You are very smart people, and so I can make some bullet-point observations without much explanation and still be helpful to you. Read these and see if they ring true to you:
It's hard to get current employees excited about a new positioning because they joined your firm with a specific expectation and now the rules are changing. So it's good to socialize any positioning work by involving them in the process, but in the end it cannot be a democratic decision. The younger the employee, the less they'll be interested in working at a well-positioned firm. Variety and exploration are more important than competence. That's fun but it's selfish.
It's nonsense to think that you must work within a tight vertical to be a well-positioned firm. It's just one of the many options. It's the simple one because you can find your prospects easily, but there are many other good possibilities. When I work with a firm in the Positioning Audit or Total Business Review, we usually explore five or so before landing on the right one for further testing.
Many large, well-known, tenured firms are not positioned at all...on the surface. But they are successful anyway because of one or more of these three things: the are large enough to be on the short list of firms with a deep enough bench to do big projects; they exude confidence and prospects are drawn to that; they are very disciplined about business development....
