Be Different or be dead

March 22, 2021

Why a winning personal brand is owned by someone special and different

Source: Pexels

Why a winning personal brand is owned by someone special and different.

Fitting in has been hammered into our heads our whole lives.

School teaches us to comply and conform to what the textbook says. Our parents reinforce at a very early age that being normal like everyone else is the thing to do, that not being like others gets you noticed and gets you in trouble. Business encourages us to find best practices and copy them as the way to improve performance.

As a result, we have created herds of people who are all alike in some way.

This is a real problem in organizations in which establishing a competitive advantage is the ultimate goal. An advantage isn’t about copying what another organization does; it’s about creating a uniqueness and distinction that is unmatched by anyone else.

And it’s also an issue for individuals who are looking to get a job and start a career. Getting that interview and landing that position is not about looking like every other candidate; rather, it’s about standing out and being noticed as someone who demonstrates special attributes that others don’t possess.

Gecko or Chameleon?

The point is this: If an organization or individual does not possess anything unique about them, why should anyone notice and care about them? Why should they be chosen over the plethora of options people have?

If they are not different in a way that is compelling, relevant and appealing to others, they will blend into the crowd and will disappear from anyone’s radar.

What do you notice and find more interesting: a chameleon or a gecko?

A ptarmigan or a cattle egret?

Your identity is determined by your context, the frame you live in. It could be the market segment your organization competes in or your MBA graduation class.

In both cases, the challenge is to find a way to gain a competitive edge and be successful given the many others seeking the same result.

If you are indistinguishable from others that share the same context, you will have no identity to those witnessing you and deciding whether or not to engage – other than family, of course, who have no choice in the matter.

Success is achieved for both organizations and individuals by staking out an unmatched position that separates one from their context; that separates them from peers, colleagues and competitors.

The best isn’t good enough

Jerry Garcia, business genius and leader of The Grateful Dead, nailed it:

“You don’t want merely to be the best of the best, you want to be the only ones that do what you do.”

Claiming a position like being the best, the leader or ‘No. 1’ doesn’t separate you from your context for several reasons.
▪️First, it’s not unique – many make claims like this.
▪️Second, it rarely can be substantiated with hard facts.
▪️Third, it’s not believable by the people who hear it.

Stepping away from your context is not about using comparatives like “better” and superlatives like “best”; it’s all about being “the only one” that does something.

It’s a simple expression of what you do that no one else does. It can be observed and it can be measured.

It doesn’t have to be complicated

Finding what makes you uniquely special needn’t be complicated. It’s a matter of discovering what interests people and satisfying it in a special way that surprises others and makes them remember you.

— Strumming a signature long, protracted guitar chord at the end of every song.
— Amazing problem-solving abilities of employees who directly deal with customers every day.
— Having employees who genuinely care about others.
— Offering a personalized video résumé that speaks to your audience.
— Being the first one to put their hand up and volunteer for a project that will take personal time.
— Remembering the names of people you meet.
— Creating a character for your grandchildren – mine was “Papa Troll” – that enriches their lives with fun.
— Giving credit to peers and colleagues rather than wanting to personally grab the spotlight.
—Using uncommon words and your own language that is a bit out there, such as ’yummy incoming’ and ’Cut the crap’.
— Having a simple and informal communication style that captures the hearts of other people and makes you real.
— Keeping promises made in a world where this attribute is very rare.

Get it in your head

Stepping out of your context begins with having a mindset that makes it a constant priority; you live and breathe it every moment of every day, whether you are in an organization or in your personal life.

You are always looking for opportunities to surprise others and do things differently than what they expect.

Be the chameleon.

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

• Posted 3.22.21 at 04:59 am by Roy Osing
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March 20, 2021

Why female entrepreneurs are rising to be the best in class

Why female entrepreneurs are rising to be the best in class.

Whatever you give to a woman, she will improve.

The same goes for business. Even though the world is yet to become a level playing field for both genders, women can bring about the necessary change in entrepreneurship.

With the right platform, they can dare to be different. Where men focus on money and power, women focus on empathy. While men are strict on results, women build strong relationships.

According to the female entrepreneurship statistics, the number of women-owned businesses has increased by 3,000% from 1972 to 2018. Today, there are more than 9.4 million people employed in female-owned businesses in various industries.

Women aren’t afraid of making a change in any sector. Healthcare, technology, hospitality, and many more industries are welcoming female entrepreneurs. Business women aren’t afraid of being different.
For example, Maiko Sakai, Simmone Taitt, Trisha Okubo, Priya Virmani used their backgrounds to find inspiration and turn their ideas into reality.

The success of female entrepreneurs will grow over time, and the uniqueness of women’s leadership has the power to change the world. Women can be great at what they love doing and have what it takes to thrive in today’s economy.

The statistics in the infographic below about female entrepreneurs will tell you more about how women lead their businesses.

— Jenifer Kuadli is a Content Coordinator at WhyDoesEverythingSuck.net. Delivering top-notch content is her main focus, and she never stops until she turns it into a masterpiece. Outside of work, you can find her playing the guitar and re-watching ‘Friends’.

• Posted 3.20.21 at 05:33 am by Roy Osing
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March 19, 2021

Why a marketing strategy to bundle is absolutely the wrong thing to do

Source: Pexels

Why a marketing strategy to bundle is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

A marketing strategy to bundle is a catastrophe; it’s nothing more than price cutting in disguise.

’Customerization’ replaces the traditional marketing approach of developing products and services for the masses in favor of creating packages of value for the chosen few customers you have selected to serve.

Many marketers equate packaging to bundling, and yet they are completely different concepts.

