Market Positioning: Perception = Reality

The past few months, I have been in countless conversations with high-end B2B companies from all over Europe, to discuss our Executive Roundtable model to accelerate sales in the Swiss and D-A-CH markets.

One of the common threads has been positioning. Many understand that in order to win the really interesting, high-end projects, you need a top level positioning.

Now, if you are entering a new market or are relatively unknown in a market, you don’t usually have that positioning right away.

So, how do you build it?

In this article, I want to explore this question, focused on the Swiss market.

Perception = Reality

I spent 10 years of my career in IT recruitment, 5 of them at Adecco.

Adecco in Switzerland is not perceived as a high-end IT recruitment company. It’s perceived as a mainstream staffing company for low level jobs.

So when I got the mandate to build up the IT recruitment division in a new market in Switzerland, we had to go about it differently.

Instead of calling companies and asking if we can help them recruit, we went into the market and first recruited the highest caliber candidates.

We pitched the candidates to become their agents to find them their dream job.

Once we had some of the candidates in our portfolio, that we knew every company was fighting for, we presented them to the clients.

Within the first year of business, we became one of the most profitable branches in the country.

It worked so well because we changed the picture of reality.

Reality was no longer “Adecco? What!? They also do IT?"

Reality was “Oh my God, this is the kind of candidate we always wanted to hire. And he’s interested in working for us?! This comes from Adecco? Wow, I must have been wrong about them”.

In some cases, companies even opened jobs so they could hire our candidate, just not to loose them.

CHF 20 Million with One Client

Earlier this year, I met the CEO of a medium sized consulting company in Zurich. He shared a fascinating story with me.

For the longest time, they were staffing projects with people one by one. Business was good but it was very transactional and client loyalty was not very strong.

So he decided to build the brand into the leading player for “Digital Transformation Recruitment” in Switzerland.

They put all their focus on staffing digital transformation projects, speaking about it publicly and understanding that market better.

After a while, this CEO met the CIO of a large industrial giant in Switzerland and they staffed two people for a project. The CEO put all his efforts on serving the needs of this CIO, sometimes to the extent of recruiting top executives at no charge just to win another division for themselves.

In total, they had 102 people staffed in projects, both as freelancers and as employees, and created CHF 20 million in revenues from this one client alone.

In the process of this transformation project, they competed with the big consulting firms and won.

Since I know this CIO personally, he later shared with me why he chose this recruitment company over the big consulting firms.

In this own words “If I had chosen one of the big four, I would have spent CHF 100m instead of 20m and the transformation may have taken longer”.

Ingredients for High-End Positioning

There are several ingredients that are required to create a high-end positioning in the market. The key one is that you need the capabilities to deliver against the positioning you create. If it’s just hot air, you’ll be out of business in no time.

Another ingredient is specificity. You don’t create high-end positioning by going after the masses. In Switzerland, we call this a “boutique firm”. They tend to be extremely specialized companies serving a hyper-niche with a laser-sharp solution.

Take our CEO Collaboration Day as an example. The positioning we create is extremely high-end and it only appeals to a very specific group of people.

C-level leaders who don’t want another penguin conference and want authentic, raw and honest conversations with people at their level. No consulting talks. No sales conversations. Exchange with peers at their levels.

So we talk about it publicly and then deliver against it.

How to Create High-End Positioning From Moment Zero

Counter to conventional wisdom, you don’t need to have anything in place to create positioning. Because your actions create your positioning. The words you speak and the words you write.

If you pitch people your solution in LinkedIn messages, you create a certain positioning. If you partner with a big four consulting firm and you co-pitch solutions with both of your logos on the pitch deck, you create a certain positioning.

Ask yourself these fundamental questions:

1. In what league do you want to play at?

Concretely, what level of dealsizes do you want to play at? What level of decision makers do you want to deal at? What involvement in projects do you want to have? 

2. Why do you want your clients to hire you?

To save costs and have a cheaper solution? To feel the prestige of having the honor of working with your brand? To access the world’s foremost experts in a field? 

3. How will you know you’ve created your desired positioning?

Knowing what success means is important. Otherwise you could pursue something and never know when you arrived.

Will you know when you get a specific type of project on board? Or when clients say something publicly about you? 

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Daniel is the Founder of LeadersBridge.org, Switzerland’s leading cross-industry network for Digital Leaders, to connect for business, partnership and board opportunities.

We are organizing custom-tailored Executive Roundtables, to get high-end B2B companies into meetings with Switzerland’s top level technology decision makers.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve hosted 40+ Executive Roundtables, and enabled connections that led to more than CHF 20m in new business.

If you're interested to learn more, just send me a message.