It’s becoming increasingly difficult - and increasingly important - to differentiate your products and services from those of your competitors, and to stand out from the crowd in increasingly noisy markets. The problem is particularly acute in technology markets, where nonsense phrases like “innovative”, “best-in-class”, “leading-edge”, “customer-centric” and all manner of other meaningless drivel is being thrown out at customers.
It doesn’t take long for prospects to loose the ability (or the desire) to discriminate between so many similar messages. The advertising budgets that propel these poorly chosen messages towards uninterested markets represent a complete waste of money for everyone other than the marketing agencies that end up gratefully pocketing the fees.
Real, meaningful differentiation starts with establishing a deep understanding of the issues that are truly important to your intended target audience. It has to be based on your ability to deliver solutions that do a better job of solving the identified problems than any other options available to the intended customer. And it depends on using ideas and language that resonates with your intended audience.
Simon Sinek, in “Start With Why”, puts his finger on why so many companies are poor communicators. They start with what they do, or how they do it. They ignore the thing that is most important to their audience - they fail to start with “why” or even to address the subject. Yet why you have chosen to do what you do is fundamentally important to the consideration of most prospective buyers.
Some consultants have attempted to associate differentiation with the creation of a “unique value proposition”. But there’s an obvious anomaly in the very idea of a universal unique value proposition. We take a different approach. We help clients to better understand what really matters to their customers and prospects, to develop a distinctive point of view, and to craft messages that matter to their audience and are likely to have them wanting to learn more.
Take the Next Step
We would be pleased to share what we’ve learned about helping high-growth-potential organisations to stand out from the crowd as part of a balanced programme of sales and marketing performance improvement. As a first step, you may find it useful to self-audit your current sales and marketing processes.
As soon as you are ready to learn more, please email us at standout@inflexion-point.com, or call us on +44 (0) 118 975 0595. We look forward to discovering whether we might be able to help your organisation to improve its performance in this critical area.