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Smart Advantage is the only marketing and management consultancy focused exclusively on identifying and communicating the most important element of successful competition – your competitive advantage – from your target market’s perspective. Today, we will be discussing the importance of differentiating yourself from your competition.
Questions Asked:
1. What prompted you to write your book, Creating Competitive Advantage?
2. What does Smart Advantage do and who are your ideal clients?
3. What results do your clients see after an engagement with Smart Advantage?
Exit Coach Bill Black interviews Top Advisors for Tips, Ideas & Precautions for Business Owners who want to grow and protect their company value and plan for a successful Business Sale or Transfer. Listen daily so you can be well-planned!
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Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for. Their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm so happy you're with us, especially to hear my next guest. We're going to talk about how important it is. To differentiate yourself from your competition and and some techniques and tips on how to do that and we're going to be talking with Janie Smith from Smart Advantage Inc. She's the CEO of that group, and they're down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And let's get right into it. Janie, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us today. Oh, thank you for having me. Janie, tell us a little bit about Smart Advantage Inc. I know you're a marketing and management consultancy focusing on identifying, communicating the elements of successful competition. How did you get started with it and tell us a little bit more about it? Well, it started out half of my career in Fortune 500 companies and then. I became a consultant to mid-market companies. In doing so, I started to identify this what I call a lost discipline. It became amazing to me how few companies, executives, sales people can't answer the question why should I buy from you and not your competition. Most answer with very glib responses, cliches, marketing speech, words that today have no more meaning. You can't tell me I should buy from you because you have good quality. Your definition of quality and mine are different. What do you mean by that? And so we started to create this process over the years that both of my books are written about and are loaded with tips for companies to do that, but it was identifying the fact that very few companies could articulate their true differentiators. Yeah, that's a great point because even a lot of industries, if somebody comes up with a new buzzword or a new catchphrase or says, you know, we're, we're service oriented and it's not very different for very long, is it? No, you know, in, in my second book Relevant telling an introduction, I use this phrase just to make your point, any company, any organization that does any form of healthcare from hospitals to doctors' offices to hospice to assisted living, almost all of them have a tagline that includes we're caring and passionate. It no longer has any meaning. It's such a cliche that it, it's lost its meaning. What does that mean? You know, we throw these words around, but how do we back up our claims? How do we support what we're saying so the person who's making a buying decision believes us. You know, our mantra is you've got to be able to build confidence and remove risk with people making a buying decision that choosing you is in fact the right thing, and very few companies do that extremely well. Good point. I've heard that in in the banking industry, especially the community banks, they say, well, our, our competitive difference is our customer service. I mean it's like, well, you know, you know, so they, they just don't scratch very deep to get the to get to the meaning of it, do they? No, customer service, in fact, if you, you know, we just as a joke when we talk to clients, we Google things like customer focused, customer centric. The phrase comes up if you Google it about 9 million times. It has no meaning. So customer service is a category of a whole list of deliverables. What does customer service mean in your Business, is it a response to a call? Is it sending a technician or a programmer out within 2 hours? What specifically do you mean by customer service? And you've got to break it down again. All of these buzz words are categories of deliverables. Quality is a category. Customer service is a quality. How can you get very specific by quantifying what you've been able to do in the past to prove that you can in fact deliver it going forward? And it seems like some industries are going so far outside of the box that they want you to, to, you know, grab onto an image in your mind and think of them even if it has nothing to do with your product. And I'll give you an example with Chick fil A, and it's all about a cow. I mean, it's they're, they're trying to go so far outside of the box it has nothing to do with chicken that I I was reminded of that just driving around the other day. So what prompted you to write your book Creating Competitive advantage? Started to ask people what is your number one competitive just a little segue based on what you said, um, you know, ad agencies come up with the creative and they get so focused on creative, which is fine, they're out winning their rewards on the creative side, but for the business, does it deliver to the bottom line? Some yes, some no. And what I always say to mid-market companies is you don't have deep pockets like those big companies and the big chains and the companies that can buy a million dollars. the Super Bowl, B2B, mid-market companies have to be crystal clear on their message. So that's the difference. Let me get back to your question. So I started to see this. I started to see these these messages. I asked everybody I met, every business person, every salesperson, you know, I was sitting next to somebody on an airplane. What's your competitive advantage? And I would get the same, same cliches. So I started to devise this process that I could help companies uncover and identify. And today we have been able to help about 200 companies uncover in the neighborhood of 25 to 75 differentiators they didn't know they had through this process that we've developed to help them get more clear on these things that are beneath the surface. I like to say don't take for granted that which is taken for granted. There are many things that you do and your competition does, but if you don't talk about it, you don't measure it, and you don't absolutely wave the flag all day long that you're in fact better, then nobody's going to get it. I'll give you a good example. One of our clients