In this podcast episode, host Adam Morris speaks with Ian Blake, an expert on differentiation strategies for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). They discuss the challenges service industries like MSPs face in standing out from the competition. Ian explains how logical thinking, common in the MSP space, can hinder differentiation and shares a compelling story of a restaurant owner who succeeded by focusing on what his top competitor did poorly. Ian discusses the ‘Holy Trinity’ of marketing—segmentation, targeting, and positioning—and emphasises understanding customer pain points, competition, and company strengths. They explore the importance of truth and customer feedback in building a unique value proposition, with examples of how clients have successfully differentiated themselves. The episode concludes with insights on the significance of client perception and creating memorable brand positioning.
00:00 Introduction and Podcast Welcome
00:03 Challenges of Differentiation for MSPs
01:02 Logical Thinking and Differentiation
01:46 The Restaurant Story: Learning from Competitors’ Weaknesses
03:08 The Importance of Differentiation in MSPs
05:05 Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning in Marketing
10:01 Understanding Your Market and Targeting
14:34 The Role of Customer Insights in Differentiation
20:10 Case Studies and Real-World Examples
28:35 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Ian Blake on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianblake1
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris/
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here –https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript
Adam: Ian, welcome to the podcast.
Ian: Thanks Adam.
Adam: great to have you on the podcast today, and I’m particularly excited and intrigued about having a discussion with you around the whole differentiation piece for MSPs because this is something that we keep hitting time and time again. Um. You know, MSPs, it’s, it’s not the only industry.
There’s lots of others like accounting and legal, et cetera. you know, where service industries in particular struggle, struggle to show how they’re different to, to, to, you know, show what they are good at, what’s unique about them, how they’re differentiate. and of course this, it’s, it’s vital to kind of carve this out in some way, in the marketplace.
Otherwise, you’re just one of. Thousands out
Ian: yeah. Um,
Adam: Um, and so I’m really interested to, to hear about this topic and dig into it. So perhaps Ian, um, you could just kick things off with some thoughts around this subject [00:01:00] and we, and we can start to dig a bit deeper. I.
Ian: Yeah, for sure. And I, I think, probably not a bad place to start, Adam, is, is, is because you mentioned some other professional services industries like accounting, legal,and the. And if you take the MSP space, and the reason they, well, one of the reasons they all struggle with differentiation is that, that they tend to be,they, they tend to be led by and,led by logical, logical thinkers. And in the MSP space, that’s great for. Problem solving, implementing hyperconverged infrastructure,and, you know, mission critical security services.
But when it comes to, um, differentiating, your business, it can be this, it, this presents a challenge. I heard an interesting story recently actually talking logic and it was about, a restaurant owner, um, in New York, he owned a restaurant called 11 Madison Avenue, I think they were called, and they became 50 on a list of, of the best [00:02:00] restaurants in. Whateverit was a, you know, a, an important list to this guy and what he wanted to move up to this. And he brought, he decided to bring, his staff to the restaurant that came first. So they all went to another restaurant in New York and,the, to the restaurant that ca that came first.
And they were all sitting around and, reveling at the things that this restaurant did well. And he told them all to stop. And he said, I don’t want you to find out what this restaurant does well. I want you to figure out what they don’t do well. And they discovered that they, what they didn’t do well was they didn’t do beer well.
the people who drank beer were made fe feel a little bit like second class citizens. and, you know, there were two beers and it was all about the wine drinkers essentially. And the other thing they didn’t do well was, was coffee. and so he went away and he said, okay, I want you, I want us to double down on beer and coffee because we can do everything they did.
Well, maybe not as well as them, but we were, we’re kind of nearly there, but let’s overindex on what they did [00:03:00] poorly. And lo and behold, 12 months later they came first. And it’s a great story, I think, to demonstrate. The problem with logical thinking, you know, logical thinking is it leads you to the same place as your competitors because they’re all thinking the exact same way. and I thought this was a really interesting, story to, to, I suppose to highlight that, uh, the guy’s written a book on it. I think it’s called Unreasonable Hospitality. but yeah, I, I, and I think that’s where the Ms. P, uh, MSPs are,is that they’re, they’re, you know, 90% of people, 95% of people who work in the space are all logical. They’re all copying each other. They’re all reading off the Microsoft IBM,VMware, uh, our Broadcom as they are now, rule book and our playbook, and. That’s how they all end up in the same place. And I suppose that probably brings us on nicely to, to differentiation.
