Be Different or be dead

July 25, 2016

Why your competitive advantage must be more than just hot air

Source: Pexels

Why your competitive advantage must be more than just hot air.

Most companies struggle with defining their competitive advantage claim. What makes them unique; different from their competitors.

They can’t answer the question “Why should I do business with you and NOT your competition?” in a succinct meaningful way.

There are two traps they fall into.

First, they generally speak to the internal capabilities an organization has (what leadership believes are the differentiators) rather than being explicit about how they compare to others in the market. “We provide the highest quality products.”; “Our people are our greatest asset.” They stress technology.

They talk about their size and claim market leadership.

Second, most competitive advantage statements are high level and aspirational in nature. They are not precise and specific enough to communicate how an organization is special among the choices available.

“We provide the best value.” “We have been in business for 100 years.” “We offer the lowest prices out there.”

The use of helium filled adjectives often abound. Overused and eye-glazing descriptors like: better, best, top, #1, excellent, great, greatest, lowest, most and so on pervade the advertising airwaves.

A competitive claim must declare the difference between your organization and your competitors AND it must be precise enough so that people can “see” the difference.

You can’t see “greatest” for example and you can’t see “most”. They mean different things to different people.

As the solution, create The ONLY Statement as an element of the Strategic Game Plan: “We are the ONLY ones that…” is its form.

ONLY must be brief. If it takes you a page of narrative to define your competitive advantage, you don’t have one.

ONLY never includes the “P” word. Claiming a price advantage is a slippery slope as price can be easily copied and it says nothing about value provided.

“The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about. “ – Seth Godin

A couple of ONLY examples.

“We provide the ONLY solution that permanently stops people from depositing biohazard contaminants through manhole covers”— MUG Solutions, Vancouver

“St John Ambulance is the ONLY provider of First Aid, Health & Safety Solutions Anytime, Anywhere”— St John Ambulance, Vancouver

Test ONLY with your customers to ensure it addresses something they care about, and you consistently demonstrate 24/7. The ONLY Statement works. It can be observed. It can be measured. People get it.

Start your ONLY journey today.

It’s the source of your competitive advantage claim.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.25.16 at 04:34 am by Roy Osing
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July 18, 2016

15 proven ways to have a real competitive advantage

Successful competitive differentiation doesn’t happen at the 50,000’ level; separating yourself from your competition in the clouds is aspirational at best.

15 proven ways to have a real competitive advantage.

It makes you feel good to have the objective, but little happens to turn it into a reality.

Why is successful competitive differentiation difficult to achieve?

Attention and focus need to be applied to the detailed specific performance drivers of differentiation.

The aspiration is easy, but if you don’t bear down on the detailed elements that in harmony produce a believable differentiation claim, you will merely have a “wish and a prayer” that will never happen.

These action items will help you to successfully differentiate you from your competition.

▪️Create a business plan with a strategic context that defines what your competitive claim should look like and the organizational capabilities that should be given priority.

▪️Create your ONLY statement to answer the question “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?”

▪️Avoid perfection; trying to get your competitive claim exactly right. Pour your soul into execution; learn and refine it as you go.

▪️Have a direct line of sight between all employees and your differentiation strategy to ensure each individual knows their role in execution.

▪️Repel mass anything. The herd believes in mass marketing. Sustainable differentiation is the result of focusing on individuals, not mass markets.

▪️Go for premium prices. Provide remarkable value to command higher prices than your competition. Low prices = low value = commodity = no differentiation.

▪️Resist copying. Copying “the best” is a non-starter for differentiation. You may get operational improvements from copying but you will never stand-out strategically.

▪️Align internal systems. Internal infrastructure - policies, compensation, service strategy, reward programs, IT, web and social media - must all work together to deliver your differentiation claim. Inconsistency in delivery renders your claim not believable.

▪️Cultivate leaders ask “How can I help?” rather than “Do this!” as the vehicle to clear roadblocks and enable execution. Successful differentiation = servant leadership. Period.

▪️Shed the impulse to control everything. Empower people; trust customers (eliminate policies intended to control the dishonest few).

▪️Surprise customers with what they don’t expect. This shows you care about delighting them and is a bold move to move away from the commoners.

▪️Think tops down; let growth targets drive the essence of your differentiation strategy. The more bold the growth goals, the more aggressive and creative your strategy.

▪️Cast off the notion of customer service in favour of serving them. You service computers; you serve people. Subordinating your organization to the client leads treating your customers in an exemplary way which cannot be easily replicated by competitors.

▪️Hire for goosebumps. Recruit people based on their proven ability and innate desire to serve others. Their stories are heartwarming and emotional and give you goosebumps. Goosebumps = a human organization = competitive advantage.

▪️Renew your strategy annually. Successful differentiation today is quickly erased by the actions of an aggressive competitor.

If you are diligent in creating an organization capable of implementing this action plan, you will not only successfully differentiate yourself today, you will also sustain in for the long term.