A bundle:

▪️ the whole = the sum of its parts. It is a collection of products and services kluged together without forethought of an integrated value proposition.
▪️ is driven by a price theme of savings.
▪️ price is a discount over what you would pay for all of the components if purchased individually. They follow ‘the more you buy the less you pay for each element’ theme.
▪️ is branded using the word ‘bundle’ to describe the pasting together of individual products or services - eg “The Financial Services Bundle”.
▪️ forces the potential customer to define value they would likely receive. Rarely is the value proposition offered anything else but cheap prices.
▪️ is easy to copy by competitors within an industry (everyone offers bundles these days) since it is really a lower price in disguise.
▪️ consumes relatively few marketing resources. The price message over a collage of existing products and services doesn’t require a significant investment to go-to-market.
▪️ is smoke-and-mirrors innovation. It gives the illusion (to the marketers) that the process is innovative when it clearly it’s nothing more than an assemble-and-discount one.

It’s a price play, pure and simple.

A value package:

▪️ the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Package components are combined together to generate more value that they would by pasting them together.
▪️ is driven by a value theme and the great ones are built around the idea of creating new experiences for people.
▪️ the price is a premium to the sum of the individual product and service components. Value packages are priced on the basis of the overall value created and not on the price points of the components.
▪️ is branded as something NEW, and reflects the set of benefits created for the customer.
▪️ makes the value explicit for the customer. The value proposition is expressed in terms of value received from the collection of components operating synergistically.
▪️ is tough to copy by the competition since the package is the result of a value integration process.
▪️ consumes more marketing resources associated with integrating value components, branding, strategic partnerships (for package components that must be ‘imported’ from another supplier).
▪️ it exemplifies true innovation by discovering an unmet need and creating a new offering with a unique set of value.

Unforgettable marketing is NOT a price game.

A marketing strategy to bundle your products doesn’t work in the long term. It’s a value play.

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

• Posted 3.19.21 at 10:36 am by Roy Osing
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March 15, 2021

7 practical and proven ways to improve sales performance

Source: Unsplash

7 practical and proven ways to improve sales performance.

Although sales is a critical function in any organization, they are often viewed to be lower in importance than other functions. And one of the most serious challenges to improve sales performance I had as a sales leader was to build their currency inside the organization as well as ‘on the outside’.

In order to improve sales performance we need to treat them differently.

▪️ Their strategic role must be clearly defined in terms of the specific role they have in executing the business plan of the organization.

▪️ The value they are expected to deliver to the customer must be carefully crafted to align with their strategic role.

▪️ The behaviours they are expected to exhibit day-in and day-out must be designed to deliver targeted results.

We need to hold sales accountable to deliver.

Strategic goals must be integrated into their performance plans and their compensation. If Sales don’t get paid to behave a certain way, they won’t do it.

To improve sales performance, action must be taken in these areas:

1. Human compassion

Sales must apply the same amount of emphasis on their customers as humans as they do on the products, services and technology they deliver.

Salespeople tend to get infatuated with what they are flogging and pay less attention to the needs, wants and desires of the people they are supposed to serve.

Product and technical knowledge overpower the need for salespeople to be empathetic and caring to their customer base.

2. Product myopia

As a corollary to the first point, the ‘hard stuff’ of the products they offer overshadows the need to build long term relationships with their customers.

In fact the sales compensation plan for most organizations encourage short term product flogging to generate immediate sales revenue at the expense of asking sales to spend the time necessary to gain a person’s trust and remain a customer over the long term.

3. Problem solving

Sales time in any customer engagement is sucked up more by the salesperson explaining why the customer should buy what they’re selling as opposed to the salesperson trying to understand what critical problems the customer must solve.

It’s the classic sales ‘push’ mentality and approach rather than a customer ‘pull’ process of using problems to lead and direct the sales process.

The salesperson has what they think is a good solution — their product — and their challenge is to try and convince their customer they have a need for it; that it solves an undefined problem. Hardly a relationship building behaviour is it?

4. Follow-up

Salespeople see their job as selling; they don’t generally get very excited about doing the other work that’s necessary to support the sales process.
They see it as taking time away from doing what’s necessary to achieve their quota and bonus.

Following up on specific things like whether the solution implementation went ok, promised information on product features or an answer to a billing query don’t rate high on their priority list even though they are very important to the customer.

It’s the mundane little things that are important to a customer and can decide on whether or not they continue to spend their money on an organization or not. Sales needs to pay way more attention to this ‘trivia’ and not hand it off to some administration help.

5. Customer advocacy

Mistakes are commonplace in any organization, but what separates the great ones from the average ones is how they respond when things go wrong.

And the key to brilliant recovery is how well the salesperson advocates for the customer that’s on the receiving end of the screw-up. What needs to happen is for the salesperson to ‘stand up’ for and defend the rights of their customer ‘on the inside’ to functions like marketing, billing, product fulfillment, repair service: any department whose responsibilities have played a part in the OOPS!

Sales needs to take leadership to promote and implement the ‘Customer Charter of Rights’ in their organization; they have a long way to go to be able to say their customer is their most important asset.

6. Secret gathering

Because of the product focus they have, sales continues to be features-and-benefits oriented in terms of what goes down during the customer transaction.

At best, they look for a potential product application; it’s a narrow view of what the customer requirements are. And let’s not forget, they are paid to sell stuff not learn what the customer is all about in a holistic sense.

What is needed is a sales approach that seeks to understand the customer in a broad holistic sense, and where the information gathering probes to learn what no one else knows about them — their secrets.

7. Service recovery

There is an insufficient commitment by sales to actively participate in the internal recovery process when service screw ups are inadvertently made. They believe that fixing mistakes is someone else’s job and they relinquish their involvement to someone else.

Sales performance is critical to any organization, and there are some simple, proven ways to improve it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 3.15.21 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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