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Marketing positioning is the topic we want to talk about today. Picture the scene; A client calls. The brief is good, right in your market, and you know you can fill it well.
Then they say it. “We have had a cheaper quote.”
So you do the maths. You come down on the fee. You win the business. And you tell yourself it was the right call.
But here is the question nobody asks in that moment: why was price the thing being compared in the first place?
Fee pressure is one of the most common frustrations we hear from recruitment business owners. And almost every conversation about it focuses on the wrong thing. Better negotiation tactics. More confidence in the room. How to justify your rate.
Those things matter. But they are downstream of the real issue. The real issue is positioning. And if you do not fix that, the fee conversations will keep coming.
What You Will Learn in This Post:
- Why fee pressure is rarely about the fee
- What positioning actually means for a small recruitment business
- Why generalist agencies are most at risk and what to do about it
- How to build authority that changes the fee conversation before it starts
When Price Becomes the Only Variable
Think about how a hiring manager chooses a recruiter.
They have a brief. They reach out to two or three agencies. They have a conversation, maybe receive a proposal, and then they make a decision.
If everything in that process looks broadly similar, if the conversations feel the same, the proposals look the same, and everyone uses more or less the same language. The only meaningful variable left is price. And of course, they are going to push on it.
You cannot blame the client for that. They are making a rational decision with the information they have been given. The problem is the information they have been given.
When a recruitment business has not established a clear position in the market and has not communicated what genuinely sets it apart from the next recruiter on the list, it is asking clients to take a leap of faith. Most clients will not make that leap. They will default to the number.
This is not a negotiation problem. It is a positioning problem. And the fix has to happen long before that phone call.
What Positioning Actually Means for a Small Recruitment Business
Positioning is the answer to one question: why you, specifically, over everyone else, a client could call?
Not “we have a great network.” Not “we really care about our clients.” Every recruiter says those things. They are expected, not differentiating.
A strong position is specific. It names a market, a type of client, a type of problem, or a type of outcome that you are uniquely placed to deliver. And it is communicated consistently, before, during, and after every client interaction.
When someone has been seeing your content for weeks, and it speaks directly to the challenges in their sector, when they visit your website. It feels like it was built for their industry, when they get on a call with you, and you already understand their world without them having to explain it, the fee conversation changes character entirely.
One of our members described it perfectly. He said that by the time he got on a call with a new client, the fee was almost secondary. They had already decided they wanted to work with him based on what they had seen of him over time. They knew his value before the conversation even started.
That is what a clear position, consistently communicated, actually delivers. The client has already done their own convincing.
Why Generalist Positioning Is the Highest-Risk Place to Be
The evidence is clear on this, and our experience with clients backs it up: generalist micro agencies face the most fee pressure. The reason is straightforward.
When you are available for everything, you are the obvious choice for nothing.
Generalist positioning tells a client you can help with whatever they need. The client hears: one of many options. Which means price becomes the tiebreaker.
Specialist positioning says something different. It says: we work specifically in your world. We know your market, your hiring challenges, your candidate pool, and what goes wrong when you get this hire wrong. The client hears: this person understands us in a way the others do not.
We see this consistently with the businesses we work with. Those who have committed to a clear niche, whether that is a sector, a geography, a type of role, or a type of client, have the fewest conversations about fees. Not because they never face pushback. But by the time they get to that conversation, the client already sees the difference.
Karen, who runs a specialist medical sales recruitment business, had a company call her out of the blue to say they had been using another recruiter for the past 2 years. Still, her content had been so consistently useful that they wanted to switch to it. That client never asked about her fees. They had already decided.
What to Do Instead of Dropping the Fee
When the “we have had a cheaper quote” conversation happens, and it will, what is the alternative to discounting?
First, understand what the client is actually telling you. When they say you are more expensive, they are usually saying they cannot yet see why you are worth the difference. That is not a price objection. It is a value gap. And value gaps are closed with information, not discounts.
Second, have something to point to. If you have been producing content that demonstrates your sector knowledge, if you have case studies showing the outcomes you have delivered for similar businesses, if your personal brand on LinkedIn reflects genuine expertise rather than generic recruitment messaging, you have evidence. Evidence closes value gaps.
Third, hold the position. Dropping the fee feels like the path of least resistance. But every time you drop it, you signal that your original number was not justified. And you train that client, and others like them, to push on price every time.
The businesses that command the best fees are not the ones with the sharpest negotiators. They are the ones who have built enough authority in their market that clients do not feel the need to test the price.
Thanks,
Denise and Sharon
How We Can Help
If fee pressure is something you deal with regularly, it is worth taking a closer look at how your business is positioned and whether your marketing communicates that position effectively.
That is the work we do inside Superfast Circle, and we have just completely rebuilt the programme. If you have looked at joining us before and it was not quite the right fit, it is worth another look.
Dop us an email on [email protected] and we will send over the details.