found that safety was the most important thing to his clients. Of course, he says it's a given. It's table stakes. I said yes, but we looked at your safety record compared to your competitors, and you have 10 benchmarks in which you exceed industry average. So you're taking for granted that everybody knows you're safe and your competition is safe, but in fact you've got 10 benchmarks showing you're above the industry. You need to be telling that because that is your differentiator, that's your competitive advantage if that is in fact the most relevant deliverable to people making a buying decision. The safety is too general, too too broad, and there are some meaningful statistics underneath that that can probably be turned into a slogan or some kind of a campaign that would that would really bring that home. Yeah, I mean, and that's just one example, but there are so many things, you know, it could be if your business demands on-time delivery. When I talk to CEO groups of all sizes, the companies of all sizes, they say how many of you have on-time delivery is the single most important thing to you, do you think to your customers, and about half the room raises their hand. I say, OK, of those who just raise your hand, how many of you think it's important? Everybody thinks it's important. How many of you measure it? Half of them. Of those. Half who measure it, how many of you use that when you're selling, you know, and a quarter of them say yes. So that's what we say is one of the missed opportunities for competitive advantages. Companies don't measure or don't leverage their metrics when selling. Now you have something called the Smart advantage. What does Smart advantage do and what are your, who are your ideal clients for smart advantage? Yeah, Smart Advantage is a consulting firm that was spun off after I wrote. I was an independent consultant for many years and I had started doing this process with so many companies, and they were having such success. I started to record the case studies and I finally said one day I need to put this in a book because I want to share it and teach other people how to do it. So I wrote Creating Competitive advantage. It's been out now about 7 years. It's been its 15th reprint. I get emails from all over the world from people who tell me how it's changed their businesses, and then it was followed by relevant selling. And let me tell you about relevant selling because this part of this process depends on a customer feedback and we do that with double blind market research. Double blind means the customer does not know who has commissioned the research and the company who's commissioned the does not get to know what the specific customer said. We're going for 90% confidence level of projectable data that might say 95% of the respondents valued on-time delivery, valued safety, valued accurate invoices, whatever it is. So what we learned from doing over 100 of those in the first few years, 100 different companies that we worked with and analyzed all those research studies, we would always go back to the company and say we now know the top 3 or 4 buying criteria based on double blind research on what your customers value. Before we share that with you, we want you to guess, and we lay out the 20 tested attributes, and we learned that 90% of the companies guess wrong. That means 90%. percent of companies are selling ABC. Customers want to hear about DEF, and that lacks relevance. So if you're trying to build a competitive advantage value proposition, it needs to be built on that which is most relevant to the buyer, not what you're projecting or not what you're good at. You may be good at something the customer doesn't care about, so that alignment has has helped our clients really, really close a lot more and build a value proposition to protect margins again and again we see it. Wow, so that's, that's, that's a huge, uh, number that you're saying 90% are selling the ABC's when the customers want the DEFs. How could it be so far off? How could, how could, uh, companies be so far off on those numbers? So that's a good question and the answer is they are mid-market companies, about 95% of them never do double blind research, good customer surveys to find out what's valued. They'll do customer satisfaction surveys, but they're only report cards. They're not good market research to find out what they value, and when they do it, they don't do it frequently enough. They, the other reason they're still irrelevant is many people, many companies depend on the feedback brought back from through the sales people from the customer. Sales people as a CEO who might be doing selling any one of us, we have our own agenda in that engagement. Number one, they're usually talking about price because they're negotiating. Research shows price is not nearly as high as you think it is, but we cave in on price again and again because we fall into that trap of negotiation and thinking we're going to lose it. If we knew what the customer truly valued and we were able to develop it with solid metrics proving that we do it, and I can give you case study after. Study of this, it will close. You will protect your margins, and you will not have to cave in on price. This is all about getting away from commodity status. Fascinating. That's really fascinating. Now what kind of results do your clients see after an engagement with Smart Advantage? They get in the door for clients they were never able to get into. They will close more business. They have a higher close ratio and again what I said earlier, they protect margins, and I can give you a couple of examples of each of those if you'd like. Yeah, would you please? Well, let me give you an example of the get in the door. This one client was a big distributor. We went through the process. They learned the three top buying criteria from their customers. They were, it was a surprise to them. We worked with them over a few months getting the metrics, the history of how well they did at these top buying criteria, and they were very clever. They put these three little graphs on a 3m cube, a paper cube like. You have on your desk and they gave it away at a trade show. They gave it away at a trade show and one guy walked by that it was a prospect they've been trying to get into the door for years. He, he, they gave him the little paper cube. He saw the three top buying criteria which built their value proposition in graphs of historic data, very simple. The guy said this is very interesting. And, and so our client said, Can we have have you for 15 minutes? You know, we were trying to get to you for years. I said, No, I'm in a hurry, but I'll give you 15 minutes in Germany next month. So they go to Germany. The guy goes to give him 15 minutes. He spent an hour and a half with them, and