Your positioning may be unclear, invisible, or inaccurate. Examine your positioning and ensure your audience feels seen, heard, and understood in the key problem you solve and your approach to solving it. You may be prone to turning to your AI sycophant to solve this for you, but the best thing you can do in this situation is—GASP!—talk to your ICP and, as one of my clients said, “flail” in conversations for a while to see what hits versus what doesn’t. When you’ve got a crystal clear who, what, when, how, and why of a positioning platform, it’s time to take a look at all the different parts of your business and ensure they reinforce those ideas.

Your marketing may prioritize the wrong connections and metrics. You may feel like you have a lot of action in your business—you’re posting on all the channels, sending all the emails, and having all the coffee chats. But action isn’t the same as traction. Audit your channels to understand where the best conversations are happening and identify the gaps that are keeping you from turning those conversations into something more.

You’ve neglected business development and pipeline building. A friendly reminder that content marketing ≠ business development ≠ sales. These are all different functions within a business that speak to different stages of the client journey. The seeds you plant today may not sprout for 6 months, which means you’ve got to plant constantly if you want to build predictability. Just because things get busy or slow down doesn’t mean you can stop working on your business (more on that later).

Your positioning may be too broad. This is a hill I’ll die on—you don’t have to niche down, but you do have to get a 🤏🏻 little more specific about who you serve and how you serve them. If you don’t, you’re going to be nothing to everyone. That means conversations that go nowhere because your prospects don’t see themselves in your solution.

You may be marketing on the wrong channels or spending time in the wrong communities. This goes back to the idea that action can feel like traction when you’re spending a lot of time on the wrong things. You may be getting leads from channels where you have a large following, for example, but they could be misaligned. Which then begs the question, “Why am I even on this channel in the first place if my client isn’t here?” Or you may spend a lot of time in a community answering questions and providing support, only for those question-askers to remain in DIY mode because you’ve given away your knowledge for free. There’s a balance between being supportive and selling yourself short!

You may be talking about the wrong problems, or the wrong version of the problem. You may have built your messaging around an overcomplicated or oversimplified version of the problem your audience is facing. It’s important to remember that many clients think they know what their problem is, but really they only know the symptoms.

Your offer doesn’t clearly solve your ICP’s urgent problem. This goes back to over- or under-building an offer that may solve a problem, but not The Problem—or at least not clearly enough for your prospective client. I see this show up when service providers put so much stake in their process or uniqueness that the client is left asking, “Yeah, but how does this help me reach X?” Right now, I see this happening with service providers who are burying the tactical piece of their offer that people are coming in the door for underneath their thinking and approach. That approach may be the reason they choose you over the competition, but it’s likely not the reason they come in the door.

The problem isn’t expensive enough for them to solve…yet. You may be talking to clients who know they have a problem that you can solve, but they haven’t had enough friction to make solving that problem worthwhile. This is a double-edged sword depending on who your ideal clients are, because when the problem gets too expensive to ignore, they’ve often leaked too much money to pay you to fix it.

Your sales conversations may be too focused on vibes, results, or something else altogether that the client doesn’t really care about. I see a lot of service providers turn sales calls into “get to know you” calls and lose the sale because, well…they don’t sell! They spend all their time letting the prospect dictate the conversation, or they spend all their time talking about their work and their process without asking any questions to know if their work and process even fit the problem. Remember that these conversations need to strike a balance between listening and pitching.

Your positioning is working as a marketing tool, but it’s not designed to help you make decisions. This is how most people treat positioning—as a tool to articulate who they serve, what they do, how they do it, when clients need them, and why anyone would care in the first place. This is a good starting point, but it’s just that—a starting point. Your positioning should inform your entire operating system so you can make quick and confident decisions. This means you spend less time on “opportunities” that go nowhere and more time on the work that matters.

You don’t have a clear picture of which low- and high-lift growth levers to pull in various seasons of your business. There are baseline tactics that can keep things growing in your business, even when you’re at capacity. And when you’re not at capacity, you have different channels and tactics that get things moving. However, we often treat working on our business as an all-or-nothing approach. And then we wonder why the feast and famine cycle happens.

You don’t have documented processes, clear workflows, and updated systems that allow you to delegate when needed. The founders I work with who are in this position often have everything living in their head. Holding everything in your head is a skill—don’t get me wrong!—but you don’t have to do it! In fact, it would probably benefit you to clear up some RAM in your brain. This isn’t only important if you’re scaling or hiring; it’s about clearing up space and capacity and creating a record of your work and processes so it doesn’t always fall back on you. Bonus! You can also use your positioning to inform where you automate versus where you stay in the work.