What makes you unique – do your prospective customers know?

Your customers are looking to determine what it is that makes you different and what you do differently to your competitiors that gives them a reason to choose your company to implement their new business management solution.

Of course, if they can’t identify any specific areas, they will go back to the only way they can differentiate you – and thats based on price, which is a bad place to try to differentiate.

During my recent visit to South Africa to deliver training workshops with our SAP Business One partners there, this issue of differentiation came up and we talked about some of the ways that this differentiation can be acheived. But the key point that we all agreed upon was that you need to very clearly spell out for your customers what it is that makes you different – whether its your unique implementation methodology, the skills of your team, your sales approach, the complementary solutions you offer or the way you package your solutions.

Your customers will appreciate that you have taken the time to do it and if you articulate it from the perspective of your customer and how it benefits them then it will make the value of that difference very clear.

Take your implementation approach for example – many partners utilise the Accelerated SAP Business One Implementation methodology as the basis for their own implementations but then adapt it to their own style which makes perfect sense but very few partners take the time to document the methodology in a simple to follow format or give it a packaged look and feel. For example, by simply renaming the process and documenting it in a one page overview with clearly articulated benefits to each stage you’ll make it very clear to your customers what the advantage is to your approach and how it will help them achieve a successful outcome with a minimum amount of risk.

For example, instead of calling it the Accelerated SAP Business One Imnplementation Methodology, what if you were to call it your 5 Step Success Guarantee Deployment Toolkit or your 6 Phase Business Process Alignment Approach, your Implementation Risk Mitigation Methodology and then clearly map out each step in a flow chart with the customer benefits clearly articulated in point form. As soon as you do this, you’ll immediately have carved out a differentiating factor in the mind of your customer, simplified a potentially complex process so they can understand it and given your team a very easy way to explain how and why you do what you do.

Give it a try and also look at the other “customer facing” processes in your organisation – how can you package, simplify and explain them better to your prospective customers so that they see how those processes make you different – it’s a simple thing to do but one that can reap big rewards for you.

Let me know how it works for you and if you aren’t sure how to do it or how to identify  what makes your process unique and how to articulate it, let me know – I am am happy to work with you to  answer those questions.