they got the business from that client because they could get in the door. They got the attention because they were being laser relevant. They had a value proposition that absolutely hit the nail on the head with what the customer was buying and previously had not sold that. Um, so that's an example of getting a foot in the door. Another one was another client always trying to get another prospect. He not only got in the door, but he got a big piece of business because he not only was able to talk about his on-time delivery, but through the analysis we did with them, he was able to show 10 years of data proving that their on-time delivery was about 98. percent because they kept 74 days of inventory, $24 million and it never went below that. So the customer knew they were pretty safe. They weren't going to be told you're not getting your goods because we don't stock enough. So those are the kinds of things that make a big difference to the buyer in the buying decision because you can prove you can deliver what they most want. Yeah, when someone's uh re-crafting their value statements to to better align themselves with the customers uh through your studies. Uh, are there, is it literally a DEF? Is it, are there, is there an optimum number of features or benefits that you lead off with to gain to get that initial interest from your customer? Yeah, that's a good question. It's there's no magic number, so if the top 3 buying, if you identify the top 3 buying criteria, what we're always looking for is 2 or 3 facts that support the top buying criteria sometimes you may have 1. So it might be so just use the safety one, safety, um, to support that we've invested on making this up. We've invested over half a million dollars in the last two years improving our safety programs. And number 3, our drivers have a minimum. Most 20 years' experience in the field, so it's 2 or 3 things that support the one thing that they value most. So you might have 3 things. You might have 7 or 8 statements, but never drown them. I've seen websites with bullet point after bullet point that nobody's going to read. I tell, I tell my clients, you know, in today's world you have about 4 seconds to capture somebody at your website. 4 seconds if you're lucky. I'm told by IT experts I'm exaggerating, so you have to have above the polls. You have to have the answer to why us in two or three quick bullet points that are relevant, and we like to say we take our clients kicking and screaming away from product or service, you know, I know what you sell. I Googled that, so I don't need pictures of the product. I need to know what what makes me want to buy from you, and that's what we encourage our clients to do. Getting to why us quickly, you know, you've given us so many great tips and ideas today, and you, uh, Janie, you speak at Visage Groups and probably other business groups I would imagine too, is that correct? Yes, I do. I speak nationally and internationally to all kinds of groups, and I do speak with Visage, great, great fun and good groups. They are great groups because they're focused on getting better. They're CEO groups for those that don't know that come together as peer groups to listen to great speakers like Janie Smith and also to learn from each other and and really grow their businesses, fantastic organization. So Janie, how do our listener, I know you have we talked. About the books a little bit, but again for our listeners creating competitive advantage and it's companion book relevant selling. You've heard some great tips from Janie today, so I, I implore you, you know, look into these because you, you really, I took, I don't know, a page and a half of notes just in our 20 minutes, Janie. How do our listeners get in touch with you best? Well, our website is M A R T smart advantage all one word.com, and they can email us at info@maradvantage.com. And if they want to get a free competitive advantage audit form, we're happy to send them one of those and kind of see where they are today. And the books are on our website, the books are on Amazon. The books are available. Both in CDs for those who rather listen than read and also Kindle, so they're out there. But the books are designed to be how-tos. Every chapter gives you a little lessons on how to have this conversation internally with your folks and see where you stand on this work. Fantastic information. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your tips and ideas with our listeners, Janie, and I'd love to have you on again at some point in the future because again in 20 minutes we just scratched the surface, but we got so many great ideas from you that I'm sure we can get a lot more great information from you at some point in the future. I look forward to the next time we speak. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thank you. We're gonna take a short break we'll be right back with another guest, so please stay with us. Hi everybody, this is Spike Riel with the Exit coach. Business owners, can you name the eight key value drivers that you and your manager should be focusing on to increase the value of your business? Introducing the Sellability score index. Visit our website and answer 25 questions about your business, and you will instantly receive your sellability score, showing you how well you stack up in the 8 value driver areas. It's a great management tool. It's absolutely free for our listeners. Just visit exitcoachradio.com and click Get My Sellability score. Just thinking about what will happen to your business if you're gone keep you awake at night? Will you get the price you need from your business to carry you through retirement? The BEI Network of Exit Planning Professions is the world's leading advisor network with the power to help business owners transition out of business on their own timeline and terms. Ask your most trusted advisor to create a BEI plan for you, or visit us at exitplanning.com. That's exitplanning.com. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Hey friend, I know how it feels, waking up exhausted after multiple trips to the bathroom and feeling embarrassed by sudden leaks. I used to be constantly on edge, searching for a restroom whenever I was out. Then I discovered better woman. I was skeptical at first, but two months in. Everything changed. I experienced improved bladder control. No more heart-stopping moments when I laugh or sneeze, less urge to go, deeper and more restful sleep. I finally felt like myself again, confident and in control. Better Woman is natural, effective, and trusted by women for over 25 years. Ready to take back your control? Head over to Bebetternow.com to order your supply today. That's Bebetternow.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Users directed individual results may vary.
