Ulrik, the leading global expert in pricing for B2B SaaS, shares how narrower positioning improved the quality of leads for his consultancy.
About:
- Domain: Pricing consultancy
- Stage: sub-$5Mn
- GTM: Sales-led
Trigger:
Ulrik: The brand that I had was predicated on me being a solo consultant, and I needed to think through what “non-solo” meant because I was hiring people at the time. I needed to know if this was just like a 1% change or more like a 70% change in terms of how I verbalize who I/we are and so forth.
I knew that I needed a context to think through it — to have scheduled time and accountability to a third party to just walk through these things. And that third party being a specialist in positioning just made it a lot better. That was part of it.
”If you’re at, say, the 98th percentile of something, it matters to actually buy access to the 99th percentile and get advice from those people, because that difference creates meaningfully different results.”
ULRIK LEHRSKOV-SCHMIDT, MANAGING PARTNER AND FOUNDER, WILLINGNESS TO PAY
But the second part of why I needed it was because I think you can always get better. If you’re at, say, the 98th percentile of something, it matters to actually buy access to the 99th percentile and get advice from those people, because that difference creates meaningfully different results. So for me, that was why I needed to get outside help.
Insights:
Ulrik: Overall, I liked the elements of the process — the way you did the interviews, the different conversations, and so forth. The idea of filling out a document, walking through it, asking questions, filling it out again — all of that actually worked really well.
The customer interviews were just golden. Really nice also, in terms of testimonials, quotes, case studies, and so forth, there were a lot of golden nuggets in there. The way they said things just made sense. I actually reached out and did a lot of testimonial work based on that. I got their permission and so forth.
"I’ve used the word “complex” quite a bit since we came up with it. It might sound a little crazy that one word could be the full outcome of a process that spans three or four weeks, but it was really important work for us to narrow down."
ULRIK LEHRSKOV-SCHMIDT, MANAGING PARTNER AND FOUNDER, WILLINGNESS TO PAY
I’ve used the word “complex” quite a bit since we came up with it. It might sound a little crazy that one word could be the full outcome of a process that spans three or four weeks, but it was really important work for us to narrow down to companies with sales-led processes which are usually for complex products, so just tightening that up slightly — instead of “B2B SaaS parts,” it became “complex B2B SaaS parts,” which is narrower and a better, more direct positioning. I use it on my LinkedIn posts, in sales calls, everywhere. It’s constantly telling the story of who we are and how we do things.
We had an RFP from a large British client, and in that RFP I wrote down seven principles of engagement, which were very much formulated and top of mind because of the work we were doing. Those seven principles of engagement have become a front-and-center piece of how we narrate how we work. It’s on the website a lot, and they’re the red thread running through everything we do.
Results:
👉 Uptick in highly qualified audience since we launched this in January
Ulrik: I don’t know — we get a lot of leads, so I guess that’s good. And the leads we have are super relevant. Some of them are a little small, but very few are completely off in the sense that they’re not relevant to what we do. I think we’re able to very clearly communicate to the market what we do, who we do it for, and so forth.
”We get a lot of leads, so I guess that’s good. And the leads we have are super relevant. We’ve seen a very significant uptick in highly qualified audience since we launched this in January.”
ULRIK LEHRSKOV-SCHMIDT, MANAGING PARTNER AND FOUNDER, WILLINGNESS TO PAY
I don’t know if it’s the copy, the positioning, or the nice new website, but we’ve seen a very significant uptick in highly qualified audience since we launched this in January. I think on that end, mission accomplished.
