How to position yourself
One of my favourite sayings is "the cobbler's children have no shoes". Meaning: we're all great at giving advice. Terrible at following it. This gets especially pressing when you're self-employed. It's all on you.
Take positioning. We spend hours, days, weeks working on positioning for our clients and their brands. When's the last time we did it for our own?
Sometimes we don't have time. Got to keep delivering the work. Or we may lack perspective. We're too close to know what truly matters. Or we might just find it extremely awkward. It just feels too fucking personal.
And yet, it's quite useful. So, inspired by Phil Adams, i decided to finally do a proper positioning for Salmon Labs. And, speaking to the Salmon Crew, i realised many in self-employment struggle with similar things.
So here's a short practical guide of how i approached it for my business.
1/ Your brand isn't what you say it is
It's what others say it is. So, i decided to reach out to former clients, and ask to interview them. 30 minutes. Nothing fancy. I asked them questions. About my functional benefits. Emotional benefits. What i did that was unexpected but good. It was awkward (for me). And yet, crucial.
2/ Differentiation is a relativity game
Differentiation is relative to the competition. It's not an absolute thing. So, having my brand perceptions from qual, i needed to find a gap. I did a survey on what people value in strategy consultants. What's important, but also rare. In other words, what the market wants but isn't getting right now.
3/ The job is to make sense of soup
Strategic processes are one big soup. You want to play with as many ingredients as you can. But i still had client work to do. I didn't have weeks to make sense of the data. So, i built a GPT to help me do it.
First, i fed it interview transcripts. Asked for functional and emotional benefits of working with me. Asked for draft positioning ideas that could deliver on those. I was just looking for quantity of options at this stage.
Then, i fed it the survey findings. I asked for the most recurring themes. This gave me a good start around market gaps. But then i realised, this was a blended perspective agencies and marketers. I'm targeting more CMOs, so i wanted to isolate the marketers' perspective. I asked it to do just that.
This started giving me some ideas i could work with. I asked for how this would translate to a website landing page. And this is the result i got.
It felt a bit marketing-y, but there were bits in here that i felt had power. So i took them away and did some more crafting on top. It had to feel like me.
I also wanted to stress test whether this positioning statement was true. So i fed it a bunch of past testimonials, and asked it to evidence its decisions.
And all of this led to the updated website. I had a clearer sense of what was the problem i was solving (bloated strategy), and my value to clients. I used this to describe my experience, client work, and newsletter. It all adds up.
This stuff wasn't rocket science. But rather than simply thinking my product could sell itself, i practised what i preached to clients. I did the diagnosis and strategy work. And have some tactics in the works too.
This also taught me more lessons on how to work with AI. It didn't do my work for me. It helped me do my work much faster. It allowed me to make sense of the soup in hours, not days. The rest was up to my skills and taste.
Will this be effective? Time will tell. Do i feel much more confident about how to show up to both existing and new people in my network? Hell yes. A core part of selling yourself is feeling confident in what you sell.
I hope this helps you think through some of your positioning questions when you're self-employed. There are tons of other ways i could have done it. This felt right to me. Maybe some of it feels right to you too.
