Your Agency’s Core Positioning Should be a Multiplier

We’re just over four weeks into the Build Win Scale Accelerator pilot program as of the posting of this article, and it’s been a privilege so far to work alongside leaders from five agencies who are putting in the work to build something more sustainable.

Over the course of sixteen weeks, we’re building something that most agencies talk about but rarely implement: a reliable, repeatable system for winning new business. A way to pursue and close the right clients—consistently, strategically, and without the chaos.

We start with positioning. Because here’s the hard truth:

A weak positioning statement is one of the costliest liabilities a small agency can carry. It doesn’t just make new business harder—it makes it unsustainable.

Without clear positioning, even the most creative and capable agencies get stuck in an unproductive cycle of reinvention each time they pitch a new prospect. 

Here are some of the ways I’ve seen this play out –

An incessant reworking of agency credentials. 

Can’t say I haven’t been there myself, hoping the more I edited, shuffled slides around, or added design flourishes, the closer I would come to making my agency stand out from competitors. 

The irony is the more I wordsmithed our credentials, the more generic or abstruse the agency sounded. Too much time is collectively lost by agencies noodling over their creds decks that could have been used for other, more productive new business activities.

A strong positioning strategy gets you out of that trap. When you are committed to a message about the market you serve and the problems you solve best, the sands stop shifting. Not only that, but you’ll find that the message shifts to focusing on your prospects, not you, and when you can articulate your prospect’s challenges as well (or better) than they can, they’re more likely to believe you are qualified to solve their problems.

An Ideal Client Profile that’s Too Generous

My stomach sinks a bit when the owner of a small agency tells me they’ve narrowed their new business focus to only five (five!?!) core business categories. And then says those categories are food & beverage, healthcare & pharma, hospitality & travel, professional associations, and banks & credit unions.

I didn’t just make this up. This is what a small full-service agency told me just a couple months ago. In fact, these were labeled as the “primary” verticals. There was an additional set of secondary ones too.

If you are a small agency with no dedicated new business person or team (which is the case for most of the agencies I work with), you simply don’t have the bandwidth to pursue five large verticals with any success. 

Prospect lists are built and used once.

Let’s say I haven’t convinced you to back away from your “top five” prospect categories and you’re going to forge ahead anyway and try to make meaningful progress with all of them.

Your next step might be to commission a contact list—perhaps at great expense—but because you’re a small agency and time is hard to find, it’s underutilized. 

Maybe an email gets sent featuring your creds in that category. Maybe there’s a second email featuring a new case study that’s relevant. 

And then you run out of things to say and that expensive list gathers dust (and gets less valuable by the day as the information ages).

Here again, a strong core positioning helps because inherent in it is your unique perspective—how you do things at your agency and why it benefits your best kind of client. 

What I’ve found is that agencies that tap into a unique perspective find that it opens the door to consistent expression. In other words, they always have something to say to their prospects.  

We all know it’s going to take more than one message to capture the attention of your prospects. Let your core positioning be the gateway to an ongoing conversation with only your best prospects. 

Your Core Positioning is a Multiplier

This isn’t about artificial constraints. It’s about focus that fuels momentum. When you concentrate your new business efforts on a clearly defined audience, your messaging sharpens, your outreach becomes easier to execute, and your close rates improve.

It doesn’t mean you can’t work outside those areas. But it does mean your positioning—and your new business efforts—should lead with clarity, not compromise.