- Do you believe your company has a competitive advantage?
- Do your prospects perceive your company has a competitive advantage?
- Do you know that you’re more right for your prospects than your sales numbers reflect?
Alka-Seltzer time?
If a business or organization continues to do what it has always done, it will get what it has always gotten. As demand for your category increases, your numbers will grow as long as you continue to get your share of the market. If, however, demand shrinks in the category, which so many have in this economic down-turn, in order to thrive (or survive), you have to take somebody else’s share. Businesses and Organizations pull ahead of the competition by further differentiating the customer experience.
The first step is to clearly establish compelling reasons why your offerings are more right for your prospects than the offerings of your competition. Whether one’s business is accounting, gasoline, groceries, healthcare, finance or insurance, clients/customers place value in two areas. They place value in your ability to solve a problem they’re experiencing. And, they place value in a client/customer experience that delivers on the EthicalFactor – trust (genuineness), credibility (believability) and partnership (client/customer focus and accountability).
Differentiation will only occur if your prospects perceive they will be receiving a better solution to their problem and/or a more valuable client experience than they would expect to receive elsewhere. Every product or service is composed of a core and an outer core. Inside the core would be solutions to problems and EthicalFactor experiences your prospects expect to get from the typical provider of your product or service.
In the outer core are benefits you offer that go beyond expectation. Differentiation happens in the outer core. Further, quality is a function of expectation; the less expected in the core, the greater the opportunity to stand out in the outer core. And, the extent to which you’re successful at differentiation turns on moments of truth and interactions you and your employees have with clients – not with what’s in a mission statement or client commitment policy.
In today’s market, with clients perceiving much quality “equality” in products and services, it becomes increasingly more difficult to stand out with an offering that will provide a better solution to clients’/customers' problems than they would expect to receive elsewhere. While there may be very little perceived difference between your products or services and your competitors’, there are innumerable ways of differentiating by giving your clients an experience that delivers more of the EthicalFactor than they would expect from your competition. The WOWEDFactor (extraordinary human, engaging or connecting experiences) are a subset of the EthicalFactor. However, it's impossible to deliver WOWEDFactor experience if you're doing exactly what your competition does. I'll provide more info in next post about my experience in doing Customer Service workshops for Shell dealers across the country.
The Pullingahead plan then is to:
- Find ways of discerning what it will take to make your offerings more valuable to clients than what’s being offered by the competition;
- Package your offerings so that they include these competitive advantages;
- Effectively communicate to prospects the advantages of your offerings so that they purchase them.
Firestone
firestone@wowedamerica.com
314-863-4000
