“So, what’s your story?”, I was once asked at a cocktail party.
You may not know it, but in business, you and your organization are being asked that exact same question every single day. The question is, are you telling them a compelling story which is powerful and memorable or do you answer it like everyone else does?
“We were founded in….”
“We’re headquartered in…”
“We have(insert #)employees and have (insert #) locations…
One of the best ways to find and develop your story is to determine your core differentiators. When I say core, I mean the 2-3 differentiators that set you apart from your competitors. It is upon these differentiators that your organization’s story will be built and told. Below are the three elements of determining your core differentiators.
Step 1. Identify what makes your organization unique. If you’re organization and/or its products have a feature or functionality that no one else has, then you are in rare air. Exploit it until somebody catches up to you! Otherwise, what you will be looking for are those features, functionality, and services where you perform better than your competition.
Step 2. Do the differentiators matter to the customer? If the differentiator doesn’t matter to the customer, why take the time to talk about it? I’ve sat through presentations where the salesman touts their system does this or that only for the prospect to say, “Gee, we don’t need it to do any of those “this or thats.” In order for it to be a core differentiator, it must be important to the customer; it must matter to them.
Step 3. Can your differentiators be defended? We’ve all seen pitches on TV making wild claims about the product and we ask ourselves, “Wow, can that be true?” If you can’t back up your differentiators with test results, customer testimonials, references, etc., then its perilous to make the claim that it’s a differentiator.
So, what’s the why behind the what here? There’s one reason…memorability.
Conversations “within the building” among your project stakeholders are happening, pre-sale, about which vendor to choose. You want them to be able to easily and succinctly explain your differentiators. Additionally,(if you’re fortunate to win the deal) after the sale, conversations are happening “outside of the building” about why they chose you! People love to share why they made an all-important decision. You need them to have an easy to remember, clear and succinct story to tell about why the chose you.
Pro tips:
- Make sure you distill between a core differentiator and a defense of a differentiator. For example, you may make the following claims as differentiators; “We will all you back within 24-hrs”, “Our hold times only average 1 minute”. Are these differentiators or would customer service be the differentiator, and these would be the defenses? It is through this process that you begin to understand and realize that you can narrow down your differentiators to only be 2-3 and then have your defenses to support your claims.
- Your differentiators can change over time. This happens if you make significant changes to your products, processes or people or your customers’ needs changes.
- As mentioned prior, keep your differentiators at 2-3 and your defenses at no more than 5. Most people thing that more is better. In reality, though, this is detrimental. The reason is when someone is presented with a list of say, 10 things and told to study it for 1 minute, they can’t remember any of them because their brain shuts down as they found it too difficult to process all the information in the short amount of time they had to review. Conversely, if you have no more than 5 bullet points, in a common arrangement(say, the way the five appears on dice), studies show the brain can easily absorb the information because it’s focused on the information, not the amount(because you’ve already sorted the amount for them). The result is that it’s more memorable.
- Once you’ve established your differentiators, 100% of your messaging will be built around either telling people what they are or defending them. Any other messaging is just noise that’s getting in the way of telling your story.
Finding your story and telling it in a concise, uniform way can be the difference between good and great. It all starts with properly identifying your core differentiators then building your story from there. Once you’ve properly gone through the process, the next time someone ask you, “How is your company different?” you’ll begin to salivate as you’ll be able to answer in a succinct, memorable, and powerful way.
Kerry Boudreaux is Senior Vice President of Sales for FourthSquare. With over 30 years of sales and sales leadership experience, he offers practical sales and organizational messaging advise across public and private sectors.