Here’s a pattern I see repeatedly when working with clients.
A founder-led business with genuinely strong delivery. Good client relationships. A team that does excellent work. But in competitive situations, when there’s a proper procurement process or the prospect is evaluating options, they keep losing on price.
The frustrating part: they’re not expensive relative to the value they deliver. They’re expensive relative to how they’ve positioned themselves.
That’s a different problem. And it has a different fix.
The Symptoms
Comparison trap positioning has a set of recognisable symptoms. Most founders have learned to live with them rather than address them.
- Prospects regularly ask you to ‘sharpen your pencil’ on pricing, even when the scope is clear.
- You win work through relationships and lose it through formal procurement.
- Your proposal template looks structurally similar to your competitors’. Methodology, team CVs, case studies, day rates.
- When you ask lost prospects why they went elsewhere, ‘cost’ is the answer more often than not.
- Your team struggles to explain what makes you different without defaulting to ‘we really understand our clients’ or ‘our people are excellent’.
- The website describes what you do. It doesn’t explain the specific problem you solve or for whom.
If this sounds familiar, the business isn’t suffering from a pricing problem. It’s suffering from a positioning problem. And no amount of discounting will fix it, it will just confirm to the market that you’re interchangeable.
The Root Cause
The comparison trap has one root cause: capability-first positioning.
Capability-first positioning leads with what you do, how you do it, and how long you’ve been doing it. It describes your team, your methodology, your sectors, your services. It’s comprehensive. It’s professionally presented. And it tells the prospect almost nothing about why they should choose you.
When two or three businesses all describe themselves in capability terms, the prospect has no basis for comparison except price. You’ve handed them a commodity market without meaning to.
Issue-led positioning works differently. It leads with the specific problem the buyer is trying to solve, names the cost of that problem staying unsolved, and explains precisely how you resolve it. It creates a category where you’re the obvious solution rather than one of several options.
The shift sounds subtle. It isn’t. It changes what the prospect is evaluating you against.
Instead of: ‘Which of these firms do I like the most?’ they’re asking: ‘Which of these firms actually understands this specific problem I have?’ Those are different questions with different answers.
The Fix Sequence
Step 1: Identify the must-fix issue you’re best qualified to own
Not every problem could a business solve. The one problem you consistently solve best, that comes up most often in client conversations, and that you have the most pattern recognition around.
For most consultancies this is harder than it sounds. Generalism feels safe. The fear is that narrowing down will lose opportunities. The reality is that specificity wins the opportunities that actually matter, and makes you invisible to the ones you shouldn’t be pursuing anyway.
Ask yourself: what’s the problem that, when a prospect describes it, you immediately know the three likely causes and the fix sequence? That’s your must-fix issue.
Step 2: Rewrite your positioning from the buyer’s trigger point
The trigger point is the moment the buyer decides they need external help. What are they experiencing at that moment? What words are they using internally to describe the problem?
Your positioning should meet them at that trigger point, not at the point where they’ve already decided to hire a supplier and are evaluating options. At the point where they’re recognising they have a problem.
Good issue-led positioning sounds like: ‘We work with [specific buyer] who are experiencing [specific trigger]. The problem is usually [root cause], not [what they think it is]. We fix it by [method] and the result is [specific outcome].’
Read that back against your current website homepage. If they don’t match, you have work to do.
Step 3: Build your use cases around triggers, not services
Replace your services page with a set of use cases that describe the situations you reliably resolve. Each use case should have: the trigger (what’s happening), the stakes (what’s at risk), and the outcome (what changes).
Use cases do something service descriptions can’t: they allow the prospect to self-identify. When a prospect reads a use case and thinks ‘that’s exactly us’, they’re no longer evaluating you against competitors, they’re deciding whether to work with you. That’s a fundamentally different conversation.
Step 4: Create a no list
Define explicitly who you don’t work with and why. This is counterintuitive but commercially important. A no list does two things: it signals that you’re selective (which reinforces perceived value), and it pre-qualifies prospects before they reach you (which saves significant time for both parties).
If you’ll work with anyone who can pay the invoice, your positioning has no edges. Edges are what make you distinct.
Step 5: Align your proposal structure to the issue, not the capability
Even when positioning is strong, proposals often revert to capability format: methodology, team, pricing. The comparison trap reappears at proposal stage.
Restructure proposals to open with the problem as you understand it (specific, evidenced from discovery), then explain why this problem is harder to solve than it looks, then introduce your approach as the solution to that specific problem. Save capability evidence for later in the document, where it substantiates rather than leads.
What Changes When You Fix It
The first thing that changes is the nature of the conversations. When positioning is issue-led, discovery calls become diagnostic rather than evaluative. Prospects come in with a specific problem rather than a vague brief. That’s a more productive starting point for both sides.
Win rates in formal procurement improve, because the evaluation criteria shift from ‘who is most capable generally’ to ‘who best understands this specific problem’. If you’ve owned the issue clearly, you have an advantage that competitors can’t quickly replicate.
And pricing pressure reduces, not because you raise your prices, but because the comparison becomes harder to make. You’re no longer one of three options on a spreadsheet. You’re the firm that specifically solves this problem. That’s a different market position entirely.
If you want to learn more about how to position your proposition, then I suggest that you read my work on The Proposition Architect.
