How to market a BPO (and why your contract pipeline isn't a marketing problem)
The contract pipeline has slowed. You're losing pitches to operators no better than you. The marketing you've been doing isn't producing the results it used to. You're about to brief another agency. Score your firm's market position free with Soba:IQ.
You can't outwork the marketing problem
You've been here before. You're about to be here again.
The first time this happened, you decided the answer was more marketing, so you briefed a marketing agency who proposed account-based marketing aimed at procurement directors, a LinkedIn campaign aimed at the C-suite, gated content about the future of customer experience, paid media targeting key accounts, and a pilot programme to de-risk the first engagement.
The deck was sophisticated, the brand was sleek and shiny and all the KPIs looked just right. They could talk the talk but six months on it was starting to look like they couldn't walk the walk. You asked them what was wrong and they said what they say to every client: B2B sales cycles in this category are long, you needed to spend more, the awareness phase has to compound before the pipeline building can start. You let them run for another quarter and still nothing changed, so you did the right thing and fired them.
The next agency had a different pitch on the surface, but came with a sense of déjà vu: sophisticated tactical proposals that didn't shift your P&L let alone your pipeline. You fired them after nine months and now you're convinced that all marketing is just expensive lies, which is understandable.
Only, those agencies weren't lying to you, but they weren't being entirely honest with you either. The marketing agency industry is incentivised to sell long-term retainers and you do that by piling tactics on top of each other and then moving onto the next client where you can pile on more tactics. It's a whole business model built around burn and churn.
What nobody is telling you is that you don't have a tactical problem. You have a deeply strategic problem that will take more than Google Ads and LinkedIn posts to fix, but once it's fixed it is fixed for good. If you're a marketing agency, it's easy to see how that's not an appealing business model.
The problem you have is this: the position you hold in the market is virtually nonexistent and that means that potential buyers either don't know you exist and are a viable option or don't see any reason to choose you over the provider at the top of the Google search rankings.
Marketing is the symptom, not the cause
Let's define "market positioning" (also referred to as "positioning" or "position") so you can make informed choices from here on out.
A market position is the space that you occupy in the mind of your ideal buyer. It's made up of several different components, such as differentiation, niching and pricing power, and is commonly expressed through branding, advertising, and communications.
The more people see and understand a brand, the more likely they are to remember the brand. The brands that have the most distinctive market positions are the ones that the buyer is most likely to remember, hence "space you occupy".
A very simple test is to try and answer this question honestly: when people think about call-handling and customer experience problems, do they think of calling us before calling anyone else?
If the answer is yes, you wouldn't have read this far.
Market position can be easily measured in customer research, buyer category surveys, customer interviews, competitor research and, most importantly, its impact on your bottom line.
The Corporate Executive Board, working with Google, surveyed 1,500 B2B buyers and found that 86% of them perceive no real difference between the suppliers in their category. (Source: Purchasing Psychology in Professional Services.) This means that 86% of B2B buyers don't know why they should choose one brand over another brand, which pushes the buyer and the vendor into conversations that drive pricing down.
86%
of B2B buyers perceive no real difference between the suppliers in their category.
— Corporate Executive Board / Google, n=1,500
In contact centre procurement the number is likely higher: RFP templates are standardised, capability decks are uniform, pitches sound identical, and the procurement director reading your proposal reads three other proposals saying the same thing in the same order, and is then expected to pick one vendor.
Those agency retainers that you've had (unsuccessfully) are trying to solve this problem by reaching as many people as possible, but the problem with this approach is that when procurement directors see that what you're saying is the same as what everyone else is saying, it's impossible for them to make the right choice (the right choice is you). Increasing the volume of an undifferentiated message produces more impressions of an undifferentiated position. The pipeline still doesn't move because the conversion problem was never about volume.
The standard advice and why it isn't moving the pipeline
The Google search results for BPO marketing are full of tactical advice. Endless lists of things you should be doing that are guaranteed to eat up your time and feel like progress while not making any progress where it matters (P&L and new contracts). Suggestions include: account-based marketing, LinkedIn ads aimed at COOs and CFOs, intent data from third-party providers, whitepapers and case studies, industry-specific positioning, pain-point messaging, thought leadership content and pilot programmes to de-risk the sale.
