How much freer can you get?

Five ways to achieve a competitive advantage without lowering your fees

by Bill Gager

In today’s marketplace, developing and maintaining an objective advantage over the competition can seem next to impossible. Why? From a customer’s perspective, similar product and service offerings are basically the same.

Consider life insurance policies. To the consumer, all $250,000, 20-year term life insurance policies offer identical coverage. So, how do they decide between policies from Company A, Company B and Company C? If they view product A, product B and product C as having the same value, the only thing they look at to differentiate the three is price.

Unless you have a distinct advantage customers care about, you must create a competitive advantage by creating a value perception that goes beyond your product or service. In other words, you must have a value-added proposition.

Demonstrating your value-added competitive advantage during the sales process is difficult, because traditionally the emphasis of competitive advantage has been service. The only way for a prospect to experience your service is to actually become a customer. And to get a prospect to become a customer, you have to be able to positively differentiate your company’s service from the competition during the sales process.

Therefore, to maximize your sales, your revenue and your profit potential, you need to create a value-added proposition and perception. In other words, your entire offering, including the way you sell, has to be set up in a way that the customer sees you as being positively different from the competition.

To position your products and services as different, you need to leverage your sales approach to maximize your point-of-contact opportunities with prospects and customers. Point-of-contact opportunities are any time a representative of your organization comes in contact with a prospect or customer. The way that representative interacts with the prospect or customer forms his or her strongest opinion of the organization.

Essentially, it comes down to what your representatives do and how they do it.

Focusing on the products your organization offers or the needs of the customer is not enough. Your staff must focus on the critical issues your customers face and the value your organization can provide to solve those issues. You need your customers to know that you offer more than any other organization, and therefore your products and services are worth the higher price. To help your organization make the most of every point of contact, consider the following.

1. Make the customer feel you understand their critical issues
Make the prospect or customer feel listened to and understood at every point of contact. This is good advice, but the usual techniques have lost their impact. For example, almost every organization uses active listening techniques, such as summarizing the customer’s question or concern. As a result, when you talk to a customer service or sales representative, you can usually hear them using the techniques on you. When everyone is doing it, the competitive advantage disappears.

Rather than parroting back answers, uncover your customer’s critical issues, help them think about these issues differently and perceive you as having a solution.  When your customers and prospects feel you truly understand their issues and challenges, they will see more value in your organization’s services.

2. Demonstrate the added value
Every time customers or prospects come into contact with one of your representatives, you want them to believe they received some value from the experience. 

Help your prospects and customers gain some new insight or identify an underlying problem. Do whatever you can to establish yourself as a thought leader by demonstrating a deeper understanding of your prospects’ and customers’ critical issues and bringing new ideas and information that specifically pertain to those issues.

3. Be consistent in your customer contact
When you don’t establish consistent positive contact with your customers and prospects, you lose opportunities to create and maintain your competitive advantage. For example, many sales professionals say and do everything right to sign a new customer, such as following up regularly, explaining details and answering all their questions.

But once the prospect opens an account, the sales representative doesn’t maintain contact and virtually drops off the planet. By maintaining consistent, value-added contact, you create a competitive advantage for your company because you’re doing something no one else does.

In the prospecting phase, the value-added might come from a different spin on your approach.

For example, instead of calling a prospect and saying, “I’d like to talk with you about the services our organization can offer,” you can say, “I’d like to talk to you about the solutions we provide to the issues businesses like yours face.”

Be as specific as possible about the issues they likely face and maintain regular contact to continually demonstrate your position as a value-added provider. In the customer service phase, a way to add value is to meet with customers on a regular basis to explore new challenges, send customers an article about trends in their industry, or recommend a book they may find useful.

By using a consistent value-added approach, you establish yourself as being positively different.

4. Identify their unseen problems
If you can help customers or prospects identify potential and existing problems they didn’t even realize they had, you can put yourself light years ahead of the competition.

Most organizations approach their prospects and customers with a fly-by assessment of their current needs, and miss the underlying problems the prospect doesn’t know how to solve.

Only about 1-in-10 prospects at any given time has an active need for your services. The key to maximizing your results is to leverage the other 90 percent.

The key to identifying your customers’ and prospects’ unforeseen issues is to do more development work. Take your point-of-contact opportunities to the next level and look for symptoms your prospects and customers experience, but can’t find the cause. If you can engage your prospects and customers at that level, you jump ahead of the competition. Ask the right questions to gain deeper insights into the hidden issues and get the customer to realize how those issues impact their business and life.

5. Provide all your resources to the customer
Once you’ve done all the development work and gained a new customer, you must continue to offer them added value. Organizations often focus solely on the prospecting phase and, as a result, lose opportunities to grow their current customers.

The more you can present the full resources of your organization to the customer to solve their critical issues after the initial sale, the more valuable you are to the customer. Introduce them to your full line of solutions and make additional information readily available to them. Don’t focus on your products and services; focus instead on how they solve your customer’s critical issues. 

To maintain a pricing advantage and to avoid lowering your price, you must create a value-added perception by leveraging your points of contact.

Remember, do what your competition isn’t doing. People will only see you as valuably different, and be willing to pay more for you, if they believe they get something of value they can’t get anywhere else.

back to top                                                                       back to industry articles