It’s not rocket science; just hard work.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.18.16 at 05:01 am by Roy Osing
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July 4, 2016

Why should we immediately stop copying best practices?

Why should we immediately stop copying best practices?

Benchmarking is viewed as a necessary process for most organizations. There are benchmarking consultant experts and courses you can take to learn how to benchmark proficiently and gain the maximum benefit.

In my view, benchmarking is a simple concept as is its process:

▪️Identify the organization that excels in some aspect of your operations that you believe requires improvement — customer service, business planning, customer engagement, sales management, accounts receivable, advertising planning and so on;

▪️Map (understand deeply) their system or process to understand exactly how they perform the operation;

▪️Define the actions you must take to incorporate their operating system into your operation with the objective of replicating their level of efficiency.

Benchmarking might help you improve your operations efficiency but it won’t make you stand-out from your competition.

Benchmarking can be problematic on several levels:

1. Benchmarking is copying

It’s ‘sucking up’ to an organization or individual recognized (by someone presumed to be the thought leader) to be the best at performing a particular function and is therefore the organization you should aspire to be.

It doesn’t make you special. It may help you improve your position in the crowd of hungry competitors by being more efficient at something, but it won’t help you stand out from them by being more relevant or unique.

Copying is the enemy of being different. The maximum benefit you can achieve by copying is best in class levels of performance which may return better operating results than previously obtained but unless you vault beyond these levels true differentiation won’t happen.

2. Benchmarking keeps you in the herd

The herd is a place where organizations go to blend in with others; to conform with what others do and to lose the DNA attributes that make them special.

Even if you are the ‘best of breed’ you’re still in the herd. It’s just that you execute a process better than any other herd member; you’re still rubbing shoulders with your sameness brethren.

And because you’re tagged ‘the best’, you have no motivation to break away from the herd; you find consolation in it.

The world is becoming a home for best practice addicts and as a result it’s boring and benign.

3. Benchmarking robs you of your individuality

Benchmarking results in conformance; it sucks any unique thinking you may have out of your system and replaces it with the need to capitulate to the leader of the herd.

Rather than look for a unique solution to your problem, you look for another herd member that has put in the work to create a solution that works for them and you assume you can boilerplate it and it will work for you.

When you copy someone or something, you relegate — subordinate — yourself to them. You roll over, put your ‘paws in the air’ and subsume yourself to the leadership of someone else. Looking up when you’re lying on the ground isn’t a very liberating place to be.

4. Benchmarking won’t make you special and differentiate you from your competitors

It has no strategic value in moving the organization to a position in the marketplace that ONLY you occupy.

“What are our competitors doing?” is often asked when organizations are thinking about improving how they conduct business, and the benchmarking process ensues — adding zero space between them and their competitors.

And, of course, if you’re chasing another organization, you’re adding nothing to the kitbag of things that make you ‘special’ in the eyes of your customers and encouraging them to spread your word to others and attract new business.

If you copy someone, all you do is lower the bar.

5. Benchmarking is the enemy of innovation

If you’re a copycat, you’re not an innovator. Benchmarking does little or nothing to stimulate innovation and creativity which seem to be values organizations covet in today’s world of uncertainty and constant change.

In fact benchmarking kills real innovation because it has performance improvement using the standard of another as its end game as opposed to revolutionary changes that determine new strategic outcomes.

We need to get our thinking straight.

Few organizations today stand out, which is sad; few are deemed to be really special by their customers.
Being remarkable isn’t a strategy on the radar of most, or if it is, it’s an elusive goal because leaders allow people to use traditional tools — like benchmarking best of class — to do their jobs.

Uniqueness, remarkability and being special come from being different than your competitors, not copying what they and others do, even if they perform certain functions more efficiently than you do.

We need to change our ways and stick copying where it belongs.

Let’s:
— Start thinking about being different than best in class, not copying best of breed;
— Covet being ‘different than breed’, not best of breed;
— Think about doing what others are not doing, not looking to other’s successes;
— Go in the opposite direction that others are going, not following in their footsteps.
— Define best in class to be the highest bar to be different from, not emulate;
— Purge boilerplates from our toolbox and break new ground (and maybe be the author of a new boilerplate).

Copying is the enemy of being special and remarkable.

And as leaders, let’s change the conversation in our organizations; purging the notion of benchmarking and copying as ways of achieving strategic progress by asking these types of questions of our teams:

▪️”What can we do to be different from the crowd of competitors?”;
▪️“How does what you’re proposing make us stand out from the competition and be special to our customers?”.
▪️“What crazy ‘insane’ thing is a different business to ours doing and how can we use the basics of the idea to morph it into a special idea for us?”

Benchmarking is absolutely the wrong thing to do when the end game for most organizations seems to be uniqueness and remarkability, but there are ways to ‘bend the curve’ and go in the right direction.

Start the change now, though, because time is not your friend.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.4.16 at 05:53 am by Roy Osing
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