Sustainability and improving revenue and profitability are core leadership goals.
With ninety percent of businesses failing within their first ten years – it is a commercial life and death challenge.
Growth levers include
- Geographic expansion,
- Attracting new buyers,
- Adjacent new business units,
- Innovation of your products and services
- Maximising existing buyer growth and margins,
- Creating new products and services,
- Creating a new business model (e.g. B2B to B2C)
Mitigating risk and reducing trial and error is the core need to differentiate the business, its products and services and new activities.
Differentiation – standing up and rising above your competitors – helps maintain your existing buyers whilst making it easier to attract new buyers.
Differentiation – done well – benefits include
- improves growth
- improves business recognition
- reduces marketing costs
- reduces the cost of acquiring new buyers
- starts building more loyal tribes of potential future buyers,
- net improvement for total shareholder funds growth
- Where to start
It starts with a competitor analysis and gap analysis – essentially, at a high level; first, you want to understand how each thinks, acts and communicates. An understanding of the potential gaps in the market is the early aim.
2. Get clarity about the state of play in the market
- Do I clearly understand why and how the top competitors are winning more revenue?
- What potential near-term threats are there to the current strategic competitive landscape?
- How similar is the business now compared to its competitors’ strategies? (if you remove branding – does your business act, look and communicate broadly like your competitors – you have a problem, Houston!
3. Identify the hidden opportunities
Once you have a high-level overview, it’s time to imagine where the most opportunities and profitability could be.
- Recently a client’s startup entered a very competitive market. As is often the case, their competitors broadly acted and communicated similarly.
- The opportunity was ripe to capture the hearts and minds of their future ideal buyers.
- Wide-ranging competitor review and gap analysis captured a research paper that provided the critical differentiator base. It was a powerful weapon to build on to differentiate the business.
The challenge is to develop a clear, big-picture view of the industry, competitors, and the industry’s assumptions and pain points.
4. Go from the big picture to testing your WHY,
Start testing the broad concepts with internal stakeholders – what is the feedback, and where is the pushback?
At this stage – you are looking to answer your ideal buyers – why – should I buy only from your business rather than any competitors.
5. Move to strategic narrative and pitch development,
The old world was to sell your offer – better benefits, pricing and so on. Your competitors can move on these same benefits within minutes – shave the price – offer almost the same – the hard work evaporates.
The new world is to tell a bigger story than just your products and services of great interest to future buyers.
The communication structure should be the same as the best-selling books and movies.
Put the buyer as the hero in their story.
They find there are changes in the market that require that you act in a fundamentally different way – a new game – which is a life-or-death opportunity or threat for you, which requires you to overcome obstacles x, y and z, which, by the way, your business can help you achieve all of these problems.
A classic example of this is Zuora – a subscription business that radically changed to a strategic narrative and pitch approach a decade ago.
Its CEO Tien Zhou says it added over a billion dollars of value to their business. Why? Because it achieved clarity for everyone, buyers, sellers, culture, performance, and financiers.
It is a very competitive world – does your business stand up and rise above the noise of your competitors, so you have guaranteed lead generation?
Find and fix the gaps in your business – take the Advanced Lead Generation Quiz – make growth impossible to fail.