Adam: Well, and I was just gonna [00:04:00] say a hundred percent can, uh, understand what you’ve been saying around, around the whole logical thinking bit. Absolutely. that’s the way I think, you know, I, I guess that’s why I became a, an IT engineer. I liked, the certainty, the structure. the, you know, and, and, when I realized I had to, do more than that to grow a business, I.
I had to think about selling and marketing, and I had to, you know, people had to know I existed and then they had to know I was actually quite good at things. it was head scratching time and, uh, took a lot of work to get my head around it all.
and the differentiation piece was just so really, really hard, you know?
for me and probably for others out there. Uh, well, hang on a minute. we can only recruit the same talent. We, we we’re recruiting the same engineers from the same talent pool. We’re working with the same vendors like Microsoft. You know, what’s different there? There’s nothing different there.
Everyone. We’re buying the same PCs from Dell and hp. What’s different there? I dunno how we’re [00:05:00] different. So, so where do you start on this, Ian? Where should an MSB owner start on
Ian: Yeah, so, so, there’s a thing in, in marketing. There’s a famous marketing professor called Mark Risin, who’s from, I think he’s from Hall in England and now lives in Australia. Any marketing people will know him. and he calls the, this, the Holy Trinity of the Holy Trinity of marketing.
So it, it’s, it, uh, begins with segmentation, moves on to, um, targeting and then positioning. Um, and segmentation is the, the segment of the market you play in the targeting is, you know, the companies within that segment that you know, you believe you should target. And then positioning. And within positioning, he talks about, three Cs essentially, which is the customer, the competitor. And, uh, the com. And the com, uh, sorry, the customer, the competitor, and the company u So, so essentially it’s not a bad kind of Venn diagram to think about, which is, you know, what you’re really good at. [00:06:00] what. Is the com What did the competition do? and then what does the customer want? Right now your listeners are probably saying, well, if I was to answer what the competitors do, what do we do?
It’s still the same, but having worked with so many MSPs, you’d be amazed how different they all are. Um,and the difference really comes down to how you do things. So one at one end of the spectrum. And I suppose I’ll, I’ll create, I, you know, create a notional spectrum for the purpose of, of purposes of this.
But one of the, the spectrum, you could have a kind of, you know, what I describe as a pure play MSP trouble ticket raising, you know, or trouble ticket answering. Um, managed service provider that’s just, you know, processing. issues that their customers have, right? And at the, and, and they might have hundreds of customers and they’re solving hundreds of, you know, small technical problems.
but then at the other end of the, the, [00:07:00] spectrum, you might, you might have a company who does 40 million pounds or euros in business that has 15 customers and they’ve. Deep subject, subject matter expertise in infrastructure, for example. And as a consequence of that, they have really good, um, a really good ability to do, cyber recovery as it as distinct from cyber security.
You know? so, so both of those two businesses, you know, to the man on the street are, MSPs or IT service providers, but they provide. Different services and in a very different way. and that the work that we do is we, we get under the skin of the business by understanding their heritage, where they came from, where they want to be in the next three or five years, what their customers say about them, what their employees say about them.
And that uncovers insights. And we use those insights to, um, to [00:08:00] develop positioning and messaging that is true to them. Uh, different from their target market and really appealing to their buyer, to the buyer because the buyer doesn’t buy. That’s that, that’s the other thing that, that, you know, is problematic within the space is that, and, and I suppose everyone in every, in every company is guilty of it when you’re starting a business and very soon you become oriented towards the business and you’re no longer market oriented, but. Really, it’s about sitting in the shoes or trying to sit in the shoes of your buyer. So what are their pain points? What are they trying to achieve? What jobs are they trying to get done? and what are they buying? You know? Um, and, and, you know, in, in, in many respects, well, you know, some people would say that, you know. B2B buyer, B2B buyers are logical, they’re actually more emotional than B2C buyers because they’re, you know, their jobs are on the line. Their [00:09:00] reputation in front of their colleagues is on the line. They want to be carried shoulder heights through the office, you know, if they’re enthusiastic about their careers, et cetera.
So that’s what you’re kind of, you’re playing to in a lot of respects. yeah, that’s.
Adam: and we’ll come, we’ll come back, we’ll come back to the differentiation piece a bit more in, in a moment. But let’s just dig into this, into the, uh, segment side of it. Uh, what was the m that you used to describe that,
Ian: Oh, uh, segmentation, uh,
Adam: or was that market?
