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5 Ways to Stand out in the Marketplace
Lack of differentiation is a slow killer of business
If you run a business, one of the major challenges you have to overcome is how to differentiate yourself in a noisy marketplace.
Most times, the lack of differentiation in the marketplace is a slow killer of business. It leads to you competing based on price and this is always a bad idea for any business.
As a traditional Chartered Professional Accounting (CPA) firm, we offer services that are generally commoditized — tax return preparation; bookkeeping services; financial statement reviews and audits; etc.
With the saturation of CPAs in the marketplace, it is harder to differentiate yourself as there is plenty of noise with everyone fighting for the same business. So, it is easy to fall into the temptation to compete based on price. And we did compete based on price for many years.
Recently, we started making small incremental changes in our business to introduce some differentiation in what we do and in how we deliver our services. We started focusing on delivering more value in order to stand out from the crowded marketplace.
We still have a lot of work to do in this area. Part of my current mission is to radically differentiate what I offer compared to other traditional CPAs.
Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned on this journey to differentiate my services in the market place. You can apply these lessons to your business.
1. Resist the temptation to be everything to everyone
Provided there is a market for what you offer, trying to be all things to all people is a quick way to failure.
So, it is critical to niche and find a specific group of customers to target in your business. By doing this, you will stay focused. You will dig deeper into what your customers really need.
In my business, as we understood this concept, we identified four industries we want to specifically target and we started to intentionally target these customer segments.
It became easier to say no to certain business opportunities that came our way. We’re regularly brainstorming on…
