Differentiate - when buyers put you in a ‘bucket’
Human nature steers us to categorize everything into familiar “buckets.”
If you’re purchasing a new vehicle, you likely are segmenting your decision to specific criteria, such as SUV, crossover, sedan, van, and so on. Each of those vehicle styles are in a bucket familiar to everyone. If you say, “I’m considering buying a new SUV,” everyone knows what that is. In that context, you can compare vehicle features from all vehicles in the SUV category against your decision criteria.
In much the same way, our customers and prospects make decisions about products and services in common buckets. They think about Accounting, Operations, Technology, Marketing, HR, etc., in buckets/categories of business support. For commodities, the decision is straightforward: the Problem is known, the Solution is known, now a decision can be made upon basic criteria: Price, Availability, Configuration, etc.
The natural effect of gravity will cause your offer to be categorized as “Commodity” or “Solution” without distinct differentiation.
If your company provides B2B services, your offer is likely complex and your value proposition requires context and color. Your competitors are not equal to your superior value prop, but buyers need to put you somewhere familiar so they can think about how to purchase. So, sometimes we find ourselves in the bucket. Now what? Differentiation is purposefully amplifying your value prop and separating from perceived competitors.
You can take the following steps and form a story:
Acknowledge the prospect may have placed you in that bucket with perceived competitors and is likely looking for differentiation for confidence in your offer
Suggest that the experience with other ‘like’ service providers has been unsatisfactory - that’s probably at the heart of why you got a meeting with this prospect - but get them to articulate the lack of ROI on fees spent.
Offer specific, possible outcomes they realized that were quantifiable, but not the end goal - you know what words to use because you executed Voice of the Customer exercises and you know how your market describes the pain
Offer some ideas why others were unable to meet their needs
Outline why your approach is different, how it mitigates what others miss or don’t do well
Give empirical evidence of improved outcomes from your offering
This is core to your value prop and messaging, only different in the context of an in-person meeting or conference call. This follows the simple format of an elevator pitch:
This is what we found….
And this is what we did about it….