Your buyers think that nothing would be better than for you to be just like everyone else. You think they want a unique competitive advantage, you think they want to know you've been in business for 25 years, and everything you think is wrong. Your customers want you to be just like everyone else so they can beat you up on price.
Do your sales and marketing people give them any other choice? You might as well be pork bellies or corn lots, because industrial and high-tech marketers are being forced to commoditize to reduce pricing. However, this is the worst thing you can do for your bottom line.
For maximum profits in minimum time, to save your customers time and effort, and to bring your marketplace maximum value you must be the one clear choice for the specific solution you offer. If you were just like everyone else, then why would anyone need what you have to offer?
This is a huge problem for resellers as I point out in a recent release "How Industrial Marketers, Especially Resellers Combat Forced Commoditization While Standing Out From Competition" -- especially since buyers see each resellers as the SAME as the next offering the SAME line. If you are to survive, yet alone turn a profit, you must convey your unique value in the form of results created for your buyer.
Not who you are, but what you are to the user of your products or services. In another column I told you to make the invisible visible, now I'm going to tell you to make the tangible intangible; from the 12-turnaround strategies to combat forced communization for industrial and high-tech marketers that I teach.
Visit "How Industrial Marketers, Especially Resellers Combat Forced Commoditization While Standing Out From Competition" to learn more. If you don't have a copy of the May 15, 2006 edition of Inside Strategic Relations then request one by faxing "ISR #B0515" on your letterhead with your name and address clearly stated to +1 (757) 282-7779; or login to Applying Strategic Relations to read it on-line.
