Seeing opportunities that others don't

We recently updated Part and Sum's positioning and language on our website. While hitting go on webflow was a bit anticlimactic, there was honestly a lot of thinking that went into how we think about ourselves in the market and so I wanted to share.

There is a ton of debate around the value of “positioning” in general, especially the value of positioning a professional service firm as a specialist vs. generalist.?

When I think about positioning a brand, I often use the mad-lib from the Strategyzer books to help articulate it. How do you best articulate a value proposition that includes all the factors of the market (your customers, your product, and your competition)?

Also, I’ve recently been really inspired by this b2b study that was put out by Linkedin. I used to think that upstarts like us were positioning ourselves against other disruptors and peers. It was helpful for my own thinking when I realized that upstarts are more commonly taking market share from incumbents.?

So we should all be inspired by our peers, especially since they’re only competition in the sense that they are taking market share from the incumbents. This became an input for our value proposition and articulating how we’re different.

Next up was who we serve or who we are “for”. I’ve always found this challenging. Lindsey Slaby once asked me “which door do you come in?” From a client perspective and for us it’s often different. We do not serve a single industry (our clients span DTC, Startup, Media, Entertainment, Non-profit, and Edu-tech)–we serve marketers, e-commerce leads, heads of product, business leads, and founders.?This is obviously a red flag for the classic “focus, focus, focus”, “pick one type of customer” way of thinking about positioning. As we’ve grown, I’m more drawn to push our thinking and POV into more areas and industries, not fewer.? By looking beyond industry, the value that we deliver across these groups becomes clear… and actually fits with a bigger issue facing the CMO today: how to get closer to the customer.

This is the problem we solve. As product, marketing, brand, growth, etc… all start to fall under a CMO’s remit, learning, uncovering insights, and synthesizing them for a variety of purposes across an organization becomes more important.?

We really have become a “Voice of the Customer” consulting firm, whether it’s through surveys, media data, analytics, user testing or qualitative research. We’re a team that can help an organization be more customer-centric and see through their customers' eyes.

This was my unlock and what I’ve been trying to bring clarity to, both for my team and in the market.?

Our previous hero statement on our site was “we bolt onto teams to bring ideas to market and grow them with data”. We certainly still do this, but we’ve grown our impact. Those go-to-market moments that are a sweet spot for our skills, expertise, and services also position us perfectly to solve these customer-centric, industry-agnostic problems.

The moments when we shine are moments where learning quickly about and from your customer is most important. That’s not the only key moment though. Finding product-market-fit, moving into a new market, reaching people through tech, and in-housing growth marketing are also critical learning moments that need our skills.

So that’s why we’ve evolved to “see opportunities others don’t”. While it’s dripping in FOMO, it’s also so true. Our combination of full-stack strategy thinkers and workshop facilitators with exacting technical growth marketing expertise has allowed us to think big and small through the channels that people use every day.

Because we see and act upon insights from customers across entire customer journeys, we’re closer to the ways that organizations actually grow today.

Working in this position takes smart, driven, creative people with super collaborative and kind ways of working, both internally and with clients. We’re building that system, together. We’re building the world's best environment for curious, smart, and driven people who want to practice their craft of helping client teams and each other figure it out.

Lots of new things are launching soon to build out this system, including a digital garden, where our team will work more in public. Here is a deck about that, with more to come soon.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, we’re hiring across roles and are looking for people to own part of this better future.