Summary

Growth breeds complexity — across product bets, routes to market, and messaging. What once felt clear gets knotted in the chase for breadth. The answer isn’t doing more; it’s choosing a niche to dominate. When teams share that lens, focus tightens and performance compounds.

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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

The Real Constraint

Mid-market leaders often feel wedged between ambition and reality: you can’t outspend a giant, yet going broad blurs what you stand for. The result is indecision, and indecision is expensive. The real constraint isn’t scale; it’s attention and credibility in the precise moments where buyers make consequential choices. That’s where brand earns the right to be considered.

Market leaders win through ubiquity. You don’t need ubiquity to grow; you need decisive relevance. That means being known for solving a high-stakes problem better, faster, or more reliably in a defined context, and doing so so consistently that preference becomes default.

Selective Dominance

Selective dominance is a deliberate pivot: define the arena where you can lead — a specific need, moment, or buyer context — and then own the experience end to end. It reframes growth from “How do we match their reach?” to “Where can we be the default?” The economics follow: higher win rates, stronger pricing, shorter cycles, and better referrals when the stakes are high and your difference is obvious.

Harvard Business Review notes that midsize firms’ edge comes less from size and more from reputation, trust, and niche speed anchored in specialised capabilities. We often see leadership teams underestimate how potent that combination becomes when it’s concentrated rather than spread thin.

Picking Your Arena

You’re looking for a tight space with consequence, not just convenience. Big enough to move the numbers, specific enough to exclude distractions. Two tests help: does this context create urgency, and can we design proof moments that no-one else matches?

• One critical job with meaningful downside if unresolved.
• A buyer context where incumbents are slow, generic, or misaligned.
• A segment with sufficient volume and clear willingness to pay for certainty.
• Proof points you can control end to end, not just message.

Operating To Win

Owning a niche is an operating choice, not a tagline. Cross-functional focus turns positioning into performance, week after week.

• Align product, marketing, sales, and customer success on the chosen arena with visible weekly rituals.
• Codify qualification, pricing guardrails, and handoffs so decisions stay tight through hiring and change.
• Track win rate, average deal size, and cycle length in the arena monthly.
• Watch leading indicators: inbound from lookalike buyers, price stability, and repeat purchase from the right customers.

Expand Deliberately

Dominance earns the right to expand. The trick is adjacency discipline: extend from strength into neighbouring contexts where your existing proof still applies, rather than jumping to unrelated scale. Move only when the signals in your core are strong and self-sustaining.

Treat trade-offs as signals, not barriers. When you prove leadership in one decisive moment, scale stops being the contest and starts being the consequence.

Sources:

• What Drives Growth in Midsize Firms? — Harvard Business Review

Further Resources

1. Positioning Strategy: Choose Your Territory with Confidence
2. Navigating Category Perceptions: Aligning Brand Strategy for Growth
3. Resetting Competitive Frames: Building Trust Through Brand Strategy

Curious how this applies in your market? We’re speaking with leaders across industries every week. Let’s talk.

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