Episode 5 Differentiating Yourself from the Competition

Welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook, and here today, in this episode, I'm going to tell you something that most people don't tell you the importance of differentiating yourself from your competition.

Stay tuned after the intro and we'll be right with you. Thank you so much for joining us performance group. A master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience, evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset, planning and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services, the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency. An expert in growth marketing With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the sales and marketing playbook unleashed welcome to the sales and marketing playbook unleashed.

I am your co-host, craig andrews, I am the ceo of beholder agency and we are the growth marketing agency that helps our clients uh, get true, show their true potential, and we do that by creating data-driven strategies that help amplify their brand, engage their audiences to take action and drive sustainable growth year after year. And today's topic, what we're going to talk about, is differentiating yourself from your competition. But before we get too deep with that, let me bring to the forefront my partner in crime, evan Polin, the president of Polin Performance Group.

Thanks, craig. And Craig, it's great to be here with you for another episode and great to be here with all of our listeners. I am Evan Polin.

I am president of Polin Performance Group. I have a sales coaching and consultancy firm and I'm helping my clients who have a sales goal in mind but either have no idea how to get there or they've been working really hard, they've plateaued, they want to get to that next level and they're not quite sure what they need to do differently to go from where they are to where they want to be. Oftentimes I'm talking with companies that are frustrated. The owner of the company is outselling all of their salespeople even though they're only spending 15 to 20% of their time in sales and they're not quite sure what to do to get more out of their sales folks.

I work with and help a lot of professional services firms, law firms, accounting firms. The managing partner would love for other people within the firm to participate in developing business and bringing in business and they just don't even know how to get started and the kinds of challenges I'm helping my clients with. Prospects are in the pipeline forever and they just can't get from having that initial meeting to closing the deal. They get frustrated because they are spending lots of time doing free consulting for folks who end up not working with them. And a lot of my clients have a great book of business, great reputation, and are having a hard time leveraging those opportunities, those referrals, those introductions. They're just not coming, despite the fact that they do good work and they're not quite sure what to do about it. So great to be here with everybody today. And, craig, let me kick it back to you to kick us off today.

Great. Thank you, evan. So today, a topic that no one's telling you guys about is the importance of differentiating yourself from your competition. Now, I know Evan and I we go back and forth a lot about this and in our space we really kind of classify it under branding just to be clear. But for the most part, the importance of differentiating yourself from your competition can be crucial for your business growth. Evan, from the sales perspective, what's the importance of that?

It is incredibly important. There are so many folks when they're going to grow their practice or going to grow their business, they're doing it with blinders on. They're going in. Let me think, hey, let me just, you know, try to put my story out there, let me just kind of share with people why they should be working with me. You know what we do really well, why our products are great, why our services are great, what we do really well, why our products are great, why our services are great.

The challenge is none of us are in this business environment in a vacuum. Whether we want to admit it or not, whether we think it's worthy competition or not, we've all got competitors out there. And when folks are going in there with blinders when they're not thinking about okay, are going in there with blinders when they're not thinking about okay, who else is my prospect talking to? How are we different? Why might we be a better option? They are going to go in there fighting a losing battle because they're just going in thinking, okay, I got to push myself, got to share what I'm doing. Share what I'm doing.

But if you become more strategic, if you take a step back, understand that, yes, your prospects are going to be talking to the competition and that if you want to be successful, you really need to understand where you fit into that marketplace and then how to put yourself, your firm, your company, your product, your service in the best light, and that really is crucial to developing a winning strategy to help you win the business that you want to win. I'm going to talk about it from what you do once you get in front of folks and some of the questions you ask, some of the tactics that you can use and, craig, I'm sure you're going to share with folks how to stand out from the crowd when you're out there in the marketplace. When it comes to that marketing messaging, when it comes to that branding, what do you need to do? To go back to the dating, the dating analogy we made a couple episodes ago how do we make sure that we're looking to attract the kind of dates we want to attract so that we can be successful?

Well, and I'll do, is I'll piggyback on that, Evan. You know the kind of the signs that your date isn't going well right, and that exam that-.

I can give you lots of examples, but we'll get into that once we get off air.

Yes, we can go through that later, but we've been happily married for several years, so we don't have to deal with that headache anymore.

Clarify, not to each other.

