How are you differentiating your organization and its offerings from your competition? If you had to list the five reasons why people buy from (or join) your organization, would your reasons be much different than your competitors’? “Superior quality,” “exceptional service,” and “competitive pricing” might keep you in the game, but they’ll never differentiate you enough to guarantee the win.

When I’ve asked clients or audience members to list their five reasons and then swap lists with the person sitting next to them, participants quickly realize that their list lacks uniqueness and that any list in the room could be their own.

In this article, I will give you some practical ways that you can differentiate your organization in both the short term and long term.

SHORT TERM: Improving Your Five Reasons

1. Perform the Five-Reasons-Why Exercise: Write down the five reasons why people currently buy from your organization.

2. Refine the Reasons: Refine each reason by adding specificity. For example, instead of “great service,” try “three-hour response time” or “126% faster service than industry competitors.” In terms of time frame, you may be able to refine some reasons (or discover new ones altogether!) instantaneously, while others may require months to develop and reword properly.

LONG TERM: Continually Differentiating

Staying ahead of competitors is an ongoing challenge that will require you to make decisions IN THE PRESENT that will produce wins IN THE FUTURE. I will walk you through three surprisingly simple yet effective areas that will take your thinking from the present and stretch it forward into the future.

First, I will introduce you to the terms Order Qualifiers and Order Winners so that you can build upon your current list of “five reasons why.”

Next, you will learn about Forecasted Winners to begin your mental shift from present-day to future-oriented thinking.

Finally, I will walk you through practical activities you can do starting today to completely transform your organization’s “five reasons why.”

Order Qualifiers and Order Winners

Terry Hill, a London Business School professor and manufacturing expert, came up with the concept of Order Qualifiers and Order Winners. In a nutshell:

• Order Qualifiers are generic entry-level characteristics that essentially place organizations and their offerings on par with others like them in their marketplace. Qualifiers alone do not guarantee sales and wins, because they are not differentiating characteristics. Examples: phone and email connections, compliance with legal and government standards, a website, accounting processes, and product, services, information, or generic features relative to quality and service, etc.

• Order Winners differentiate organizations and tip the scales in your favor. These specific characteristics, typically determined by an industry or sector, earn sales, memberships, grants, and other desired returns. They include patents, licenses, innovative new products, and can differ within industries and sectors; Winners for a 4-star hotel will be different than winners for a 1-star hotel and winners for a tax attorney will be different than winners for a personal-injury attorney.

Forecasted Winners

To keep ahead of the other players in your space, you need to be on the lookout for regressing Winners as you’re working on your next list of Winners. That’s why I’ve taken Hill’s concept further and am providing you with Forecasted Winners.

• Forecasted Winners force you to develop tomorrow’s “five reasons why,” before today’s Winners downslide into Qualifiers by helping you determine what the marketplace will want tomorrow with some degree of certainty?

The Process of Developing Forecasted Winners

Begin Forecasting: Watch trends and patterns within and (more importantly) outside your industry: new products and services, geopolitically-driven changes in thought, emerging technologies, etc. Pay attention to pattern changes in consumer buying, pop culture, weather, economics, and so on.

Revisit your Winners: Continually review Order Winners to see how they may already be out of date or on a fast decline so that you’re not caught off guard.

Get active: Be a part of a trade association, discussion boards and forums, and other types of groups that offer the newest details about changes on the horizon. Groups like the World Future Society focus on tomorrow rather than on today, forcing you to think about the future.

Be global: Learn about global markets through the web, newspapers, and books to discover new-to-you ways of operating and generating creative ways to improve your offerings. Success rates for products designed for an international market achieved 85% success rate compared to 43% of those without. (Research: Cooper and Kleinschmidt) Use what you learn to identify up-and-coming threats before they make an actual impact.

Gather Competitive Intelligence: Collect, assemble, interpret and distribute information about customers, competitors, products, threats, and opportunities to leadership throughout your organization.

Tap great minds: Surround yourself with a group of trusted people inside and outside the organization—members of your current management team, respected colleagues, mentors, etc.—with whom you can develop a mutually-beneficial exchange of dialog and ideas to come up with Forecasted Winners.

Expand your perspective: Competitors aren’t just entities that offer the same products and services that your organization offers; any source that detracts buyers from spending their money with you is a competitor. For example, video-rental companies also vie for discretionary dollars against YouTube, Apple ITunes as well as your local ski resort, your kids’ day camp, and so on. What types of Winners are these untraditional competitors offering that you might be able to adopt?

Conduct “Future” Meetings: Once a month, have a meeting solely designed to discuss “what ifs,” connect the dots from data that has been collected, and to ideate innovative Forecasted Winners. UPS connected dots using computerized technology to plan right-hand-turn routes that saved 28.5 million driving miles and three million gallons of fuel in 2006. (04/2007 abcnews.go.com Rooney).

Avoid the Commodity Crutch: Don’t get stuck in thinking that you’re a commodity; in every sector and industry, there are always differentiators. You have five warehouses, $40 million in inventory and a one-day shipping guarantee in comparison to your competition who has two warehouses, $10 million in inventory and no one-day shipping guarantee. Sure, you’re both offering the same product, but the firm that isn’t struggling with debt and missed deadlines (your competitor, of course) is the one that will ultimately win more often if positioned correctly.

The key to developing Winners with staying power is to pull your thinking out of the present and project it into the future. Using the tips above, you should be able to come up with at least five differentiated reasons why people buy from your organization. Use those reasons as a rallying call internally, for marketing and sales externally, and to make improvements throughout your organization to keep it standing out from the crowd.

