One of our current clients originally came to us because they had run out of ideas on how they could be the best at what they did. They wanted our take on what we thought they needed to do to be the ‘only’ choice for their customers.
The problem is, in just about any industry you care to name, there is always a choice for your customers. Being (in your opinion) better than everyone else isn’t enough nowadays.
For example, I prefer Google Chrome as my web browser of choice (even if, more recently, I’ve been using the Brave browser for its speed and removal of cookies and trackers).
However, I’m happy enough to use Safari on the (admittedly) rare occasions when a particular website doesn’t play so nicely with Chrome. Changing over to Safari is not a big deal to me. In the same way while I prefer Evian bottled water, if the restaurant only has Volvic it’s not a deal-breaker.
You see where I’m going with this?
Value Is A Matter Of Customer Choice
It doesn’t matter whether what you’re selling is (as far as you’re concerned) ‘the best’. No matter what the product or service, there are other choices out there which, by and large, are just as good in the eyes of your customer. Maybe they’re not as good, but they’re good enough. And that’s all that matters to some people.
Today, customers are surrounded with a array of choices that – by and large – all meet their buying criteria. So how are you going to stand out?
By not trying to be just the best choice, but by aiming to be the only choice. The challenge is for your business value to be seen as a market of one. You need to aim to radically differentiate your product or service offering in such as way so that you stand out in the minds of your target market.
In the case of the client I mentioned earlier, we’ve been working with them in defining their business value in new ways.
- Firstly, we re-defined and prioritized the markets that they occupy.
- Then we looked at what, exactly, were the results that their customers were expecting to realize by buying their product.
- Finally, we worked on developing collateral and tools that allowed prospective customers to see the value of the result (i.e. not the product).
As a result, our client’s offering is now more about being invaluable, or indispensable, in the eyes of their customers. They don’t talk about being “the best” any more.
Today, there’s rarely a “best” in anything these days, so communicating your business value in such terms is always going to be a tough gig. Now, it’s about standing out from the crowd, based upon whatever criteria makes sense with your company, with your product/service, and in your market space.
It’s no longer about what you’re selling. It’s about what your customer is buying.
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