How to stand out from competitors
What makes [or could make] you more noticeable in the crowd of other product and service providers?
Very few companies enjoy a monopoly position, most face stiff competition. Identifying and amplifying distinctiveness is critical.
Ask yourself these simple questions:
- What do we do?
- Why do we do it?
- How does that benefit our customer?
The final question is arguably the most important.
Features and benefits
When running this thinking exercise to explore customer benefits more fully, it can be eye-opening how benefit-rich communication with prospective clients could be. This should be an exercise involving all departments across a business to capture all possible features and benefits.
The output we create is a ‘FAB Grid’ (the ‘Grid’), the FAB acronym standing for features and benefits. When complete, it serves as a source document for making marketing, prospecting, and selling, much richer in benefits. The Grid remains a live document which is maintained, revised, and extended.
You might run a more extensive update if for example, new markets are being explored, new products launched, new competitors emerge, disruptive business models and technologies change customer habits.
The Grid provides much more material for differentiation and communicating value. It also means customer benefits are never forgotten or overlooked.
Embed a common language
Having completed the FAB Grid, we also recommend spending time on creating a common language used to describe features and benefits.
We have seen plenty of instances of confusing and imprecise marketing and sales messages which are also feature rich but benefit poor.
Words are extremely important; marketing and selling, after all, are communication disciplines.
The symptoms or poorly communicated benefits
There are symptoms which indicate opportunity for improvement which anyone in sales leadership will recognise:
- Over-selling to win a sale
- Heavy discounting
- Prospects becoming unresponsive
- Extended sales timelines
- Buying decisions deferred repeatedly
- Increasingly losing to competitors
- Declining conversion rates
Sustaining success
We advocate making a small group from across the business responsible for keeping the FAB Grid updated. Keeping your features and benefits aligned with customer expectations and communicating them well is key to sustaining success.