Verify, not to each other, Correct. So one of the signs here that you haven't truly differentiated yourself from the competition is you get into price wars very quickly, Right, the client or the potential client is back there going hey, this guy told me X the price of the service or the product, and you're doing that. You really haven't gotten to the point where you've established a good relationship that you're differentiating yourself of your brand value. Two customer confusion. A lot of times what they may do is they may come back to you and they'll say, hey, can you make your quote like company B? Because that means to me from a marketing perspective. They understood their value better than they understood yours. So they took theirs, piggybacked it and said, hey, I'm interested in you, but can you make yours like theirs? You haven't really delivered the value properly or the brand isn't delivered properly. Three, for the clients you already have. You have a low customer loyalty and that shows itself in. Clients come in, they work with you a little bit and they get out right. If they truly understood the value you were bringing, they would be around longer because you have a value that they don't want to go finding other vendors for Generic customer feedback. So that would be when you go and you speak to your getting the marketing data of how the marketing or, in my case, the marketing and how the product is working for you. They come back and they say it's OK, it's gone. It's gone, All right.

Nothing specific to what, the value that you pitch them to, lack of brand recognition. That's one of the worst ones that can happen to you from a marketing perspective. You know, what company are you with? Again, yeah, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not. I don't know what do you. Who are you? That should be a clear indication it's not working and that leads to ineffective marketing. So you could be putting out tons of money to events, you could be putting out tons of money to advertising and so forth, and they still don't understand. You would have wasted a lot of money to try to get a message out there that they just don't get, and that's dangerous from a marketing perspective. So those are some of the signs that the differentiation isn't very clear. So if you're struggling with any of those, there's a couple of people here online that can probably help you with that problem. And so, Evan, from that perspective, what's your feedback?

So, Craig, it's funny you bring that up. I was just doing a training program yesterday with one of my clients managed mobility company and we were talking a little bit about the difference between negotiating and selling. A lot of people confuse the two and they're going and they're trying to negotiate price when they haven't differentiated themselves from the competition, yet they haven't set themselves apart, they have not given their prospect, a reason why, hey, craig, we really want to work with you.

And when you don't differentiate yourself from the competition, when you don't identify, that value prop when it comes to negotiating, if you are not the cheapest, you are not going to win. And, unfortunately, if you win the business by being the cheapest, if you're not the cheapest the next time there's going to be no customer loyalty, going back to your last point. So it's really important to set yourself up right from the beginning. How are you different than the competition? How do you bring more value to the table? And if you're not doing it from a marketing perspective, you're not going to get the attention. And we, you're not doing it from a marketing perspective, you're not going to get the attention. And we talked a little bit about last time your ideal, best clients. You're not going to get the attention of those folks to even be able to get your foot in the door to have that conversation, to explore further what are the needs of your prospect, what are they looking for for their ideal vendor, their ideal provider, their ideal consultant? And if you're not able to again look around and see, ok, what am I bringing to the table? What do clients really see in me? How can I articulate that? And if I know that they are talking to my high end competitor, what are they going to get different from me that they may get from that person?

If they're talking to a low-end competitor, why may it not be in their best interest to go with the cheapest price? If you're talking about you know, if you're somebody in the financial services firm, why is somebody going to work with you, versus a do-it-yourselfer, and get somebody to actually put money out of their pocket versus doing things that they think they can do on their own? And if you're not really thinking through, how do I compare to those different things? If I identify that my potential client is talking to one of those different types of firms, how am I going to present myself as different? But again, going back to what I said at the beginning, if you've got those blinders on, if you're not really thinking about it, you're going to fall right into that trap of hey, you're just like everybody else. Hey, just give me your quote, you're no different and nobody's going to see that value that you bring to the table.

So, from a marketing perspective, what are some things that folks can do early on in the game to help differentiate themselves and put themselves out there the way that they want to be put out there?

You know, before I jump into that, evan, you kind of hit upon a point I want to touch upon. You know, between the marketing on my end and the sales on your end, for any business we are kind of the forefront of business growth, right? So a lot of times what happens talking about your price points, you know, a lot of times we all are in the business of growing the business. We're not in the business of staying stagnant. So at the end of the day, if we're out there and we're trying to compete on price without having the measurement of the high end and the low end competitor, if we're trying to compete on price, that's not something that's sustainable, it's not. You're running on that hamster wheel far more than you should be, just trying to bring in enough clients to sustain.

And not only is it not sustainable, but I have walked into some companies where they lose money every time they close a deal because they're competing on price so much and they don't take into mind their overhead, what they may be paying their salespeople, what they may be spending in marketing, and they end up losing money every single time they close a deal, which is no way to stay in business for any period of time.

Yeah, and part of what we'll maybe get into another episode is the importance of understanding that you've stepped into that business. We've all done it. We've all stepped into a client who may not have been the ideal client, but what I'll say is, the more important thing is when to get out of it, so that you don't sink into that drowning work of bad business, right?

Absolutely. My mantra to my clients is do you care more about overall revenue or do you care about what you're bringing home at the end of the day? And 95% of who I talk to it's about no. What's ending up in our bank account at the end of the day? What are we making at the end of the day? And they could care less if they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in volume. If they're not making any money by doing it, probably not Right. Exactly what's the point? You're working way too hard, giving yourself way too much stress for not making any kind of profit.

