Hardcover)

Introduction.

Chapter 1 Size Is Not a Strategy.

Maintaining Pricing Integrity.

Better to Be a Profit Leader than a Market Leader.

Why Bigness Doesn’t Lead to Greatness.

Hired to Be Effective, Not Efficient.

Chapter 2 How and Why Brands Become Homogenized.

The Urge to Copy.

The Folly of All-In-One.

Line Extension Is Not Branding.

There’s No Such Thing as Full Service.

The Natural Fear of Focus

Chapter 3 The Mature Company’s Identity Crisis.

Differentiation and Price Premiums.

Columbus, Not Napoleon.

The Diffusion of Identity.

Landing in No-Man’s Land.

Strategy at the Edges.

Not Best Practices, but Next Practices.

Chapter 4 Expanding Business by Narrowing Focus.

There’s No Such Thing as a General Market.

Vertical Success versus Horizontal Success.

The Strategic Value of Going Deep. 

Chapter 5 Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy.

What Are You Really Selling?

Becoming Hard to Imitate.

Two Critical Dimensions of an Effective Value Proposition.

A Category of One.

A Brand Is the Customer’s Idea of the Product.

Natural Outcomes of a Powerful Value Proposition.

Chapter 6 Building Brand Boundaries.

Brand Boundary 1: Calling.

Brand Boundary 2: Customers.

Brand Boundary 3: Competencies.

Brand Boundary 4: Culture.

The Confluence of Calling, Customers, Competencies, and Culture.

Chapter 7 Validating the Value Proposition.

Be Rooted in the Future, Not the Past.

The Value Proposition Team.

Asking the Right Questions.

Chapter 8 Without Execution, There Is No Strategy.

Services.

Staffing.

Self-Promotion.

Systems.

Staging.

Executing a Positioning Strategy with Alignment Teams.

Rebuilding Your Ship While at Sea.

Chapter 9 Getting Paid for Creating Value.

The Perils of Cost-Based Compensation.

Changing the Language.

Pricing as a Core Competency.

Why a Value-Based Approach is in the Client’s Best Interest.

The Alignment of Incentives.

Creating a Virtuous Circle.

Chapter 10 A New and Better Way to Price Professional Services.

Forms of Value-Based Pricing.

The Right Clients for Outcome-Based Agreements.

The True Meaning of Partnership.

Uncovering Missed Opportunities to Make Pricing a Core Competency.

Key Questions in Setting a Value-Based Price.

If Complex Global Companies Can Do It, So Can You.

Better Time Tracking Is Not the Answer. 

Thinking of Compensation Plans as a Stock Portfolio.

Setting the Stage for a Value-Based Approach to Compensation.

A Declaration of Value.

Appendix A: The Before-and-After Survey.

Appendix B: More Ways to Differentiate Your Brand.

Appendix C: Indicators of the Firm’s Success.

Notes.

About the Author.

Index.