Was
Ian: segmentation tar, oh, the three Cs customer, sorry.
Adam: Sorry, customer. Sorry, customer.
Ian: uh, company. Yeah. Yeah.
Adam: so we’re talking about de defining a
Ian: mm-hmm.
Adam: and in your, uh, uh, example earlier you talked about an MSP with hundreds of customers, you know, across several segments, and then you talked about one with perhaps just 14 or 15 in one segment that you had deep knowledge around. So just expand a little bit more about that for me and, and, and, and, uh, you know, how that starts [00:10:00] to, come together.
Ian: so yeah, it’s, it’s essentially, The reason you do it is to inform choices, um, because we don’t have unlimited budgets or unlimited resources to target, to target, you know, everybody. So even within, you know, small markets,you, you still, it’s still really important to. Kind of focus your energy and efforts on, cer a certain target within a segment. So the segment could be, a good example of a segment is, you know, SME SMEs, you know, between 10 and 200 employees, right? Or it might be, you know, mid Marcus. I’d have between, and I’m, I know we’re probably talking predominantly to a UK audience, so your, your definition of SME is very different to ours in ar in Ireland. Uh,but in terms of numbers, you know, but then if you take that SE segment, right, um, there’ll be, you know, a huge amount of [00:11:00] customers, potential customers within that, you know, uh, what did I say? Uh, 50 50 to 200 or 10 to 200, uh, employees, right? Um, so what you’re looking for is, a. Tar targeting within that segment.
So you pick your segment, say we’re really strong in this particular S-M-E-S-M-E space, but then you move to targeting. And the targeting is, well, who within that are most likely to buy our products? Who could, who within that segmentation can we be really intensely appealing to? and that can, that’s informed by who you’ve sold to in the past. the value you bring, the profitability of, you know, of, of the existing customers you have. And there’s various criteria you can use to make those choices. But that then informs, you know, the positioning and messaging because you can, you know, hone in very, you can become very focused on that. That on that particular target, you know, it might be a particular vertical or a particular number of employees. It might be by pain [00:12:00] point, it might be, let’s say, you know, you pick the financial, small financial companies with between 50 and 200 employees because they’re heavily regulated with Dora and this two, and you feel that you have a very strong proposition in that respect, you know? so that’s the, I dunno, does that answer
Adam: of, of course. Yeah. and when does a target market. Hit the sweet spot.
Uh,
in other words, when is it, um, defined appropriately? It’s not too big. It’s not too not, you know, it’s not too small that there aren’t enough, isn’t enough, business there potentially. how’d you go about determining that kind of sweet, sweet spot of, uh, specificness in defining that target
Ian: Yeah, well that would, that would come from the value that you would put on it. So it depends on, on what your goals are. it’s usually a very good place to start. So how much do we want to grow by, uh, in whatever period? And then that, and you figure out what the targeting is, or, or, you know, you, you, you pick a [00:13:00] particular target and. if it isn’t big enough to achieve, you don’t believe it’s big enough to achieve the goal that you, you, you, you have, you can broaden it and and you know, and there is, there is spillover. It’s not too difficult to find, you know, you could in go from just having, financial, uh, you know, services, you could go, you know, you could include banking, insurance, and pensions in it, for example.
so you just build it, builds it out. But all comes down to I. What value you think is in that market? How many, and then go back to your numbers. How many,sales qualified leads you need to engage with those, you know, uh, to, to engage with, to, to get, yeah. Get your conversions. To make those sales.
Yeah.
Adam: Yeah. and of course it ties into the, the value proposition that you have for that market and what capacity and skills you have, right?
Ian: a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Adam: So you wanna be making sure you can,you’ve done both sides of the [00:14:00] equation, right? You’ve worked out. What is a good market because the size is there.
They,they’ve got budgets. they’re not gonna be swamped by AI in the next six months and disappear or, or, or whatever it is. Plus, you have the skill sets to provide those services that they want.
Ian: Exactly. and the case studies to back it up. Yeah, so that you know that that’s where why you, you would use your existing customer base and, you know, to inform that targeting decision. Um, because what you want to be able to do then is, is build as many case studies as possible within.
Adam: So, so. What would you say to the question that owners might have out there today
listening
to this
where
they’re saying, well, hang on a minute. You know what, we’ve looked at this in the past. We’ve got 50 customers. Some are in services, service industry, some are in manufacturing, some are in logistics.
