By The positioning statement that makes a business easy to recommend is rarely invented. It’s found. It already lives in how your best clients describe you when you’re not in the room, usually in words you’d never have chosen yourself. Finding it takes three things: talking to the right clients, asking questions that get past politeness, and listening for the specific phrase rather than the general compliment. Here is a practical way to do it.
Why can’t you just write your own positioning statement?
Because you know too much. Owners describe their business from the inside: services, processes, qualifications, years in operation. Clients describe it from the outside: the problem that went away, the moment they felt relieved, the thing you did that nobody else bothered to.
The inside view produces sentences like “a full-service accounting practice with over 20 years’ experience”. The outside view produces sentences like “the first accountant who explained our numbers without making us feel stupid”. People repeat the second one, and it almost never comes out of a planning session. It comes out of clients’ mouths.
David Ogilvy built his agency on this habit. He wouldn’t write a headline until he had done his homework on the product and the people who bought it, and he believed the copywriter who skipped that step was guessing at someone else’s expense. For a professional firm, the homework is cheaper than it was for Ogilvy: your best research subjects already know your name and will usually take your call.
Who should you talk to?
Not everyone. Choose five to eight clients who meet all of these:
- they are the kind of client you want more of, not just your longest-standing;
- they have seen real results, not just a pleasant process;
- each would give you a straight answer if you asked;
- ideally, at least one has already referred someone to you.
This is segmentation in miniature. Philip Kotler’s sequence runs segment, target, then position), and it holds at the scale of one firm: decide who you’re for before deciding what to say, or the sentence you find will describe the wrong client.
So avoid choosing only friends or your easiest clients. You’re looking for the description that will persuade a stranger, so you need people who had a genuine problem and can say what changed.
What should you ask?
Short conversations of 15 to 20 minutes work well, by phone or in person. Ask open questions and let silence do some of the work. These five do most of the heavy lifting:
- “What was going on in your business when you first got in touch?” This surfaces the problem in their language, which is the language future clients will search with.
- “What nearly stopped you from working with us?” The hesitation tells you which doubt your sentence needs to answer.
- “What’s different now?” Listen for the specific change, not the adjective.
- “If a colleague asked you about us, what would you actually say?” This is the closest you’ll get to the real sentence. Ask them to say it as they would, not as they think you’d like.
- “Is there anyone else who does what we do the way we do it?” If they hesitate, you’re onto something distinctive. If they name three competitors, the sentence isn’t specific enough yet.
Before you start, ask permission to take notes or record, and write down their exact words. Paraphrasing is where the useful detail disappears.
What are you listening for?
Most of what you hear will be kind and general: “great to work with”, “very professional”, “always responsive”. Note it, then move past it. You’re listening for three kinds of phrase:
- A specific change. “We stopped losing tenders on the presentation” is worth more than “they helped our marketing”.
- A surprising detail. The thing a client mentions that you didn’t think mattered, like the way you explained a report or the fact that you said no to something.
- A repeated idea in different words. If three clients describe the same thing three different ways, that idea is your sentence. Your job is to find the clearest version of it.
How do you turn the notes into a positioning statement?
Lay the exact quotes side by side and look for the overlap. Then test each candidate sentence against five checks:
- Is it true? It must describe what you reliably do, not what happened once.
- Is it specific? Could a competitor say it honestly? If yes, keep going.
- Does it carry its reason? Hopkins insisted every claim come with its “because”. “They made our tenders easier to win because they rewrote the technical sections in plain English” is believable. “They made our tenders better” asks for faith.
- Is it short enough to repeat? If someone can’t say it in one breath, it won’t travel.
- Would a client recognise it? Read it back to one of the people you spoke to. If they say “yes, exactly”, you have it. If they say “I suppose so”, you don’t.
In practice, expect the first attempt to be too long and too polished. The final sentence usually sounds plainer than you’d like, and that’s a good sign. Plain sentences get repeated. Clever ones get admired and forgotten.
What do you do with the positioning statement once you have it?
Everything else builds on your positioning statement. The sentence shapes the brand, the website’s first line, the way the team introduces the business and the stories you choose to tell. It also tells you what proof to collect: if your sentence is about making technical work understandable, your best evidence is a client saying exactly that, in their own words.
In short
Your positioning statement isn’t hiding in a strategy document. It’s sitting in your clients’ memories, waiting for someone to ask the right questions and write down the exact answer. Talk to the right five to eight clients, ask what they’d really say, listen for the specific phrase and test it until a client says “yes, exactly”.
This is the first stage of our Method. If you’d rather have someone run these conversations and find the sentence with you, start with a Story Clarity Session.