Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. When it comes to pricing, wouldn't you rather race to the top than race to the bottom? Of course, but how do you do it? Strongly defining a positioning statement for your business and or your services is a great way to escape the race to zero. It sets you apart from your competitors. It insulates you against clients asking, you know, why are you the most expensive? Maybe they won't even ask you. Why are you the most expensive? They'll just know. Entire books have been written on the subject of positioning. It's a big topic, but you don't need to be an expert to begin to enjoy the benefits of a strong positioning statement. So a good first step for people is to get really clear about articulating who you help with what. Now ideally, you would define a full laser-focused positioning statement or LFPS, which I've talked about elsewhere, and you can use that as an internal mantra to kind of drive the rest of your marketing messaging. It's not something you'd necessarily publish, but you'd use it when you're deciding what to say, you know, when someone asks you what you do at a cocktail party or a headline to put on your website or a bio to put in your LinkedIn profile. So a full LFPS takes the form of, I am a discipline who helps target market with expensive problem. Unlike my competitors, you have this unique difference. And the problem with this is that I've found over the years that people have a hard time completing an entire LFPS when they're first getting started. There's a lot of things to consider. You've got the discipline, the target market, the expensive problem, the unique difference. These four variables are a little bit overwhelming for people when they're just starting to think about this. If you have a hard time filling that in for yourself in your own mind right now, then you might want to consider an XY positioning statement. It's a little bit easier. So what's an XY positioning statement? XYPS is sort of a minimum viable positioning statement. It leaves out the discipline and the unique difference aspects of an LFPS and focuses directly on the core value proposition. So you're basically cutting out half of the variables that you need to solve for. If you're a visual person, you can think of XYPS as the primary colors of marketing. Or if you're musical, it's like a 1-4-5 chord progression. Maybe if you are a chef, it's like meat and potatoes. There's nothing fancy about it, but man, can you do a lot of things with it. So who do I most want to help and what do I want to help them with? When you're answering those two questions, it gives you a very effective reply when someone asks what you do. Your answer is, I help X with Y. So in an XY positioning statement, the X is your ideal buyer, your who, your target market. And your Y is your ideal buyer's desired outcome, what you help them with. So let's talk about X first, solving for X. Okay, so the X in I help X with Y is your ideal buyer. It's the person who you seek to serve, the person who will most benefit from your expertise. There are lots of ways to define your ideal buyer. You could use a vertical focus like dentists, a horizontal focus like people who need a MySQL expert. A platform focus, people who need a Shopify expert. A demographic focus like 45 to 55 year old females who live in New York City. Or a psychographic focus like environmental advocates, people who believe a certain way. Once you have an idea who you want to help, your ideal buyer, we can talk about solving for Y. Clearly defining your ideal buyer's desired outcome. In a B2B relationship, the desired outcome will be a business outcome. Things like increased revenue, decreased risk, improved employee morale, stronger customer loyalty. Some of these things are tangible, some of them are intangible, but they are business outcomes. They are things that business people want to move. They are needles that business people care about. Now, please note, what you help these people with is not things like front-end development or portrait photography or content marketing. These things are your discipline, and that doesn't go in an XY positioning statement. Your discipline is relatively unimportant to your ideal buyers compared to the business outcomes that you can help them achieve. I'll say that again. Your discipline is relatively unimportant to your ideal buyers compared to the business outcomes that you can help them achieve. That's what they care about. For example, here's an XY positioning statement as might be written by a copywriter who wants to help independent software developers. I help independent software developers with their copywriting. Here it is again, but this time with a stronger why that's outcome-focused. I help independent software developers convert existing traffic into more leads. See the difference? Which do you think would be more interesting to an independent software developer, especially one who has a really popular blog but almost never gets any leads from it? The takeaway here is that your why isn't the activities you engage in, like copywriting. It's the business outcome that you deliver to the client.

like turning traffic into leads. Okay, so people can get hung up on this. I know from working with tons of students in TPS and private coaching that people get hung up, even with this smaller sort of minimum viable positioning statement. So here are a couple of tips, some troubleshooting tips. The first one is, if you're stuck on your who, the X, try defining your what first, and then search for people who would benefit the most from that sort of help. So let's say you build internal workflow systems to optimize a process, something like that. Well, who would benefit the most from having a process that is optimized? Is it going to be a mom and pop pizza place or is it going to be Domino's delivery service? Once you know that, then you can make a list of types of people who would benefit from it and find one that you care about to kind of reverse engineer it. Okay, the second tip, if you can solve lots of things for lots of types of people, brainstorm a huge list of possible XYPSs and then ask people you trust for feedback. So just make a huge list and find people who you trust, their business advice, successful business people or folks that you're connected with who you trust, and say, do any of these click with you? Notice if you have a Rolodex moment for any of them, that sort of thing. Now, if you're having a hard time drafting a big list like this and you just don't even know what I'm talking about, but you do have past clients, go back through your list of past projects and make an XYPS for each project and then ask people you trust for feedback. So for example, one of my last client engagements was for the president of a credit union. So I'm not even gonna think about it, I'm just gonna write, I help credit union presidents with, and what did I do for them? I went and did a workshop to their board of directors, but why? Because the president wanted to convince the board that was important to invest in mobile and needed them to approve a budget. So I could, looking at this one project, I could say, okay, one potential XYPS for me would be to say, I help credit union presidents persuade their board to release funding for mobile development. Now fourth tip, if you can't settle on anything at all for your overall business, pick a product or service that you offer and write an XYPS just for that. So I'll use the workshop example again. So I did this one workshop for the CEO of this credit union or president of the credit union. So I could have this product called, I don't know, credit union mobile strategy workshop or something like that, or mobile strategy workshop for credit union executives, something clever, and then assign it to that one product. So I'd say, okay, here's this half day workshop, it's to be delivered to a board of directors of a credit union, the buyer is the president of the credit union, the pain that the president of the credit union has is that they can't get approval for mobile innovation and it's frustrating, and this is a solution for that. So I help them convince their board to fund mobile initiatives. And that would just be that one product. So if you've got a couple of different products or you can think of different services that you have that feel discreet, maybe you do retainers and maybe you do custom projects and maybe you do road mapping, maybe you do design sprints, figure out who the ideal buyer is for each individual product or service, and then write the XYPS for that based on the ideal outcome from that product or service. Okay, hopefully this has helped you understand what an XY positioning statement is, how to put one together, what it would do for your business, your products, your services, and you can find this article typed up, transcript of this episode typed up at jonathanstark.com slash XYPS if you want to have a printed copy. Thanks. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the pricing seminar. Pre-registration starts soon and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like

Just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com/call. That URL again is jonathanstark.com/call. Hope to see you there.