agency-positioning

name

agency-positioning

description

Premium positioning, offer architecture, pricing logic, qualification, scope control, and proposal structure for a website agency selling $12,000+ engagements. Use when defining the agency category, building or pricing the offer, qualifying a prospect, writing or presenting a proposal, defending fees, controlling scope, firing a misfit client, onboarding staff on positioning, writing agency copy, or preparing for a sales conversation. Covers the agency narrative, the three-tier offer ladder (Foundation / Growth / Authority), value-based pricing with a calculator, the Win-Without-Pitching expert posture, the four-conversation sales sequence, the Doctor-Pilot-Teacher framework, the 9 Positioning Assets, solutions language, founder storytelling, personal brand authority, and the Selling the Shovel principle.

Agency Positioning

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, [phone].

Use when

• Defining or revising the agency category, narrative, or one-sentence positioning.
• Designing the offer ladder, fee floors, or productized service architecture.
• Packaging agency expertise into paid audits, workshops, frameworks, newsletters, or other authority assets.
• Pricing a specific engagement (use the value-based calculator).
• Qualifying or disqualifying a prospect at the first call or before a proposal.
• Writing, presenting, or defending a proposal for a $12,000+ project.
• Holding scope discipline during delivery.
• Onboarding a new team member on how the agency positions, sells, and delivers.
• Writing agency-side copy: home page, services page, case studies, sales pages.
• Preparing for a sales conversation, value conversation, or closing conversation.
• Explaining why website design is sold as a premium product: strategy, content, SEO, UX, stack, QA, launch, analytics, and post-launch improvement rather than pages alone.

Do not use when

• The task is client-side messaging or brand work (use brand-strategy, content-writing, sales-copywriting).
• The task is delivery execution rather than commercial structure (use the build skills: design-system, page-builder, seo, deploy).
• A narrower skill is clearly the better match (e.g. agency-client-retention for retainer pricing and client retention, they-ask-you-answer for content-led lead generation, cro-audit for conversion audits).
• The work is for a non-premium offer (sub-$10k engagements). This skill assumes a $12,000 minimum and a productized model.

Required inputs

• The current artefact or decision being developed (proposal, sales page, pricing question, qualification call, scope dispute, etc.).
• Business context: the prospect or client's sector, scale, decision makers, and the commercial pressure driving the project.
• Any existing positioning, fee data, or prior engagements that constrain the answer.

Workflow

1. Identify which file in references/ matches the task. Do not load the whole directory — load only what is needed.
2. Anchor the work in the agency narrative (references/agency-narrative.md). Every downstream artefact should be able to point back to a specific line in that file.
3. Apply the relevant detailed guidance:
   • Offer-ladder and tier definitions → references/premium-website-offer-playbook.md
   • Pricing, fee defence, modifiers, payment terms, retainers → references/pricing-rules.md
   • Authority products, paid diagnostics, and expertise packaging → references/information-marketing-assets.md
   • Scope, exclusions, change orders, revision discipline → references/scope-matrix.md
   • Qualification, fit signals, red flags, disqualification scripts → references/qualification-guide.md (narrative) and references/lead-qualification-scorecard.md (scoring rubric)
   • Proposals, the closing conversation, objection handling → references/proposal-positioning.md (principles) and references/premium-proposal-template.md (document template)
   • Website-as-business-asset framing, due diligence, asset risks, and premium fee justification → references/website-asset-value-due-diligence.md
   • Website-as-premium-product, content/SEO strategy, launch discipline, technical philosophy, and agency proof → ../premium-website-product/SKILL.md
   • Positioning language, founder story, personal brand → references/positioning-language.md, references/founder-story-templates.md
   • Prior detailed instructions preserved from the previous skill version → references/legacy-guidance.md
4. Produce the artefact with concrete inputs (real numbers, real names, real client words). Do not generalise.
5. Verify the artefact against the agency narrative's commitments (agency-narrative.md section 8) before shipping.

