How to differentiate your services

Whether you're an established firm or a startup, finding a way to differentiate your services has its challenges. If you're new, you don't have enough experience to know what's really needed. If you're old, you have a track record that may not match with whatever you must double down on.

Luckily, there’s a series of steps you can follow to find your footing regardless of what stage you are. Here you go.

Step 1: Start with the market

If you want to be in services, you need to know who you are serving. As common sense as it sounds, that’s usually the last thing most people consider when they’re launching a new business or trying to grow revenue.

Pick the market you have the most experience with. The more specific you can be with it, the better. “Fintech Companies” is good, “Series A and beyond Fintech Companies in the MENA region” is better. “Series A Fintech Companies in MENA serving unbanked sectors” is best.

Take feedback from your outbound team (if you have one — if you don’t, do it yourself). Tell them to go find at least 50 leads that fit your market criteria. If they have to ask clarifying questions like, “Umm this company is Fintech but it’s just pre-seed” or “there’s this company but it’s really big and I’m not sure they’ll need our services”. That’s your cue that you’re not specific enough.

If you don’t have experience in any market, then pick one and gain experience in it (freelance, job, whatever suits you). The more specific, the better. Obviously.

Step 2: Find your angle

Once you know what market you will serve, everything else naturally flows. If you’ve picked a specific enough market, there’s a big, big pain-point that this market is facing that nobody has solved yet. Even if it’s not the most salient problem, it’s still enough for you to build a really good agency.

For example, we tackle the problem of scalability for pre-launch Web3 projects. Projects at this stage face a plethora of problems: figuring out GTM, getting the hype, security considerations, etc. One of the problems is a backlog: during development, the market pressures often force you to make subpar choices and technical debt accrues. Moreover, that ramps up the price for a security audit (usually the last stage before a launch) way high.

It’s a big problem, certainly not the biggest (might be, for some companies). But it’s enough for us to know:

1. What content we need to be producing
2. Who our target audience is
3. What our GTM should look like

And that’s enough for us to know we’ve picked the right angle.

Step 3: Figure out your solution

Don’t need to say much on it. This is everybody’s favorite part. Still, the right solution would require doing extensive testing for PMF. I could write about that some other day.

Step 4: Figure out your pricing

If your competitors — and you always have some; if you don’t know who your competitors are, ask your prospects — are pricing per hour, then you can figure out a fixed pricing model.

If fixed price is the standard, figure out a results-driven pricing model.

If results-driven pricing is the norm, switch the market. Just kidding.

Point is: the prospects are always getting the job done one way or another, if you have figured out a superior angle/solution in the previous steps, then the best way to speed up adoption for your service is to find a pricing model that gives peace of mind to your clients who may be fed up with the way your competitors have been billing.

But I’m an established firm …

Yes, it’s a lot of work to make the transition, but you can leverage your sales team to find PMF on your new positioning. Do this:

1. Make a custom landing page with your new positioning and offering.
2. Have your sales team shortlist a few 100 leads.
3. Cold approach on the new offering.
4. Refine each step and repeat.

It’s a little bit of an upfront investment but is absolutely worth it. You can get cleverer with this process (and we certainly did — but that’s a story for another day) but the bottom-line is to lead with the outbound. The data from outbound is sacred. Treat it well.