Why the one metric that could embarrass you next quarter is the cheapest credibility on the market, and the one thing on your website a competitor cannot copy by Friday. Everyone in your category claims to be fast, accurate and easy to work with. Buyers read those words as noise. What follows is the alternative,…
How to be standing there when somebody else’s business ends, and how not to become the ghoul everyone in the industry remembers. 1. What is “distribution by obituary”? Building your demand capture around other people’s endings instead of around your own content calendar. A competitor gets acquired and the acquirer kills the product. A vendor…
Twenty-five competitors, one document, one morning: how counting words gives you both an audit and a statistic your trade press does not have yet 1. What is the Commodity Phrase Index, in one paragraph? Take the twenty-five closest competitors in one vertical. Paste every homepage and every services page into a single document. Count phrase…
Why positioning against a rival makes you a footnote in someone else’s category, why positioning against a practice can make the category yours, and the one test that stops you picking a fight you are quietly losing at home. 1. What does “name the enemy” mean? Isn’t it just trash-talking a rival? No. Trash talk…
Your positioning statement is no longer the one on your homepage. It is the one an assistant recites when no one is watching. A one-hour diagnostic that costs nothing and will probably ruin your afternoon. 1. The paragraph you did not write is doing your selling Somewhere this morning a buyer typed your category into…
Your champion is fighting for you in a room you will never enter, and you sent them in with a slide deck about ROI. Somewhere in your best open deal is a person who cannot buy anything. No budget, no signature, no quota, no upside if this goes well. What they have is a checkbox,…
Every article about repositioning assumes a launch. Real firms have to change what they sell while still carrying a client base that hired them for the old thing. Here is how to do it the way people cross the English Channel: sideways, slowly, and without a press release. In August 1875, Captain Matthew Webb swam…