Quality standards

• Specific, not generic. Real fees, real tier names, real prospect language, real sectors. Generic "agency-speak" is a red flag.
• Expert posture. Outputs are written from the doctor/expert stance — diagnosis, recommendation, single direction. Never order-taker, never pair-of-hands.
• Commercial logic visible. Every price, scope item, and qualification rule should be explainable in commercial terms — not aesthetic, not "industry standard."
• Floor enforced. No artefact assumes or implies sub-$12,000 work. The floor is the positioning.
• Website as product. Agency copy and proposals must explain the premium website as a packaged commercial asset with strategy, content, UX, SEO, measurement, QA, and handover; never as "number of pages plus design".
• Recommend one. Where options are presented, one is recommended. The agency does not present three options and ask the client to choose.

Anti-patterns

• Generic framework dumps with no decision made.
• Hourly or day-rate quotes anywhere in the output.
• Pages-only or "starter" packages that violate the floor.
• Bundling hosting, maintenance, or content production into the project fee.
• "We can do anything" language that dilutes the niche.
• Client-pleasing copy that softens the commitments in agency-narrative.md section 8.
• Pay-for-performance, equity, or revenue-share fee structures.
• Inventing facts to fill out the artefact.

Outputs

• Sales pages, proposals, scope definitions, pricing answers, qualification scripts, fee-defence responses, onboarding documents, sector-specific positioning notes.
• Each output should be ready to use directly — not a draft for someone else to finish.

References

• references/agency-narrative.md — the canonical paragraph, category definition, and commitments. Anchor file for everything else.
• references/premium-website-offer-playbook.md — the three-tier offer ladder (Foundation / Growth / Authority), tier inclusions, the commercial logic behind the $12,000 floor, the sales-to-delivery handshake.
• references/pricing-rules.md — value-based pricing principles, the pricing calculator with modifier score sheet, fee floors by tier, the four-zone fee-defence playbook, payment terms, retainer rules.
• references/scope-matrix.md — tier-by-tier scope matrix, hard exclusions, handoff boundaries, revision discipline, scope-creep defence playbook.
• references/qualification-guide.md — who we serve, who we don't, fit signals, red flags, the qualification conversation question map, disqualification scripts, firing misfits.
• references/lead-qualification-scorecard.md — numeric scoring rubric for fast qualification decisions before deep discovery.
• references/proposal-positioning.md — the four conversations that precede a proposal, the nine-section proposal skeleton, the closing-conversation choreography, common objection responses, post-close reassurance sequence.
• references/premium-proposal-template.md — the document template to adapt for specific engagements.
• references/positioning-language.md — agency-side copy patterns, naming, and language conventions.
• references/founder-story-templates.md — founder narrative templates and authentic storytelling patterns.
• references/case-study-template.md — standardised 7-part case study format, per-tier formats, production process, quality gate. Use whenever capturing or publishing a client engagement as a sales asset.
• references/proof-library.md — the reusable bank of proof components (case excerpts, testimonials, metrics, diagrams, checklists, process snapshots). Defines folder structure, taxonomy, retrieval rules, and maintenance rhythm. Every proposal and sales page assembles from this library.
• references/premium-audit-offers.md — the four paid audit offers (Website Authority $2,500; Trust & Conversion $1,800; SEO Foundation $1,500; Messaging Clarity $1,200). Use when designing audit landing pages, audit deliverables, conversion-to-engagement pathways.
• references/website-asset-value-due-diligence.md — the asset-value and due-diligence lens for explaining premium websites as measurable, transferable commercial systems rather than page builds.

This skill has no bundled scripts. The workflow is documentary, not executable.

Notes

• This skill is a portable execution layer for both Codex and Codex.
• Do not modify the agency narrative or the floor without an explicit decision recorded in writing — small drift becomes generic positioning.

Premium-positioning proof assets

Premium fees require demonstrable proof. Positioning references these assets rather than re-arguing them:

• Certification programme — certification/syllabus.md, certification/exam.md, and the current cohort record. Premium positioning names the certification when it exists; a prospect can verify it.
• Public scorecard — dashboards/public-scorecard.md (Phase 12), aggregate live quality data. Proposals link to the live scorecard, not screenshots.
• Benchmark sites — the Phase 12 benchmark library, indexed and auditable, is the "look at our published standards" asset. Reference them when the prospect asks "how do we know you can do this?"
• Case-study corpus — the Phase 12 corpus of measurable outcomes. Every case study cites the engine's gates the project met.
• Design-quality rubric — design-quality-score/references/rubric.md is quotable in proposals; the score is a concrete, defensible number.

A proposal or sales page that names "premium" without naming at least two of the above is drift toward marketing adjective.