Translating Your Positioning Into an Actual Offer

A dream becomes a goal when action is taken toward its achievement.

The same is true of positioning. A line like “the careful, on-time painter” is a dream until it becomes something you can schedule, staff and price. We see this constantly with contractors and service owners: they spend weeks on the sentence and about ten minutes on what the sentence costs them to keep.

So here is the difference. Positioning is what you want the customer to believe about you. An offer is what you actually hand them: the scope, the timeline, the people, the price, and what happens when something goes wrong. If the two do not match, the customer notices on the first job, and no logo can fix that.

Turn the promise into things you can see

Take your positioning and ask what a customer would see, hear and receive if it were completely true. If you say “white-glove,” what does that look like on the day? Does someone call the evening before? Does a person walk the job with the customer at the end? Are there shoe covers, a clean truck, a written summary of what was done?

Write those down as plain behaviors. Not adjectives, behaviors. “Careful” is an adjective. “We cover floors and furniture, walk the job with you at the end, and send a photo summary the same day” is an offer. This is also where you find out whether your positioning is one you can live inside, which is a good time to revisit Competitive Positioning: Why Someone Should Choose You.

Give every promise a price and a pair of hands

Now the part a lot of brand work skips. Every behavior you just wrote costs time or money, and somebody has to do it. Two questions for each one: how many minutes or dollars does it add to a typical job, and who does it?

Here is a labelled hypothetical. Say you run a small painting company and your position is “tidy and on time.” The extra floor protection, the end-of-job walkthrough and the same-day photo summary add about two hours per job. If an hour of your crew’s time costs you $40 with pay and payroll costs, that is $80 per job. Say the job sells for $3,000. The promise costs you about 2.7% of the price, and more if those two hours could have gone to paid work. Fine. But if you sell it at the same price as the painter who does none of that, you are giving away the brand for nothing.

Now flip it. Say the promise is “someone always answers within an hour.” Answering within an hour takes more than two hours of crew time. It takes a person, a phone routing system, or you at 7 p.m. That is a staffing decision. If you are the only person who can honor it, the promise has a capacity of one owner, and it breaks the week you get sick or busy.

This is the pricing side of branding. The lesson on Pricing From the Numbers Backward walks through building a price from your costs; here, add the cost of each promise to that build. A premium position that is not priced as a premium is a hobby. A premium price with a commodity operation behind it is a refund waiting to happen.

Write the offer on one page

Once each promise has a cost and an owner, write the offer on a single page:

• Who it is for, in one sentence, and who it is not for.
• What is included, in behaviors, and what is not.
• The price or price range, and what moves it.
• How long it takes, and what you need from the customer to hold that date.
• Who delivers each promise, and what happens when they are out.
• The one thing you will not compromise on, even if it costs you the job.

If you cannot fill a line, you have found a business problem for free, before a customer found it for you. Check margins with the gross versus net margin lesson in mind: a promise that eats your gross margin has to earn it back through price or volume.

Set it up this week

Pick the one promise in your positioning you are proudest of and write down the three behaviors that would prove it on a real job. Put a time and a dollar figure next to each, and name who does them. If you have the Pricing Calculator from the Resources page, add those costs to a typical job and see whether your current price still works.

Plan on two to three hours for the first offer page, mostly thinking. It costs nothing but time. Expect a second pass after you talk it through with whoever will actually deliver the work; they will know what the promise really takes. If you cannot name anyone but yourself to deliver it on your worst day, that promise needs a different price or a smaller scope.