How easy is it for your potential customers to differentiate your products and services in an ever competitive market place?

Do you know what makes you unique and special?

Defining yourself uniquely, will enable you to stand out in the crowd. You may have heard of the concept of a USP or a Unique Selling Proposition. This is critical to the long term success of your business.

The danger is that we can speak about our businesses in language that is too general – “quality service”, “fast delivery”, “expertise”, “reliable” ……

These are known as platitudes or to put it another way, they would be statements that potential clients would expect as a given for your service from anyone. What you need to be saying is something different, that will flip your prospects minds from alpha state (auto pilot) to beta state (alert).This will need something different that will prick their attention.

Without that uniqueness, the temptation can be to try and differentiate on price by discounting, but this would be turning you into a commodity business.  This is a path to be avoided.

Ask yourself the questions –

– What problems, frustrations, or challenges do your prospects expect to face when dealing with your industry in general ?

– How can you make sure you provide them comfort this wont be the case with you?

– How can you delight and exceed expectations?

– What statistics can you use to differentiate what you offer and provide some comfort for your prospects?

– What is different about the way you do things, particularly as this will be experienced by a client?

This is the path to uniquely defining your business.

You may find that you can offer some form of guarantee that others in your sector do not offer. This is a strong way to differentiate you and remove an element of risk from the purchase.

Be sure you can honour this though in a high percentage of cases, so that if you do have to compensate people on a rare occasion, this has only a minor impact in comparison with the increased sales in a broader sense from having the guarantee.

You may also want to explore a potential niche market for you services or products. Is there a sector you can specialise in, that will again differentiate you. If you provide a service that positions you as a specialist for accountants, for example, an accountancy practice would be more likely to pick you than a generalist.

One final piece of advice. To help you define what makes you unique and special, why not ask your clients? Who better to give you a view on why your services and products are chosen!

 

Do you want more help with going through this process? Then drop me an email at tony@bb-ds.co.uk or call me on 07912143040 and we can book in a free 30 minutes for me to start to explore this for your business.