It’s never too late to stand out.
What do all exceptional leaders and businesses share? They stand out from the crowd.
Differentiating your business in many ways helps you avoid the most common pitfall for businesses competing in the market: the price war. When businesses fail to stand out with their product, with their service or with their business processes, then the only thing they can use to differentiate themselves is their price. What follows is a race to the bottom.
Before you look at how you can differentiate your business, first look at what type of competitive environment you’re operating within.
Define your industry’s competition level.
Renowned economic and business academic Michael Porter wrote a seminal piece for the Harvard Business Review in 1979, still influencing thinking today.
In How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy, Porter urged any business leader to think about the competitive environment of their product and/or service. This included external factors, such as customer bargaining power vs supplier bargaining power and the threat of new products.
“The state of competition in an industry depends on five basic forces,” Porter wrote.
These are:
“The collective strength of these forces determines the ultimate profit potential of an industry,” Porter continued. “It ranges from intense in industries…where no company earns spectacular returns on investment, to mild…where there is room for quite high returns.”
Before you look to differentiate yourself within your market, try getting a handle on the competitive environment your operating in. This will help you identify opportunities to shape your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
Defining your Unique Selling Proposition
Your USP doesn’t have to be limited to what you sell. It can be a great idea to work with an accredited business coach to develop a comprehensive USP that you can communicate swiftly and effectively to customers while also helping to frame the growth of your business.
You can differentiate your business in many ways:
Help your offering stand out
Look at your product or service and generate ideas on how it can stand out from competitors. This might be how you build features within your offering as well as benefits, or even the very offering itself.
This is a differentiation that you can communicate to customers quickly and effectively, but it’s not the only area in which you can stand out.
Let your processes stand out
How you find employees, how you retain them, how you listen and act, how you position yourself in the market – these are all processes that you can shape to stand out.
The ScalingUp methodology practiced by Ninety Six To Four provides a clear framework for identifying and simplifying processes so you can then shape them into unique selling points.
Streamlined and smooth-running processes allow room for a differentiated service. Try identifying ways your service to customers can be better than your competitors and then how it might stand out across industries.
Stand out as a leader
Businesses grow when leaders do. Reading, listening, networking and finding the support of an accredited business coach can help you build a mindset for growth.
With a framework for leading and growing your business, you can stand out as a leader within not just your industry but amongst various communities (e.g. local, business, government).