All of it boils down to busy work because none of it improves or fixes a broken market position.
Account-based marketing works when there's a defensible reason for the targeted account to take the call. If your pitch sounds like the three other BPOs the procurement director will hear from this quarter, ABM produces meetings without producing deals.
LinkedIn campaigns work when the content gives the C-suite buyer something they can't get from the next BPO's LinkedIn. If your content is "five customer experience trends to watch in 2026", they can get that from anybody.
Pain-point messaging works when the pain point is specific enough that only certain operators are credible answers to it. If your pain point is "scaling customer service efficiently while maintaining quality", every BPO in the country is pitching against the same pain.
Pilot programmes work when the pilot is risk-mitigation for a buyer who has already decided you might be the right vendor. If the buyer hasn't decided that yet, the pilot is a free trial they're never going to commit to converting.
Each of these tactics is good. None of them work when the position underneath is undifferentiated, because all of them depend on the buyer already accepting that you are worth more than the alternatives. The tactic doesn't install the differentiation. The differentiation has to be there first.
Bain's research on B2B pricing identified five beliefs that limit competitive performance. The first and most damaging: "Our service is commoditised, so we must accept prevailing prices". This belief is endemic in mid-market BPO because contact centre delivery is structurally similar across firms. Leadership teams conclude that real differentiation is impossible, and the conclusion becomes self-fulfilling. If you believe the work is a commodity, you market it like one, and the buyer prices it like one. (Source: The Real Cost of Not Being Different.)
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What the research says about where pricing power actually comes from
Kantar BrandZ analysed the components of brand pricing power (what it takes to charge premium pricing and raise prices) across thousands of brands and concluded that meaningful difference accounts for 94% of a brand's pricing power. That means that when the buyer can tell why you're best placed to solve their problem and they're not weighing you up against half a dozen alternatives, you can charge more. By comparison, your reputation only accounts for the remaining 6%. (Source: The Real Cost of Not Being Different.)
94%
of a brand's pricing power comes from meaningful difference. Just 6% comes from being known.
— Kantar BrandZ
This is the central problem with treating marketing as a pipeline solution. Marketing produces salience (how well known you are) but salience is 6% of the pricing power equation. Without the 94% (meaningful difference), more salience produces more visibility of an undifferentiated position, not more pricing power. The marketing investment compounds the wrong variable, which basically means that your marketing is the equivalent to setting money on fire.
The Hinge Marketing 2025 High Growth Study, surveying over 1,200 firms, found that high-growth firms were nearly three times more likely to have a strong differentiator than their slower-growing peers. Not three times more likely to spend more on marketing, but three times more likely to have something distinctive to say and to stand out in their market. (Source: The Case for Market Positioning.)
There is also research on what happens when undifferentiated messaging is amplified. A 2019 study published in Industrial Marketing Management analysed 156 B2B firms and found that undifferentiated positioning has a measurably negative effect on brand performance. The effect was statistically significant. Firms that sound like their competitors actively damage their own commercial outcomes, even when they spend more on marketing those outcomes. Again: marketing a weak position is simply wasting money. (Source: Why Your Message Isn't Landing.)
The implication for a BPO that is losing contracts: marketing more aggressively on an undifferentiated position doesn't just fail to fix the pipeline, but can actively make things worse by convincing the buyer that the category is generic and it simply doesn't matter who they choose.
A concrete picture of the difference
Two BPOs are pitching for the same mid-market customer service contract. Both operators are good. Both have the relevant experience. Both senior leadership teams have built and run several similar engagements.
The first BPO is positioned as a full-service contact centre with strong technology integration and a polished CCaaS partner stack. Their pitch covers credentials, client roster, capability deck and a fixed monthly pricing model competitive against the market. The buyer thanks them, asks for a meeting to discuss pricing and negotiates the proposal down significantly before signing. The contract starts at a meaningful discount to the proposed rate. Annual reviews compound the discount because the starting point is wrong.