And so if any of you listeners are listening to this and you feel that way, it's time to give us a call or at least have a conversation with the right people inside, and we're going to talk about that in a little bit. So, to answer your other question here, some of the key points here is identifying your unique value proposition. Believe it or not, depending on the size of your business, even if it's small or super large. If everybody within your business don't fully understand or grasp that unique value proposition and know how to pitch it, you're going to fail in the process. You've already started failing. So identify it, train them and understand how to repeat it throughout your business.

Two, focus on a niche. This happens a lot from a marketing perspective. I just recently walked in and talked to a client and I asked them a simple question based off of what I read on their website. From what I read, you guys do this and I think it was I forget the name of the business at this point but you guys do this. He goes no, no, we stopped doing that years ago. What I'm confused. I'm confused. Help me, help you. Right. It's one of those Jerry Maguire moments. What do you mean?

you stopped doing that years ago and he's like oh, probably nobody was showing him the money that's right, Good one, that's correct, right.

So if it's not something that you do, then you have to refine your message to make sure that it's understood, because, from a public perspective, we see it. So focus on the right niches and make sure you're moving in the right direction, Leveraging your brand personality. That's another way you can do it. So what does your brand represent? A lot of people and I've said this before think of their brand as just their logo. Their brand is their logo. Their brand is their voice. Their brand is their message. The brand is basically what your company represents when you're not around.

And so now, realistically, if your brand is known of having top quality products or services that delivers it to their client base every time, you probably have a very good brand perception. If you're already on the way to your value proposition, right. But if it's the opposite of which you deliver bad product and you're hard to get in contact with customer service is horrible then that's your brand right, and that's something that needs to be fixed. Innovate, always innovating. So one of the points I didn't talk about before was a lot of things if you're not doing your value prop properly, you could potentially be victim of your competition. Innovating new ways of doing things within your niche and you falling behind because you can't stay with it. So one of the best ways to help yourself is consistently innovate, within the niche that you chose, on how you can deliver your product better, faster, cheaper.

If you're not learning, you're not changing, you're not moving forward, you are falling behind.

And in the world that we live in today, when you have cell phones and technology that can deliver a lot of answers for you, you have to find new ways to be creative. I mentioned it before deliver exceptional customer service. I'm telling you, evan, I tell my wife this all the time If I go to a place to eat and the service is horrible, I will never come back. I'm not even a big foodie. If the food's okay, I can deal with that, but if I have to sit there and wait for 30 minutes for the first person to come service, I'm probably walking out. I'm sorry.

Craig, I know you, I know your wife. It's probably not going to be a secret. You're probably going to let a lot of people know about the fact that you weren't real happy with the service, and don't they say that if somebody really has great service or really likes the product, they'll tell one person. If somebody has a terrible experience, they'll tell 10.

And they're probably only Google reviews. They're probably telling the world. And there's your brand. Right Again, there's your brand representation Build a strong community.

So this is something that sometimes goes missing as well, and I know that you're a big proponent of it. You know you have to build a community of people who are like-minded, like yourself, and if your community is not strong and you're in a position that the people around you aren't really thinking about growing their businesses or growing their industry, you're probably in the wrong community, right? So one of the reasons that you can differentiate yourself from your competition is because your community is strong enough that they can start talking about and being an evangelist for your business as well. That's very important from a marketing perspective, and little things as well. Last thing content marketing. So, now that you're in a niche, now that you have a focused area, you now have to deliver resources. That makes you valuable going forward. For instance, can I write an article, Can I write a social post or something that's going to inform my community, the people I'm trying to impart upon about new things? That's coming down the pipeline that they've never thought about before.

On about new things. That's coming down the pipeline that they've never thought about before. I think we recently had a meeting, Evan, where we were teaching guys about chat, GPT, right, and I think that something like that that's coming. Some people go. I'm a very good writer. I can do this right and I'm sure you can, but in a lot of times when you don't have the time, we were able to help him understand that this is a way of saving yourself some time. Now, it's not perfect, but it's a way to saving yourself time and that's something we can deliver to the community who understands that. We that we find it valuable Right. I'm sure from a sales perspective, you've been in several industry things where they talked about new up and coming trends. Do you have any stories for that?

So, yeah, I think two things that are really important Staying on top of the up and coming trends. Again, if you're selling a product, selling your service, it's a generation or two behind, good luck, you're probably not going to be successful. The other thing that I find, on a tactical, more sales related basis, that companies, firms, just completely miss out on, is you need to pay attention to your competition. You need to understand what they're doing, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, and then compare that to what your strengths and weaknesses are. In later episodes we'll get more granular. I'll talk about some sales tactics, but oftentimes, especially if I know I'm selling against a competitor, I'll use a tactic called presumptive questions, where I will ask somebody questions and I'll have a pretty good idea what the answers to the questions are. And as prospects answer the questions, they're going to start to see and that light bulb is going to go over their head why they may want to work with me versus the competition head, why they may want to work with me versus the competition. Guess what If I don't know my competitors well, I might ask questions and my prospect goes hey, I'm glad you asked. They are phenomenal at that. That's what I love most about them. If I've done that, at that point I'm dead in the water. It is over. I'm not going to be able to recover from that. So you really need to kind of be up on what's going on with the competition. What are they doing? Well, how are they different from you? And starting to get a little bit more granular? But let me just kind of give you another example of what I mean.

