What's your Laser-Focused Positioning Statement?
I just read a blog post about tech folks leaving their full time jobs for the world of consulting. I’ve been in this demographic for seven years now. Part of this article was how to position yourself as a consultant and to stand out. Specifically, what’s your Laser-Focused Positioning Statement? Meaning, how are you specifically positioning yourself in the market? I’ve never thought much about how to position myself as a consultant. Mostly, I’ve just put it out there that I develop websites and mobile apps for startups and small businesses. This has done pretty well for me over the years, but when I think about my ideal client there are some clients that come to mind that are not ideal. Maybe this comes down to how I position myself. Having positioned myself as a generalist or maybe not positioned myself at all – has led to clients & work that is not my ideal. I’ve always thought anyone who wants a website, mobile app or is in need of technology strategy is my ideal client. Perhaps that’s not the case.
Back to my laser-focused positioning statement. My positioning in the past as been:
I’m a web & mobile app developer. That’s not very laser focused at all. It’s extremely generic. Based on this very generic position, I started to write my new laser focused position statement. Starting with “I’m the founder of msoftware, we’re technology consultants who help startups, small businesses and researchers with their technology strategy, data visualizations & web and mobile app development. Unlike my competitors, we are focused on how we can help solve your problems instead of just selling software you may not even need
– Me
That’s a lot and feels awkward when reading it all together, but like the article points out – it’s still pretty generic. The laser-focused positioning statement should be specific to an ideal who, what and why. I love working on interesting data visualizations projects. There is something about seeing raw data in nothing but rows & columns, something that can be overwhelming to the naked eye. Taking that dataset and moving it into a beautiful data visualization backed with a structured data set that can be consumed & understood with little previous understand of the data. Some of my favorite clients & projects have been for companies who have large datasets but don’t have the people, skills, resources or what-not to take this data and organize it into a consumable format. That format being a website or nicely displayed out mobile format. I love walking into a project when the team says – “here is our data, what can you do with it?”
Therefore, my updated laser-focused positioning statement is “I’m a technology consultant who works with starts up and data intensive businesses to help process and game value from their information & data. Unlike my competition, I work one-on-one to understand the business & the needs of the business before designing a technology strategy.” This means I don’t come in excepting to build or code anything. I just listen to the customer pain points. Sometimes there isn’t a need to development anything all all. Perhaps off the shelf software will do the trick or maybe they just need to reconfigure something. Essentially, my new elevator pitch is – I help companies define what they need & where they want to be. Then I help them get there. Sometimes with code and sometimes without.