SECTION 1
Why It Matters
Positioning is the foundation of your professional brand. It shapes how clients perceive your value, which projects you’re competitive for, and ultimately whether you win the work at all. Strong positioning lets a client size you up in seconds and know exactly why they should engage. Weak or scattered positioning means even genuinely experienced consultants struggle to get traction — the market simply can’t tell what they’re good at.
It’s also sticky. Once clients and referral sources know you for a particular thing, repositioning takes real effort. Better to get it right early than to course-correct later.
SECTION 2
Framing Your Experience
Positioning starts with an honest inventory of your expertise — both how much of it you have and how deep it runs.
Depth is relative to the field, not absolute. AI is one of the hottest topics in business right now, but it’s also genuinely new — someone with three years of hands-on AI experience may already be among the more seasoned practitioners available. Procurement strategy, by contrast, is a mature discipline where clients typically expect real depth — often 15-20+ years — before they consider someone a true authority.
How to check yourself: Write down your years of experience in the specific area you’re positioning around, then list 3-5 concrete outcomes you’ve driven in that area — not responsibilities, results. If you’re struggling to fill that list, or if your tenure looks thin relative to how mature the field is, that’s a signal to either narrow your claim or broaden your positioning until the two line up.
Pro Tip: Frame your experience in terms of years and specific, named outcomes — not job titles. “Reduced procurement cycle time 30% across four Tier 1 automotive suppliers” tells a client far more than “former Director of Procurement.”
SECTION 3
Assessing Client Demand
Expertise only matters if there’s a market for it. The next question is how your experience maps to what clients actually want.
If you have a niche with a large pool of potential buyers, lean into it — that’s the low-hanging fruit. The more challenging situation is when your niche is real but narrow. Say you position yourself as “a procurement expert for aerospace and defense Tier 2 suppliers serving major Primes like Lockheed and Northrop Grumman.” That’s a credible, specific niche — and also a small one. Winning consistently in that space requires either an unusually high conversion rate or an existing network deep enough to generate warm introductions.
How to check yourself: Do a quick gut-check on market size before you commit to a niche. How many companies actually fit the description? If the honest answer is “not many,” broaden until the math works — for example:
- “Procurement expert for companies below $100M in revenue”
- “Aerospace procurement expert” (same industry, wider client base — from small suppliers to billion-dollar Primes)
Either widens your aperture without abandoning what makes you credible.
Pro Tip: If your instinct is to niche down, pressure-test it against how often that specific need actually shows up in the market. Narrow is powerful when the demand is there — and a liability when it isn’t.
SECTION 4
Weighing Personal Interest
The last input is the one consultants most often skip: do you actually want to do this work?
If strong experience, real interest, and healthy client demand all line up, you’ve found the sweet spot. Build your positioning around it and don’t overthink it.
More often, it’s a tradeoff. Go back to the two aerospace procurement framings from Section 3. The broader one (“companies below $100M”) likely means working across multiple industries with less mature procurement organizations. The narrower one keeps you in aerospace but spans a wider range of client sophistication, from small suppliers to billion-dollar Primes. Same underlying expertise, very different day-to-day.
How to check yourself: Look back at your last five projects or engagements. Rank them by how much you enjoyed the work, separately from how much impact you had. Where the two overlap is usually a strong signal for where to position — and worth weighting more heavily than you might expect, since this is the work you’ll be doing for years, not months.
Pro Tip: Interest isn’t a nice-to-have layered on top of positioning — it’s an input. Factor it in deliberately rather than defaulting to whatever sounds most marketable on paper.
SECTION 5
Bringing It All Together In Your Pitch
Once your positioning is set, the next test is turning it into a pitch that actually lands. This is where the resume-versus-relevance tension from the introduction of this article plays out directly.
Compare two openers a consultant might send to the same prospective client:
Pitch #1
“My name is Bob Jones and I worked at McKinsey in the industrial goods practice. I’ve worked with large OEMs across the construction industry and have a strong understanding of their dealer network dynamics and parts strategy. I graduated from Stanford Business School.”
Pitch #2
“Based on my preliminary review, it appears you’re currently seeing a decline in OEM parts sales through your dealer network. Being a major revenue driver, I would imagine you’ve already talked with your dealer council and are trying to figure out what’s changed. Based on what I’ve seen in the field, the increase in Re-Man parts is likely playing a role and will need to be considered as you develop your strategy for the next year.”
The fact that you’re on the call likely means your professional pedigree is assumed. If you make that pedigree the focus of your narrative, you’re leaving the client’s true tension unaddressed. That’s the differentiator many consultants overlook: not who you are but how precisely you can name what the client is dealing with.
Of course, this only works if the insight is specific and accurate. Generic claims like “I help companies grow revenue,” “I know how to hire better talent” read as noise regardless of how they’re packaged. Save those statements for your LinkedIn profile headline. The work is in the homework: understanding the client’s actual situation well enough to describe it back to them before you’ve had a single conversation.
And if you don’t know, ask good questions to get there. If you listen to a client long enough, they’ll tell you how to sell to them.
Pro Tip: Before you send a pitch, ask whether it could only have been written for this client — or whether it’s a template you could send to anyone in the industry. If it’s the latter, go back and get more specific.
SECTION 6
Catalant Tips
Positioning yourself through Catalant involves the same fundamentals covered above, with a few specific nuances worth knowing. For more targeted guidance, jump to: How to Craft a Winning Pitch