~ David

connect further:  http://consultingfromthestage.com/

contributed by eric hall of eh design & consulting

Keeping track of your brand can be a difficult task. With all these on-line, social conversations happening it can be difficult to really know what is being said about you, your company, your products, etc. But knowing what is being said about you, your business, your key markets is CRITICAL. As I’ve said before, if you don’t know about these conversations, you can’t join in the conversations. And, I guarantee, conversations are happening. The only question is – are you going to participate.

So, if we agree that there are conversations happening online (blog posts, product reviews, twitter posts, facebook comments, youTube videos, etc.), the question is “how do I find out about these conversations and join in”?

Well, that a great question and there are a lot of good answers. In a previous post (Two Simple Business Uses For Twitter) I described one method – using the Advanced Twitter Search based on location. This is a great way to find people who are twittering about you or a topic of interest within a certain distance from you (i.e. anyone talking about “antiques” within a 50 mile radius). But, what if you want to join in on conversations happening on other mediums? What if you want to know about blog posts, web site updates, facebook posts, etc.?

The answer now is Google Alerts! Google Alerts are a great way to get regular updates any time Google finds a web page with your search term. Using Google Alerts, you could get an e-mail every time Google finds a new web page that mentions the search term you chosen. You can choose to get e-mails immediately, and daily or weekly digests (summaries). You can also choose to have the results delivered to an RSS feed – my personal favorite. Assuming you choose instant e-mail notifications, you would receive an e-mail every time Google finds a new article, blog, video, image, etc. that contains your search term. What an awesome way to join in the conversation and help to control your brand.

Here’s the basics of how Google Alerts work:

1. Visit www.google.com/alerts and create your Google alert. The main screen (once you are logged in – you will have to have a Google account) looks like this:
   Simply type in your search terms, select a type (for instance – if you only want to get results from blogs, etc.), select How often, and select where to deliver the information to (you can choose RSS later)
2. After you click “CREATE ALERT” you’ll be in the manage screen. It looks like this:
   You can see from this screen shot that I had two Google Alerts set up – both being delivered to an RSS Feed, updated immediately (as-it-happens). So, any time the words EH Design (my company) or Eric Hall (my name) appears in a new page in Google, the RSS Feed will get updated. I’ll know immediately whenever sometime is talking about these terms. Since this time, I’ve added a couple more Google Alerts – basically centered on my around some of my key SEO terms – Fort Wayne Web Design, Fort Wayne E-Commerce, etc.

   Here’s what the RSS feed looks like in my browsers (I’m running Apple Safari – so Internet Explorer would look a little different):
   

3. My final step is to Monitor my RSS Feeds in a convenient RSS Feed Reader. Since I use an Apple, I monitor my RSS Feeds in my E-Mail program (called, Mail). So, just as I would go to Mail to view any no e-mail message, so I go to mail to check if there is a new e-mail message, I also see if there are any new Google Alerts. Here’s what it looks like in my Mail program:

Google Alerts – a great way to keep up to date with your own brand, product, search terms.

Want to know more? Have other ideas about? Leave a comment and share your thought. Or, contact EH Design & Consulting today, and we can talk about all the ways Social Media can help your business!

• This is a monthly forum for discussing: product innovation, development, and commercialization topics in an informal atmosphere
• Product development focus: idea generation strategies, requirement gathering, requirement processing, product development process, prototyping, launch challenges, quality, design verification and validation, portfolio management, supply chain, etc…
• Industry focus: What are the trends in some industries such as automotive, energy, orthopedics, medical equipment, how do these trends affect us locally?

Date: Repeats the second Monday of each month

Time: 7:30 – 9:00 AM

Agenda:

• 7:30-8:00a.m. Breakfast
• 8:00-9:00a.m. Discussion and Networking

Location: IHOP #5465 — 1535 W Washington Center Rd (intersection of Lima Rd and Washington Center Rd), FORT WAYNE, IN 46825-4144 (260-490 4467)

Cost: Free. Just pay for your own meal/drinks.

Registration: Limited to the first 12 people — Please register early to ensure a spot.

Format: Informal atmosphere, but a moderator will be assigned to guide the discussion

Past topics:

• Measuring performance of product development
• Supplier development – techniques and challenges
• Software Development challenges (including embedded software)
• Voice of the Customer: Its importance within NPD, techniques, and best practices

Sam leads a Product Development Breakfast Club on the second Monday of the month. Click here for more information.

It’s been said the “business plan” should fit on the back of a T-Shirt… to force succinct thought requires great discipline…

For all the V.C.’s, Angels and other investors out there — ride the wave and see what ideas might fit your portfolio…

Who said twitter couldn’t be useful?

To learn how to speed up change come to this event on September 3. Click here for more information or to register now.

Wow — what an amazing event, with a fantastic line up of speakers!! It’s the morning of Day two at the Summit with the promise of more fantastic speakers. I was going to post some highlights, but Eric Hall and I found great notes from people on Twitter (search #tls09).

(sample of speaker line up)

Here are a few blog’s all seem to have GREAT notes on them:

http://entermission.typepad.com/my_weblog

http://daveferguson.typepad.com/daveferguson/2009/08/

http://www.timschraeder.com/2009/08/

If you see this post today, all three of these blog’s are taking notes and posting them right away — you can catch a glimpse of some of the great nuggets being tossed into the crowd.

Frequent guest blogger and speaker Clifford Clarke was a contributor to Alan Shark’s new book — CIO Leadership for Cities & Counties: Emerging Trends & Practices .

Congratulations Clifford, we appreciate the forward progress and further ground work you laid with the City of Fort Wayne.  Having worked closely with government organizations at both the state and local levels, I can appreciate some of the complexities you inherited during your time in government service!

To hear a brief interview with Clifford, check out our first installment of  ”Tech Talk” — where I press him for pros and cons of cloud computing.

http://www.sharetogain.com/2009/07/cloud-computing-tech-talk-with-clifford-clarke/

–craig d. crook