For leaders of multi-service consultancies, one challenge crops up time and again: how do you position your firm with clarity when you're serving a wide range of clients, contexts, and challenges?
Too often, the default is to try to cover everything under one umbrella proposition. But that “one-size-fits-all” approach is rarely fit for purpose. It’s either too generic to be useful (“We help clients solve complex problems”) or so watered down it fails to guide any real decisions about marketing, sales, offers, or even hiring.
The answer isn’t to simplify your firm’s positioning down to one tidy tagline. It’s to embrace the complexity, but structure it with intention.
Here’s how.
At some point in a consulting firm’s growth, the leadership team realizes that their original value proposition - crafted when they were a single-practice or founder-led team - no longer reflects the business they’re running. It doesn’t speak to their strategy, their breadth of capabilities, or the evolving sophistication of their clients.
A single firm-wide proposition becomes a bottleneck. It’s too vague to support specific sales motions. It can’t flex to the real differences between a digital transformation buyer in a global enterprise and a cost-reduction buyer in a mid-market business.
But the solution isn’t to let a thousand propositions bloom. That’s a fast track to brand confusion, internal misalignment, and messaging chaos.
Instead, smart firms adopt a tiered value proposition model - one that aligns every layer of positioning without losing strategic coherence.
Recommended reading: Want More Clients? Stop Talking About Your Expertise!
Every consultancy needs a clear, cohesive statement of what it exists to solve - regardless of service line. This is your umbrella. It’s not about what you do; it’s about why clients seek out a firm like yours in the first place.
It should be:
This umbrella proposition anchors your brand and ensures consistency across all public-facing communications. Think of it as your North Star.
Once your umbrella is set, the next layer adds practical clarity. Depending on your firm’s business model, that second layer should organize around either:
The choice depends on how your clients buy. If they come to you with a problem in mind, use cases may be the better lens. If they come to you because of who they are and what kind of firm you’re built for, segments might make more sense.
Whichever option you choose in Layer Two, use the third layer to provide the complementary view. If you went with use cases in Layer Two, use segments in Layer Three - and vice versa.
This tri-level structure allows you to zoom in and out without losing clarity.
Across all three layers, every proposition should follow a consistent structure. A strong value proposition should answer:
How do we help? Your firm’s point of view on the issue and how it should be solved, plus the client success journey you’ve designed to solve it.
This structure keeps your messaging grounded, specific, and connected across levels. It prevents a fractured story - and helps teams stay aligned on how to talk about the work.
A common question: “If we build all these propositions, what happens to our actual services?”
The answer: they don’t change. Your services can stay as they are, at least for now.
What changes is how those services are framed, packaged, and presented. In one proposition, your transformation work might be framed as modernization; in another, as efficiency. It’s the same delivery, through a different lens.
Think of each proposition layer as a filter - not a menu rewrite.
That said, there is a way to fully re-design your services once you’ve validated your value proposition, and it might make for a different post some other time. The essence of it is to build services along the client success journey you’ve designed; and it usually works by 1) undbundling your services so you can review the capabilities underpinning them; 2) mapping your capabilities to the client success journey you’ve designed (think: “which of these do clients need at this specific milestone within the journey?”), and then, 3) eventually, re-design them.
Recommended reading: Why Consulting Value Propositions Must Include a Client Success Journey
Not every firm starts from the top.
In many cases, a thorough client-and-work review will support a top-down approach: define a strong umbrella proposition, then cascade more focused sub-propositions below it.
But in other firms - especially those that are diversified or loosely integrated - a bottom-up path works better. You begin by clarifying what each practice, service line, or sector team stands for. Then, you build a unifying umbrella based on what those perspectives share.
Neither model is inherently better. What matters is coherence. The goal is to create a system that aligns your firm’s strategic intent with the actual work you deliver - and helps every part of your business tell the same story, from a slightly different angle.
A mid-sized sustainability consultancy operated across three distinct practices: ESG strategy, sustainability communications, and concept engineering (e.g., green buildings, wind farms). While aligned in principle, the three groups struggled to collaborate in practice. Cross-selling was rare, and business development was fragmented - each team selling uphill into its own silo.
That changed when a firm-wide “client-and-work review” surfaced a shared cultural insight: across all three practices, the firm was helping clients treat sustainability as a business opportunity - not just a cost or compliance burden. This conviction became the anchor for a new firm-wide proposition:
“We deliver profitable sustainability solutions.”
From there, the team developed a tiered proposition model:
The result: more coherent messaging, better collaboration across teams, and stronger alignment between business development and delivery.
A strong value proposition isn’t about slogans - it’s about structure. If your firm serves multiple clients, solves different types of problems, and operates through multiple teams, you need more than a single tagline. You need a system.
When done right, a tiered proposition model doesn’t dilute your message - it sharpens it. It ensures that every part of your firm speaks the same strategic language, while still allowing for the nuance and specificity that great consulting requires.
And most importantly, it helps clients see the full value you can bring, not just the slice they already know.
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