Buyer's guide
Red flags when hiring a positioning consultant
The biggest red flag when hiring a positioning consultant is a process with no customer evidence in it: no interviews with your buyers, no lost deals, no test of the new story with real prospects before it goes live. After that, watch for a workshop sold as the whole answer, a deck of frameworks with your logo swapped in, a retainer with no defined end, and a consultant who agrees with everything the leadership team already believes.
The nine red flags
1. Nobody talks to your customers
Positioning is a claim about what buyers value. A consultant who builds it from your leadership team's opinions and a competitor scan has skipped the only evidence that matters. Ask how many customers and lost deals they will interview, and who does the interviewing.
2. The workshop is the deliverable
A two-day workshop produces energy and sticky notes. It rarely produces a story that survives contact with a sceptical CFO. Workshops are useful for alignment once the evidence is in; as the whole method they are theatre.
3. The framework arrives before the diagnosis
If the proposal already contains the canvas, the pyramid or the messaging house you will be filling in, the consultant has decided the shape of the answer before hearing the question. Good positioning work looks different for a single-product scale-up and a four-division group.
4. No test before launch
The new story should be tried in real sales conversations before it goes near the website. A consultant who hands over the words and leaves has handed over a hypothesis.
5. A retainer with no end
Positioning is a project with a finish. Ongoing retainers suit fractional marketing leadership and agencies; for positioning they usually mean the diagnosis never quite lands.
6. Everyone agrees with the CEO
The findings meeting should contain at least one thing the leadership team does not want to hear. If the consultant's conclusions match the founder's pitch deck, either the company was already perfectly positioned or nobody asked a buyer.
7. The examples are all logos, no results
A wall of client logos says who paid. Ask what changed for two of them: win rate, deal size, time to close, how prospects describe the company now. Anonymised numbers are fine. No numbers is a flag.
8. The sales team is an afterthought
Messaging that lives on the website and never reaches the deck, the discovery questions and the objection answers changes nothing. Ask how the sales team gets it and who checks they are using it.
9. It is really a rebrand
If the conversation turns to logos, colours and a new website within the first call, you are talking to an agency. That can be the right spend, after the story is settled. The comparison of consultant, agency and in-house explains the difference.
Questions to ask before you sign
- How many of our customers and lost deals will you interview, and will you do it yourself?
- What will we know by day 30 that we do not know today?
- How is the new story tested before it goes live?
- What happens if the evidence says our story is fine?
- How does the sales team end up saying it the same way?
- What does the project look like when it is finished, and when is that?
How The Proposition answers them
Dan Ilett interviews customers, lost deals and your own salespeople himself in the first weeks, plays back what they said in the Mirror, builds and tests the story in The Message, and equips the sales team in The Engine. Fixed scope, fixed fee, a defined end, and a first call that sometimes ends with a recommendation to hire someone else. What the first 90 days look like sets it out week by week.
Questions people ask
Is a cheap positioning consultant a red flag?
Price on its own tells you little. What matters is whether the method includes customer evidence and a test. A low fee with no interviews is a poor buy at any price; a high fee with no interviews is worse.
Should a positioning consultant have worked in our sector?
Helpful, rarely essential. Sector experience speeds up the research. The skill that matters is hearing what buyers say and turning it into one sentence, and that transfers across sectors.
What if the consultant wants to interview our lost deals?
That is a green flag. Lost deals tell you why buyers chose someone else, which is the single most useful input to positioning and the one most companies have never collected.
How long should a positioning project take?
Diagnosis in weeks, the story and the test within a quarter. Anything described as a year-long programme is usually a retainer wearing a project's clothes.
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