You know, we’ve got a, a jewellery maker, a candle, a candlestick maker, you know, uh, and, and a plumber,and everything in between. [00:15:00] Um, you know, the max we’ve got of any one sector is three. Um, not convinced it’s necessarily the the right sector we wanna be in. how, how would, what would you say to, to someone who’s trying to kind of get better at this segmentation
Ian: Well, it
doesn’t
Adam: they’re not sure.
They’re not sure where to
Ian: yeah. It, and, and this is the problem, I suppose. People tend to jump straight to verticals. Um, and if you think, if you, if you think of the example you just gave there, if you have a, you know. Uh, an MSP that has many different,many that they, that serves ver many different verticals. When they look at their database of customers, there will be things that bubble to the surface, and it might be pain points that their buyer experiences. It might the company size, it might be a location. and that’s really what will inform you. Like they’ll have a sense of where. The sale, when the sales conversations happen, do they feel this is a sale that they’re gonna get over the line?
Are they, are the people they’re talking to, leaning into what? Leaning into the examples of the [00:16:00] problems they’ve solved in the past? And that’s a really good indication to, to prompt them in direction of where the segment, where the targeting is going.
Adam: do you think? Um, I’m not sure how to, What term to use for this, but the culture or the, or the sort of, the, for example, a family owned business is different to a non-family owned business in terms of how they run it.
certainly
on the smaller side. there might be some connections around the culture of that business that, that, you know, match in terms of you as an MSP,
is, you know, is that, is that is, are there some sort of connections there or some, some differences there that can work in terms of segmenting?
Ian: Absolutely. If, if, for example, are you, are you suggesting that, you know, there could be a, you, you might over index on family owned businesses, because
you, you’re a family owned business yourself and you,
Adam: yeah, exactly. Just, just different ways of, [00:17:00] of seeing what clicks,
you know, if, you know, in terms of trying to stand out,
That
was just a, a thought that came into my head. But if it’s not segmented, if it’s not geography and it’s not technology, and it’s not size. you know, it, pain points.
What are the pain points, you know, and or what are some of the other areas,that you, you could sort of look at that perhaps haven’t traditionally been looked at?
Ian: Yes. Yeah, that’s certainly, youworth looking at. All right. You know? Yeah. But in the examples that, of the companies that we’ve worked with, they’ll typically be, you know. it, it on the, the com companies with the smaller number of customers and bigger deal sizes will tend to focus on a particular vertical. it might be, um, or it could be, it could be just enterprise. You know, there are, there’s probably only, 10,000 large enterprises in Ireland, you know, so an MSP that specializes in those. You know, it doesn’t really have to differentiate by segment. [00:18:00] but then when you go down to the other, when you go down to the other end,the SME end, it typically, where we have a project at the moment and where the soft center seems to be, is in, businesses that rely heavily on technology. So looking at kind of, you know, media companies, cyber companies, those types, they’re, they’re a telco provider as well. This example I’m giving, you know.
Adam: yeah, I mean, ultimately what we’re saying is get deeply immersed into a particular type of business. you know, whether it’s sector based or, or, or something else around their pain points. And,and truly understand what the, what the owners and the, and the leadership team are going through.
You know, really understanding what their problems are, what’s happening in the market, what the opportunities look like. And then you can start to, build your services. to offer value
in, in, in that sector and start to use their language and everything else.
Ian: it’s about, it’s about positioning your services and your, and how you [00:19:00] do things that,that appeals to them. that’s the key. That, and that’s where this, that’s where this big. I suppose opportunity exists within the MSP space. Is that like getting the answers to those informs that positioning and messaging?
So you show up and you’re not talking about being, the digital transformation partner or the cloud partner or the, you know, I, you know, name the list of, things that they call themselves. yeah.
Adam: Yeah, and, and of course, not the trick. This isn’t the trick, but of course a lot of those services
are
the same.
Ian: right?
Yeah.
Adam: So, so MSPA can be delivering Microsoft 3 6 5 services in exactly the same way that, uh, MSPB is. but what we’re talking about here is communicating the value of that in a way that, that, that resonates with that particular sector,
in terms of impact that can make to their business.
if even [00:20:00] though perhaps the underlying.
technology
itself,is the same.
Um,
yeah. Agree with that.
Um,
Ian: would it? yeah.
