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Today's post is adapted from our whitepaper "3 Reasons Why Growth of Your Technology Services Startup Is Slow".
“Positioning is the pivotal act of clarifying the problem(s) your consultancy is solving for a specific audience and how your approach is achieving that.”
David Baker
Take it from David Baker: a lack of positioning is one of the primary reasons why IT services businesses struggle to scale sales. Without a clear positioning strategy, IT services startups often find themselves competing on price and losing to larger competitors.
Strong positioning gives clarity to your sales motions, helps define the sales funnel for IT consulting, and makes it easier to understand how to sell IT services or how to sell IT consulting. For emerging tech services startups, positioning is the engine that drives growth, margins, and market differentiation.
Why Positioning Matters in IT and Tech Services
As a founder, you want to attract more clients for your IT services. But most founders rush into tactics before clarifying their positioning strategy. Over time, this worsens the problem.
Without positioning, your sales engine stalls. With good positioning, however, you transform your business.
| With Poor or No Positioning | With Strong, Effectively Used Positioning |
| Marketing produces inconsistent results. | Marketing provides a controllable lead flow. |
| You chase every prospect rather than focusing on fit. | You confidently say no to non-ideal clients. |
| You end up selling IT services by lowering prices. | You charge premium pricing. |
| Growth is slow. | Growth accelerates. |
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Five Keys to Positioning
At Vixul, we use a structured approach to positioning technology services firms. As we’ve defined it, there are five core elements:
1. Problem: What You Solve
Identify the exact business problem you address. Finding IT services or consulting clients becomes easier when you articulate their pain points effectively. Are you solving legacy system inefficiencies, data security issues, or cloud scalability problems? The clearer you are, the more naturally your tech service sales conversations flow.
2. Customer: Whom You Help
A common mistake in selling tech services is going too broad. By defining a specific customer segment, you build resonance. Instead of targeting “all enterprises,” you may narrow it down to “fintech startups needing secure cloud infrastructure.” This directly impacts how you design your sales funnel for IT consulting and ultimately how successfully you sell your IT services.
3. Technology: What You Work With
Many decisions in IT service sales are driven by technology stacks. Demonstrating certified expertise in AWS, Azure, or AI frameworks can go a long way towards reassuring prospective customers that you have what it takes to deliver the solution. Strong partnerships and clear specialization improve both credibility and referrals.
4. Process: How You Do It
A repeatable, efficient, and scalable process improves not only delivery but also your sales motions. Prospects feel more confident when you can point to structured case studies or frameworks. Signalling reliability is critical for your positioning, and ultimately sales.
5. Unique: Why It Should Be YOU
Without a unique position, you compete on price. Differentiation is a survival necessity for your IT services startup. This can come from your deep expertise, proprietary accelerators, thought leadership, or your proven track record. Think about the secret sauce that makes your work worth noticing. Often, it overlaps with the reason why you decided to become an entrepreneur in the first place.
Wrapping Up
Strong positioning powers your sales engine, shapes effective sales motions, and makes your IT services sales funnel predictable. It’s the foundation for a scalable, profitable tech services company.
At Vixul, we help founders of emerging technology services firms formally define their positioning through a step-by-step process with clear success criteria. With the right position, selling IT services and selling tech services becomes not just possible, but repeatable and scalable.
