agency-positioning

name	agency-positioning
description	Use when defining a premium website agency's niche, offer ladder, qualification, fee posture, scope boundaries, proof, and proposal positioning. Use `premium-sales-conversation` for a live opportunity and `brand-strategy` for a client's market identity.
metadata	{"portable":true,"compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

Agency Positioning

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

Use When

• Defining or revising the agency category, narrative, or one-sentence positioning.
• Choosing or sanity-checking a single-vertical niche ("web design for X"), or deciding when to add a second niche (use the niche-selection rubric).
• 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 premium proposal, including Uganda-calibrated local pricing and international premium pricing.
• 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 commodity, template-only, or low-trust engagements that cannot support strategy, UX, SEO, QA, analytics, and handoff quality. Local Ugandan pricing may be below international floors, but the offer must remain productized and premium for its market.

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.

Artefact	Source	Required?	If absent
Agency economics, capacity, proof, and ambitions	Leadership and delivery records	yes	Stop fee or category claims and reconcile evidence.
Target-client and market evidence	Research, CRM, interviews, win/loss notes	yes	Treat niche and price as hypotheses.
Existing offer, scope, and proposal assets	Commercial operations	conditional	Build a current-state inventory first.

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. If the task is choosing, validating, or expanding the niche, run references/niche-selection-rubric.md before the offer ladder — the niche decision constrains every fee, proof asset, and proposal downstream.

4. Apply the relevant detailed guidance:

   • Offer-ladder and tier definitions → references/premium-website-offer-playbook.md
   • Pricing, fee defence, modifiers, payment terms, retainers, and market calibration → references/pricing-rules.md and references/uganda-market-pricing-calibration.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

5. Produce the artefact with concrete inputs (real numbers, real names, real client words). Do not generalise.

6. Verify the artefact against the agency narrative's commitments (agency-narrative.md section 8) before shipping.

7. Stop when evidence or authority is missing; recover with a provisional brief and named validation task.

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 by market. No artefact assumes commodity work. Use the Uganda calibration when selling locally; use the international floor for export, funded, or global buyers.
• 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. Fix: select a niche, promise, offer path, and fee boundary.
• Hourly or day-rate quotes anywhere in the output. Fix: price the defined outcome and scope with a recorded rationale.
• Pages-only or "starter" packages below the market floor. Fix: retain the strategy, content, SEO, QA, and handoff floor.
• Bundling recurring work into the project fee. Fix: price it separately with exclusions.
• "We can do anything" language. Fix: name the primary buyer, problem, and no-fit work.
• Softening approved commitments. Fix: preserve the commercial boundary in agency-narrative.md.
• Pay-for-performance, equity, or revenue-share structures. Fix: use authorised fixed project and retainer terms.
• Inventing facts. Fix: label the hypothesis and assign verification.

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.

Artefact	Consumer	Acceptance condition
Agency positioning brief	Leadership, marketing, and sales	Defines niche, category, buyer, promise, proof, exclusions, and competitive frame.
Offer and scope architecture	Sales and delivery	Names tiers, exclusions, price logic, capacity, change path, and acceptance.
Qualification and proposal rules	Sales and proposal teams	Gives observable fit, no-fit, discovery, proof, and fee-floor decisions.

Evidence Produced

Evidence	Format	Acceptance condition
Positioning evidence register	Claim, source, status, limitation	No market or proof claim rests on invention.
Commercial decision log	Choice, rejected option, rationale, owner	Fee and scope decisions are traceable.

Capability Contract

Default to read-only commercial analysis. Editing assets requires authority. Publishing claims, quoting, changing fee floors, signing scope, or terminating a client requires explicit leadership authority.

Degraded Mode

Fallback if evidence or capabilities are unavailable: return a provisional brief with hypotheses and validation tasks. Never claim demand, price acceptance, proof, or approval without evidence.

Decision Rules

Choice	Action	Failure or risk avoided
Niche has painful demand, reachable buyers, proof, and delivery fit	Commit and build proof density	Generic agency positioning
Value is clear but scope uncertainty is material	Sell paid discovery	Free solution design and price guessing
Prospect conflicts with fee, authority, or operating rules	Decline or refer	Misfit scope and counter-reference

Worked Example

A studio with three verified hospitality projects chooses owner-led lodges as its primary niche, packages direct-booking and enquiry outcomes, and sets a paid content-discovery gate. It does not claim regional market leadership or quote a fee its capacity model cannot sustain.

References

• references/agency-narrative.md — the canonical paragraph, category definition, and commitments. Anchor file for everything else.
• references/niche-selection-rubric.md — how to choose, validate, and expand a single-vertical niche: the five specialisation types, the 1,000–10,000 prospect / 10–100 competitor guardrail, niche scoring, the positioning-statement formula, concentration risk, and staged adjacent-niche expansion. Pairs with the design-side design-system-skills:sector-strategies, resolved through the global engine-routing table.
• references/niche-positioning-sources.md — attributed sources for the niche rubric (Enns, Morgan, Baker, Dunford, Godin) with UNVERIFIED flags.
• references/premium-website-offer-playbook.md — the three-tier offer ladder (Foundation / Growth / Authority), tier inclusions, the commercial logic behind the relevant market 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/uganda-market-pricing-calibration.md - Uganda and East Africa pricing bands, payment structures, scope-control rules, and no-go signals.
• 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.

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

Notes

• This skill is a portable execution layer for both Claude Code and Codex.
• Do not modify the agency narrative or market floors 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.