ABC News - Why Competitive Advantage is Important for Your Business
Jaynie L. Smith sits down with ABC news to discuss why it is so important for companies to uncover and incorporate their competitive advantages within their marketing and sales messaging. It is a matter of staying ahead of the competition.
Commentator: In business, it is vital to demonstrate how your product or your service is better than your competitors. Earlier I spoke with Jaynie Smith, author of Creating Competitive Advantage about new ways to stay ahead of the game.
Well, good morning to you.
Jaynie Smith: Good morning.
Commentator: Let’s start out with what competitive advantage is? It’s not just your strengths versus your weaknesses, but how you’re better than others, is that –
Jaynie Smith: Absolutely. How you’re better and different. Competitive advantages are the things that answer the question for the buyer, why us. Whether a company is selling B to B, selling to another business or a consumer, there is a lot of competition. How do you answer why us in a compelling way that doesn’t have all the same things that everybody else has.
Commentator: And while these things may seem straight forward, it’s not something that everybody gets, as you’ve mentioned.
Jaynie Smith: No, not everybody gets it. I’ve asked 2,000 CEOs and middle market, what your company’s number one competitive advantage; and about four could answer the question. They confuse strengths and things that are givens. They’ll say things like our good customer service, our good quality, our good responsiveness. And I say those are all givens. You’ve got to have those just to be in business. They don’t set you apart. They’re just your ticket to play. What do you do better and different?
Commentator: Now one of the points you make, that I find surprising, is you don’t compete on price. Isn’t that what most customers look for in a good deal?
Jaynie Smith: Yes, because we have trained the Universe to compete on price; because companies do a very poor job of communicating what they’re actually selling. We know, we love to throw this phrase around, we sell value, we sell value added, what does that mean? Nobody knows. Break it down. If you save your customer time and money, figure out what that is, extrapolate, well how much money? Well if we give you free training, what is that costing us? For example, we provide a half a million dollars of training to our customers each year. Be specific. Let them know what they’re paying for, then you can minimize price as an issue. But we’ve all become trained just to believe that price is the issue, and it’s not. It doesn’t need to be.
Commentator: And you also talk about giving good numbers, solid numbers, real examples, what are some of those examples?
Jaynie Smith: You need to use your metrics. And so many companies, I find, have all these measurements, they’re just not using them for their advantage. If you want to say we have on time delivery, don’t say just say that. Say, our measurements show that 99.5% of the time we’re on time. Or 90% of the time we’re within an hour. Be very specific so the customer believes you. The key to this is to build confidence in the buying decision. The more you build confidence, you remove risk. When you remove risk you can minimize price. You’ve got to build confidence with the metrics that say we know what we’re doing, we keep score of everything.
Commentator: All right. Well, Jaynie Smith, I want to thank you very much for joining us.
Jaynie Smith: Thank you.
Find out why over 100 companies worldwide in the past year have changed their marketing and sales messaging because of because of Jaynie's work. Learn how you can for your company.