Would it help? Yeah. a good example that, I can give, which they’re a Microsoft partner, client of ours, um, and they serve the, uh, enterprise space. in the UK and Ireland, and the insight that we gathered from them, from looking at what they do and talking to their potential customers and customers is that, in, in, in the IT space, projects typically go over time, over budget, uh, or, you know, aren’t delivered. Aren’t delivered at all. But this particular client over-indexed against that. So they delivered projects on time, on budget. Um, and this was something that, that was an insight that really came through. So we le we, we leaned into that and their, became around de delivering impact. So everything on their messaging on their website is all around [00:21:00] the delivery of impact. and all about up times and the speed with which they do things and how they, you know, live up to those, live up to those promises and go. Going back to what I said earlier about how they do things, so, you know, that was, they were the other insights that we gathered that they were very kind of. Craftsmen, like in their approach to the work that they did. And again, we leaned into that and so, so that’s a very good example of, you know, taking the insight, taking what’s through, what’s true to the, to the MSP and creating a differentiation based on that. And
Adam: And what would you say to the idea that, ideally you want to differentiate so much so that you repel part of the market?
Ian: Well, that’s ideally, that’s ideally what you want, what you want to do. And that comes down like if you are, if every sales conversation you have is with, you your ideal, your ideal prospect, like it very, it very quickly reduces the cost of [00:22:00] acquisition, increases, customer lifetime value, just that the sales cycles are much shorter. So, yeah, that’s the, you, you, you want to repel people, you want, you, you, you, you don’t wanna be talking to Yeah. People who, you can’t really serve that well, you know? Yeah, for sure.
Adam: Yeah, I, I, I, for me, that was, you know, kind of one of the first fundamental lessons to learn was that you don’t want to, you know, you don’t wanna work for everybody,
Ian: absolutely.
Adam: know, everybody’s not your customer. Uh, you, you do want to be choosy, and you do want to carve out a niche and, and be really clear on who, who you wanna work with.
that’s, that was a, just a, a really huge lesson. And of course in, in setting out that clarity,
and repelling others that, that aren’t going to be a fit. It, it makes you much stronger fit for those that, that, that see themselves as a fit for you,
Ian: Oh, big time. I’ll even notice myself in, I do all of our selling. So because we have such a heritage in the MSP space. When I sit down with the CEO of an MSP that turns over between 10 [00:23:00] and 200 million a year. they’re all ears. They want to hear all of, you know, how we did it for this company and that company, because in, in most cases, they know, they, they know, either know all of them or know them. and they’ve seen, they’ve seen the results and they’re, really, really interested.
For sure. Yeah.
Adam: So, so you gave us a great example there around project
Ian: project delivery.
Adam: delivery.
Ian: Mm-hmm. And,
Adam: And, uh, that, that business, really stressing their expertise around how they manage their projects and how they manage budgets. Could you give us perhaps a couple of other examples of, of clients you’ve worked with that
you’ve helped,
identify and how you’ve helped identify some, something that’s different about them and how they’ve then turned that into a, a new value proposition?
Ian: Absolutely. Yeah. So, so one of the mo, one of the most recent ones we did was, was for a, for a client in the Midlands, in Ireland. and they are,Microsoft h HP partner. and one of the insights that we uncovered from talking [00:24:00] to them and to their customers was the personal. Approach that they take to,providing service for their customers. So to the point where they’re, you know, the, every customer has the CEO’s, uh, mobile phone number. they, you know, they know a lot of the people in the organization. they. and, and vice versa, you know, so this, this large,uh, relationship building and also they took great pride in, in appreciating the risks that CIOs take, that they’re making huge investments on behalf of their organization.
They’re going to their CEO to get sign off on half a million. Pounds or euros. so, you know, that was something else that they, that ca that came through that there was a lot of empathy in this organization. So that was the insight and,and what the outcome of that was. Um,for, for this particular company, it is for us, it is personal. [00:25:00] and if you look at, if like, it didn’t just inform the positioning and the messaging, but, the. How they show up in the market is, we took inspiration from concierge services and private banks as opposed to other IT or managed service providers. Now they don’t look, you know, exactly like a private bank.
You need to kind of be true to the category, and also lean into this differentiation. But it’s a good example. and, and, and we’ve kind of developed that further by promoting the fact that the, you know, that, that personal connection, the mobile phone number the, of the CEO, they’re just, uh, small examples.
but again, everything that we do then thereafter is informed by this personal approach. You know, whether it’s a direct mail campaign or an in invitation to an event, it’s all done in a personal way where you’re kind of living the brand or we’re encouraging the client to live the brand, um, in everything that they do.
