The decision that happens without you

The reason is matters so much right now is that your prospective clients are making decisions about your business long before they ever speak to you.

6sense’s 2024 Buyer Experience Report, which surveyed over 2,500 B2B buyers globally, found that buyers are 70% of the way through their purchasing decision before they make first contact with a supplier. 81% already have a preferred business in mind before that conversation happens. Which means the pitch, the credentials meeting, the chemistry session — all the things professional services businesses invest enormous energy in — are the final act of a play your brand wrote without you in the room. If that brand is vague, generic or simply invisible, the audience has already left the building. 

Why good work needs good branding

This is where most professional services businesses have a blind spot. The instinct is to let quality speak for itself — to trust that good work, strong relationships and a decent reputation will do the heavy lifting. And for a long time, that worked. But Hinge Marketing’s research across 50,000 professional services businesses and their buyers tells a different story today. High growth businesses are almost three times more likely to have a strong, clear brand differentiator. The businesses without one — the ones running variations of “expert team”, “tailored solutions”, “trusted partner” — are competing on familiarity and hope. In a market where median growth has fallen to its lowest point since 2018, that is a strategy with a shrinking return.

The three things to look for

So back to the test. What it actually reveals, when you run it properly, are three very specific gaps.

The first is ‘clarity’ — whether someone can understand what you do in a single sentence without prior knowledge of your business. Research from Nielsen Norman Group shows visitors form a first impression of a website in as little as 10 seconds. The value proposition either lands immediately or it does not land at all.

The second gap is ‘specificity’. “We work with financial services business” is not a position, it is a description. “We help RegTech businesses explain complex compliance propositions to non-technical buyers” is a position. The difference between those two statements is the difference between being considered and being overlooked.

The third gap is the hardest to close and the most commercially valuable. ‘Memorability’. After 30 seconds with your brand, does anything stick? Not a tagline. A feeling. Something that separates you from every other professional services business making broadly similar promises to broadly similar people. Spellbrand’s analysis of over 2,000 brands found that the gap between how a business sees itself and how the market sees it is almost always wider than anyone expects, and that it directly affects pricing power and the ability to retain clients over time.