I don't need positioning, all my business is word-of-mouth

I've heard people say this to me, and I've probably lived it more than I care to remember.

If you're getting good word-of-mouth, strong positioning will just make your referrals higher quantity and quality.

First, I'd rather get 1 great referral than 10 bad referrals. Not only will that 1 referral likely turn into a great client, but it will probably take 1-2 fun conversations, versus endless back and forth and "objection handling".

Let's assume for the sake of argument, that better positioning has no impact on the number of referrals you get. (Most people fear it will reduce the quantity. I'll argue later that this fear is misguided, but we'll go with it for now.)

What percentage of those referrals turn into initial conversations? What percentage of those conversations turn into proposals? How many conversations after the proposal does it take to win the deal?

Looking through these steps, we can see that stronger positioning not only leads to more revenue, it requires less work. (And we haven't even calculated the difference in work for the actual projects, which is exponentially more.)

Whenever we try to get really specific about positioning, we get scared about eliminating Possible Client Profiles (PCP-- which is very harmful) to focus on the Ideal Client Profile (ICP).

Imagine you go from a PCP with 5,000,000 people to an ICP with 5,000. How many of those 5,000 have you already served? How many can you serve this year? All of them? Almost certainly not. You just don't have time. So why not dedicate your precious, finite time to serving ideal clients?

The key mindset shift for me was moving from considering market size ("oh, no, I might be able to serve a whole 1% of my ideal market this year, whatever will I do?") to ease of sales and marketing. Do I want sales and marketing to be challenging? Do I enjoy adding extra degrees of difficulty?

This isn't the Olympics, where you get extra points for doing harder moves...

That's not how I want to do sales and marketing.

I want it be more like this:

And that's what good positioning will do for you-- make everything easier.

From your Zoom room elevator pitch, to your LinkedIn profile, to your website, to your connection requests, to your referrals, let your positioning be a lever to help you go further, faster, more easily.

This means you'll also get better referrals, and more referrals, because you will be the one person who comes to mind when someone meets your ideal prospects, versus the vague cloud of "business consultants" or "web designers" or whatever broader category you're part of...

If you'd like some help nailing your positioning, join me for a free webinar/workshop on April 20. (Link in comments.)

(And a bit of bragging-- I was just on a zoom call with someone who wanted to bring Mimiran into her firm, even though it's not really the right fit-- they are building a sales team. My positioning tells me that, so I wasn't sad when it didn't work out. But she was disappointed, because she liked Mimiran more than the more corporate CRM direction they are taking. But she mentioned that she learned more about what she should be doing by going through the Mission & Positioning wizard in Mimiran that in 2 weeks of sales training.)