Adam: and, um, was that the strap line to the bus to the business? Did you say to us it’s personal? Was
Ian: [00:26:00] Yeah, for us, uh, uh, it is personal.
It’s,
Adam: us, it.
Ian: yeah, cutting edge technology with traditional values. Okay.
Adam: And that was kind of the tagline around,what they did.
just my cynical nature here.
Was
there any kind of kickback around that? In as much as this is often sort of put out there amongst, you know, big corporates and they talk about the personal touch all the time, don’t they? And, and yet you, you know, you go to a call center how to have to wait for 30 minutes before it gets answered by some robot.
So, so, how did they ensure they didn’t fall into that kind of trap and, genuinely lived that brand?
Ian: well, it, and this, it’s an interesting question. You ask, it, it, it has to be true. So, so there’s no point in saying these things or making these claims if they’re not true. So it wasn’t a stretch for them to, because we got back, we got that from the customers that there was this personal, empathetic [00:27:00] approach from this particular client. So we were able to take that as a, as a, as a truth, and you know, whereas. if these things are decided in a boardroom somewhere and say, oh, let, let’s be personal. And you know, it, it, it’s not coming from the, it’s not coming from the soul of the company. It’s coming from a room somewhere where someone decides it. So yeah. I I, it’s really important for it to be true. and this goes back to my point earlier on, is it is really interesting how different all of these MSPs are. there are, there is differentiation, but it takes. Um, it takes a lot of work in a, in a reflection, and to kind of, you know, figure out what it is and, and, and like the, that’s why there are. Brand positioning experts. That’s their job is to uncover these insights, to be able to, and then when you’re, when you, when you show it to the client, they kind of, you know, they exhale and they go, yeah, that is us. Or they might have been resisting something that they knew was true all along. [00:28:00] And they lean into it.
You, you give them the courage to, to kind of, to lean into what they always thought they should lean into. You know, um, and that’s another example we have of a, of a, of a client where we convince them to embrace infrastructure. and then, and as a result, everything on their, everything on their, about their brand is about infrastructure because they are deep subject matter experts in the infrastructure space.
And they’re one of these, one of these MSPs that is a small number of very, uh, valuable, customers. And they do massive projects for them.
Adam: Got it. well look, uh, we’ve run outta time as always, and there’s always lo loads to talk about, masses to talk about. something just clicked in, in my head when you were talking about, uh, canvasing the clients. I think for me, that’s a key, absolutely a key part of this process. Talk, talk to your clients.
Ask them. What they think of you, what they like about you, what don’t they like about you perhaps, but what do they think of you when they first think of you? What is it that, you know, how do [00:29:00] you stand out? I think there’s a lot to be gained in just doing that because sometimes you, you kind of assume, you know,
what you think this thing is.
And actually, if you ask your clients and the words they use often helps you truly sort of get, get to grips with that difference. Especially if you’re asking them, well, how are we different from the guys you had before? you know, and those sorts of things. But we, we’ve run out of Ian, uh, run out of time, Ian, but, um, any last thoughts
Ian: is just one. And it was, when you, when you said the word, what do they think of you? Right? So, so a
big thing about positioning is,is that, is to occupy. Occupy a place in the mind of your buyer, of your, you know, so your existing customers will know you, right? But for people who don’t know you. we all have these, ladders in our minds when it comes to whatever we want to buy, whether it be a car or a tv or a pair of sports shoes, whatever. You know, you have this brand ladder in your mind, and the reason why. Uh, or one of the reasons you do brand positioning is [00:30:00] to have something that’s, as I say, true to you, different to the competition and appealing to the target audience. So it creates a memory of you with the buyer. And if you’re the same as everybody else, they’ll never remember you. But if you, you’re, if you’re differentiated and distinct and you have something for them to remember you by, it makes. you’ll just get a hell of a lot more, a hell of a lot more inquiries,when those, people come to, to, you know, make a decision about whatever it is that you’re selling.
Adam: Indeed. well look, thank you again, and if anybody wants to follow up with you, Ian, how, what’s the best way to get hold of you?
Ian: best is, uh, email is ian at Square Agency and LinkedIn handle is, I just got a few now.
Adam: We’ll put that on our show notes anyway, Ian, that’s, that’s fine.
Ian: Okay.
Adam: Great. speak.
Ian: Absolutely. Thanks very much, Adam. Thank you. [00:31:00]
