Your #1 Business Goal Has To Be Differentiation!

Lately, the idea of differentiation has been at the forefront of my thinking.

There are several reasons for this including:

• The continued rise of noise in all forms of advertising which can often drown out even the most targeted and relevant messages.
• The idea that with technology enabling you and your competition to deliver value and work across a global marketplace, the default setting can fall towards competing on price…but in a global market, there is often someone that will willingly do the work for less.
• The example of brands like Apple, Tesla, and many others that stand out as singular points of focus in the market in a way that the conversation you are having with yourself isn’t, “Do I buy an iPhone over some other company’s phone to which iPhone do I buy?”

The more I think about it, the more it seems that 2019 will be the year of differentiation in all manners.

Because the market on the internet for goods and services will only grow.

The ability to deliver value in new ways will only expand.

And, the need to differentiate yourself so that you can create a competitive advantage for yourself will become more and more necessary.

Why am I harping on differentiation so much?

Several reasons, actually:

• If you aren’t differentiated, you are a commodity. Commodities compete on price.
• If you aren’t differentiated, the likelihood is that you don’t really exist in your markets’ mind. This means that the business you attract is due to luck as much as anything else.
• If you aren’t differentiated, you will struggle to sustain any success because after each successful transaction, you will be starting over from ground zero.

Make sense?

The key question then is:

How do you differentiate yourself from your competition?

Or, a better question might just be:

How do I make myself differentiated enough to enable me to be a singularity, one of a kind?

I’ve got 3 ideas that I want to share with you today that should help you get started on the way to differentiation.

First, start by being clear about your specific value.

Take out a sheet of paper. This exercise works better when you do it on paper.

Draw a square in the middle of the page.

In that square, write down the core value that you deliver for your market.

In my case, I write “Market Creation.” Below is a photo of my somewhat complete exercise.

Now, think about that core area of value and think about all the things you do that support that value.

You see mine. I talk about branding, marketing, sales, innovation, and from there tons of other stuff breaks out.

What does this look like for you?

Maybe customer experience is at the heart of what you are doing.

How do you support customer experience?

Could you talk customer service, the buying journey, and other things?

Or, maybe your core value is sales.

What supports your core value of sales?

Prospecting, managing the sales cycle?

Think about this and draw out your own guide for your unique value.

In most cases, I’ve found 3–6 support topics is about right, but your mileage may vary.

Second, can you think about the big idea for a moment?

Dorie Clark wrote a great book a few years ago called Stand Out. (link) In her book, Dorie talks about the idea of using your ideas to make you stand out to your market and the people you want to serve.

Which is really code word for “The Big Idea.”

Lately, my big idea has been about “The Differentiation Gap.”

Why?

Well, I started to figure out how important differentiation was to businesses and people in a world that has allowed almost everyone to be connected to everyone else with the click of a button.

How do you come up with your big idea?

There isn’t one quick and easy question that will light the way for you, but here are some questions that will get you started down the path.

1. What matters now in your industry?
2. Is there something people are overlooking that you think is the difference between success and failure?
3. How will the world be different in the next year or two? Is there one key concept that explains that?

Those are just 3 questions, but I hope you can see that the big idea is about moving forward and pushing yourself to ask, “What’s next?”

Third, make sure you are talking to the right people.

I’m a big advocate of generalization in many cases because I think we find ourselves defaulting to the mindset of “this person has experience in this area for this long…they must know what they are thinking about.”

Is that true?

Sometimes, sure.

But not all the time.

Because sometimes by being so myopic in focus towards a specific area, you lose the ability to think creatively about a solution to a challenge.

Because the question shouldn’t be: “Do you have experience?”

It should be: “Do you have the right experience?”

But to truly differentiate yourself, you have to be talking to the right people.

Recently, I had Corey Leff who created the John Wall Street newsletter on my “The Business of Fun” podcast.

Corey said something that really impressed me when he talked about subscriber growth for the John Wall Street newsletter when he said something to the effect, “I don’t need 2 million subscribers because the truth is that the people that my work will have an impact on really numbers around 500.”

It is this clarity of purpose that we all should be shooting for.

Because the idea often becomes that in your excitement to reach a wide audience, you don’t create something that is truly meaningful for any audience and this limits your impact.

To Corey’s point, you are better off creating something awesome for 500 people than you are creating something mundane for 2,000,000.

Because it is always way better to have a few people that really, really care about you than a big audience of people that just won’t care if you aren’t around.

How do you figure out who is the right person or people to talk with?

Again, this will develop over time but let’s try out 3 quick questions to get you started.

1. Who is the person that is likely to buy into your idea, your products and services, your point of view?
2. Who will take action on your idea if you strike the right chord?
3. What is the profile or job title that is most likely to appreciate your message of change?

Going forward, your ability to close “The Differentiation Gap” for you and your business is likely to be the key between success and failure for your business.

Because if you aren’t differentiated, you are likely a commodity or worse.

To take a deeper dive, I’ve put together a free webinar on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018 at 12 PM Eastern. If you are interested in the webinar and the free newsletter that comes along with it, send me an email at dave@davewakeman.com with the subject line “webinar” and I will get you set up.