The second BPO is positioned as the specialist authority on a specific problem the buyer is actively trying to solve, with a record of solving that problem for similar clients. Their pitch covers the same credentials but frames the engagement around the specialist problem the buyer has already identified. The buyer asks two clarifying questions about scope and signs at the proposed rate. The contract grows in year two because the buyer expands the engagement into adjacent problem areas the second BPO is also credibly positioned to solve.
A material revenue differential year one, and a compounding differential every year after.
What good positioning produces in the marketing conversation
BPOs with a strong market position do not need marketing to do the persuasion work and to get them into the room. They simply need it to get them into the room and build mental availability.
The mistake that most marketing makes is that it assumes you're already in the room, that the buyer is already thinking about you, and it defaults to persuasion. If you have a persuasive and defensible market position, then your ABM produces meetings where the buyer is predisposed to take the call because they already understand why this BPO might be relevant to a specific problem they have. LinkedIn content reads as informed point of view, not as content marketing. Pain-point messaging works because the pain point is specific enough that only a small number of operators are credible answers. Pilot programmes convert because the buyer has already decided you might be the right vendor and the pilot is risk mitigation rather than a free trial.
The marketing spend doesn't disappear, but it does produce a multiple of the pipeline that the same spend produced on top of an undifferentiated position. The pricing power that Kantar's research describes shows up in pitch outcomes with less negotiating on fees and attracting clients who are happier to pay those fees because they see the value of what you do and why you're the best option for them.
The longer your market position is active, the more the benefits of it compound: every contract delivered under a strong position adds to the firm's specific reputation, the next pitch arrives with the buyer already half-persuaded, marketing tactics that previously produced lukewarm results start producing warm pipeline, and all you're doing is allocating your marketing budget to backing a defensible market position instead of amplifying an indefensible one.
How to actually do it
The work is the same work the differentiation page describes, applied to the marketing question specifically.
- Honest competitive analysis: Not the version your business development team produces where every competitor has weaknesses. The honest version where you accept that the BPOs competing with you are also good firms run by competent leadership, and the question is what you do that they genuinely cannot, will not or do not. The answer to that question is what the buyer is paying the premium for.
- Direct buyer research: Conversations with the clients who pay your full rate without negotiation about why they pay it. Not satisfaction interviews. Specific conversations about the moment they decided you were worth what you charge and what would have made them decide otherwise. Most BPOs do not do this because the answers are inconsistent with the firm's own assumptions about its value.
- A defensible specialism: A position that is narrow enough to be credible and wide enough to be commercially viable. The niching page covers the difference between a sector and a real niche.
- Internal discipline on the position: Once the position is defined, every part of the operation has to stop contradicting it. The pitches, the website, the LinkedIn presence of the senior team, the way the operations director describes the firm to an analyst on the phone. Most BPOs get the positioning document and then drift back to whatever language is in front of them by the next quarter, which is why the pipeline pressure returns.
The work takes between eight and twelve weeks of externally led strategic effort by people who can ask the questions the leadership team has stopped asking each other. It is not a rebrand. It is not a content campaign. It is the strategic foundation that every marketing tactic, every pitch deck and every pricing proposal is built on top of.
Stop losing, start fixing.
Before you brief another agency or commission another campaign, score the position the marketing is supposed to be amplifying.
Soba:IQ is a free tool that scores your homepage's market position on a 1 to 5 scale and shows you exactly what's working, what isn't and what to do about it. No email gate. No payment. No account. You enter your firm's URL and the tool reads your homepage against a research-led framework. You get a scored report with specific recommendations within two minutes.
If you score a 4 or a 5, your position is doing its work and the pipeline problem you're experiencing is somewhere downstream. The report tells you where to look.
If you score a 1, 2 or 3, the next marketing investment will not fix the pipeline because the position underneath is not giving the marketing anything defensible to amplify. The report tells you what to fix.
Soba: Private Label provides market research and market positioning for B2B firms whose buyers cannot tell them apart from the alternatives. Soba:IQ is the UK's first publicly available market positioning assessment tool, built by Soba and available free at sobaiq.com.
This article draws on research from Bain & Company, the Corporate Executive Board, Hinge Marketing, Kantar BrandZ, McKinsey & Company and peer-reviewed studies in Industrial Marketing Management and the Journal of Marketing. Full citations and methodology in the source reviews linked above.