The Most Expensive Sentence in Commercial Positioning: “We Can Help Anyone”
HP DemandSignals™ | Highly Persuasive
There is a failure mode specific to companies that are genuinely good at what they do.
They’ve worked across multiple sectors. They’ve solved different problems for different clients. They’ve adapted their approach to different contexts and succeeded in most of them. And so when someone asks “who do you work with?” the honest answer feels like it should be broad — because their track record actually is broad.
The sentence that emerges from this is well-intentioned, experientially accurate, and commercially damaging: “We can help anyone — our approach works across industries.”
The damage is not immediately visible. The sentence doesn’t lose deals in an obvious way. It doesn’t produce rejection. It produces something more costly: diffuse, low-conviction interest from buyers who aren’t sure whether you’re exactly what they need. It extends sales cycles by removing the filter that would tell a well-qualified buyer immediately that you’re specifically for them. It invites comparison shopping by declining to define a comparison set that you’d win.
And it signals, to the sophisticated buyer who is implicitly assessing whether this company has done the introspective work of knowing its own limits, that perhaps it hasn’t.
The Mechanism: How Breadth Undermines Credibility
The cognitive science underlying this is attribute substitution — a well-documented decision-making shortcut first described systematically by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. When buyers face a difficult question (“is this company the best choice for my specific situation?”), they substitute an easier one (“does this company look like it specifically knows my type of situation?”). The substitute question is answered through the specificity of the company’s positioning, not its general capability.
A company that positions itself as relevant to everyone fails the substitute question immediately. Not because the general capability isn’t there, but because the buyer’s heuristic reads “relevant to everyone” as “specialised in no one” — and specialisation is the proxy signal for depth.
The research on this is consistent across sectors. A 2017 McKinsey analysis of professional services firm growth rates found that firms with narrowly defined specialisations grew revenue at approximately 2.4× the rate of generalist competitors in the same markets during the study period, despite — and partly because of — serving a smaller addressable market. The narrower the stated focus, the higher the perceived depth, and the higher the fee premium the market accepted for that perception of depth.
This is what Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz has understood since its founding. At 280 lawyers — a fraction of the size of the firms it regularly competes with on the most significant M&A transactions — Wachtell’s deliberate refusal to expand beyond high-stakes corporate law has not limited its commercial position. It has defined it. Their selectivity is their credibility. Every refusal to take work outside their core domain is a restatement of the claim that they are exceptional inside it.
Positioning that claims relevance to everyone resolves, in the buyer’s heuristic assessment, to depth in no one. The commercial cost of “we can help anyone” is not a few lost deals — it’s a systematic discount on the depth signal that determines fee premium and shortlist priority across every evaluation.
The Brand Gravity Momentum Session™ identifies where your positioning is substituting breadth for depth — and maps what a more specific, defensible positioning would do to your shortlist rate, your fee conversations, and the quality of the clients you attract.
Why Companies Default to Universal Positioning
The motivations behind “we can help anyone” positioning are understandable and worth addressing directly, because they need to be resolved rather than overridden for the positioning change to be genuine.
The revenue fear. The most common concern is that narrowing the positioning will reduce the addressable market and therefore reduce revenue opportunity. This concern has surface plausibility and is empirically incorrect in most cases. The McKinsey data referenced above is not unusual — it reflects a consistent pattern in professional services: specialist firms command fee premiums that generalist competitors cannot. The arithmetic of a 25–30% fee premium on a narrower qualified market typically outperforms 5–10% lower fees on a broader unqualified one, once sales cycle length and close rates are factored in.
The historical breadth problem. Many companies that have worked across sectors have clients they value in all of them, and those clients feel excluded if the positioning narrows. This concern is operationally legitimate but strategically misapplied. Positioning describes who you primarily build your brand and pipeline around — it doesn’t prohibit serving clients outside that description. Bain’s articulated focus on specific problem types doesn’t prevent them from taking engagements across industries. But their positioning creates gravity in the spaces where their depth is greatest.
The founder identity conflict. In many companies, the broad positioning reflects the founder’s genuine identity — someone who has built a career on adaptability, who takes pride in being able to solve problems across contexts, who experienced their breadth as a strength. Narrowing the positioning can feel like a denial of that identity. The reframe that resolves this: specificity in positioning is not a claim that the founder can only do one thing. It’s a commercial decision about which buyers should self-select to them, and which problem category deserves the company’s full focused credibility signal.
The Commercial Mechanics of Specific Positioning
The commercial consequences of narrowing from “we can help anyone” to a specific, defensible positioning statement are measurable across four dimensions.
Shortlist rate. A company with specific positioning arrives in relevant evaluations as an obvious candidate rather than a possible one. The buyer who encounters “we specialise in supply chain risk management for Tier 1 automotive suppliers navigating supplier base consolidation” doesn’t need to do interpretive work to determine relevance. The buyer who encounters “we help businesses optimise their operations” does. The first company is shortlisted; the second is filed under “follow up if needed.”
Sales cycle length. When positioning is specific, the qualification conversation is shorter. Buyers already know whether they’re in scope; the first conversation confirms it rather than establishes it. The Gartner research on B2B purchase decision timelines consistently finds that the conversations with the shortest time-to-decision involve suppliers whose relevance was established before the first meeting.
Fee premium. Specificity implies depth, and depth justifies premium. The buyer who has determined that your company specifically understands their type of problem is not running a competitive price comparison — they’re assessing whether the value of that specific depth justifies your fee. That’s a different conversation than the one a generalist is having, and it produces different outcomes.
Referral precision. When clients refer a company with specific positioning, the referral arrives qualified. “They work with mid-sized engineering companies entering Western export markets” produces a different referral than “they do branding.” The referred prospect arrives already knowing whether they’re a fit, which means the conversation starts ahead of where a cold introduction would.
The Positioning Specificity Audit
Three tests that reveal whether your current positioning is creating depth signals or diluting them.
The substitution test. Remove your company name from your current positioning statement. Can any competitor in your sector substitute their name without the statement becoming false? If yes, the positioning is producing no differentiation — it’s describing a category, not a company.
The comparison set test. When a buyer reads your positioning, what set of alternatives do they mentally compare you against? If the comparison set is the entire market in which you compete, your positioning is generic. If the comparison set is a small number of companies with similarly specific claims, your positioning is doing competitive work.
The recognition test. Read your positioning statement to someone in your target client profile who doesn’t know your company. Ask whether it describes a company they’d recognise as specifically relevant to their situation — or a company they’d need to know more about before determining relevance. The time it takes them to answer is a positioning specificity indicator. Immediate recognition means your positioning is specific enough to do pre-qualification work. Extended deliberation means it isn’t.
The Field Test
Write two versions of your positioning statement. The first is your current version. The second answers this question: if you could only serve one type of client, in one specific situation, doing one specific thing you do exceptionally well — what would that be?
Compare the two. The second version will almost certainly feel more limiting. It will also almost certainly feel more credible. That gap — between how limiting it feels and how credible it sounds — is the positioning premium you’re currently leaving unrealised by staying broad.
The companies that have solved the “we can help anyone” problem have not narrowed their capabilities. They’ve narrowed their claim — and in doing so, they’ve deepened the signal of depth that determines whether the right buyers put them on the shortlist before the first conversation. The commercial difference is not marginal. It’s the difference between being discovered and being overlooked.
The Brand Gravity Momentum Session™ identifies the specific positioning territory where your company has deepest credibility — and maps what explicitly claiming that territory would do to the quality and velocity of your pipeline.
HP DemandSignals™ — Strategic brand intelligence for business leaders. Read more at Highly Persuasive →