I was recently working with one of the owners of a financial services firm, with one of the owners of a financial services firm and he and I went through an exercise. And he's working typically with folks who you know 750,000 and above their firm. Not only does the wealth advising, they have tax folks on staff, they're looking at helping people with strategies to keep their money, not only make more money. And he and I went through an exercise where we looked at in the financial services world there's hundreds of different firms out there, lots of different companies, so he couldn't just focus on one specific competitor. But what we did is we broke it down into different categories.

He knows if he's out there talking to somebody, that that person is either a do-it-yourselfer who's always managed the money themselves, or he's talking to somebody that that person is either a do-it-yourselfer who's always managed the money themselves, or he's talking to somebody who's working with an individual where they may be working with just one financial advisor. Maybe there's two or three people in the firm. They could be working with a firm like his and his was a boutique firm that had 30 to 40 people. The partners were touching all of the clients or they could have been working with one of the big wire houses, one of the big banks, and the exercise that we went through is we went through him understanding the strengths and weaknesses of his firm, and then we went through each of those categories.

Okay, what's really good about a do-it-yourselfer? And again, they don't have to pay any fees, they have total control. Then we went through what are some of the downsides, what are some of the weaknesses, why might that not be in somebody's best interest? And we did that for all of the different categories of competitors that he could be in front of, so that when he and his team go out there, they know what questions to ask. They know if they hear that somebody is working with a certain type of competitor. Ok, these are the questions that we're going to be able to ask that are going to let us know whether or not that's a good prospect for us and, based on the answers that we hear, we'll know whether or not they're qualified or not and whether or not we can move forward If we didn't go through that exercise and for the last 10, 15 years they just went in blinders on. Okay, let me tell you about our firm, why you should be working with the XYZ firm and all of the things that we do. Great.

Selling features and benefits.

Selling features and benefits, not really developing any urgency, kind of people walking away from the meeting, going okay. Well, really, how are you that much different? I mean, everybody says they do that.

Yeah.

So the more that you can understand the competition, figure out what your lane is. Going back to the last episode, identifying what your ideal target looks like, so that you can get in front of your ideal prospect and then, once you're there, ask the right kinds of questions and go down the right paths to get that ideal prospect. To see why they really want to work with you is going to make all the difference in the world, and we talked about adding rocket fuel to your results. That's what's going to really accelerate your results and that's a function of sales and marketing working together.

Absolutely.

That's a function of being a little bit more sophisticated. And again, these days we're all up against it. There wasn't the internet, you know, 30 years ago. People now have done way more research about us ever talking to us the first time than they ever have before. So if we're not sophisticated, if we don't understand who our competition is, how to sell against them, it's going to make life really difficult and we're going to have to work really, really hard for minimal results, and that's why we wanted to bring this up this week.

Absolutely, and I'll kind of piggyback on that, evan to sit back and say if you think about LinkedIn, you think about who they're connected to. On LinkedIn you think about, I can do company data research and probably have a pretty well-rounded visual of what your company is about prior to even having a conversation. It almost makes no sense why people don't know how to differentiate themselves from their competition. It almost makes absolutely no sense. That's why I started saying I shouldn't even tell you guys about this, we shouldn't even be going through this because it's already there, hand in front of you.

Craig, sometimes common sense isn't so common. We get all caught up in terms of what we're doing and so internally focused that we forget about looking at all of these outside things.

Yeah.

That oftentimes is going to make the difference between being successful and not being successful.

Absolutely so. Do you have? Let's say, what would you say is the top three tips you would have from a sales perspective, from differentiating yourself from your competition?

I would say my top three tips are first, do the research so that you can understand who your competition is. Next, do your homework. Figure out what kinds of situations you're going to be more attractive to your prospects versus the competition, competition. And then, once you get in front of your prospects, ask the right kinds of questions, position yourself in the right kind of light so that you can make it very easy for your prospects to see why you're different, why someone wants to work with you versus working with one of your competitors. And, craig, going back to something you brought up at the very beginning people selling on price those kinds of things If you can get somebody to understand why you're a better fit and why they're going to get a lot more value working with you versus working with one of your competitors, yep, guess what? Having the lowest price Isn't the most important thing anymore.

You know, trying to make all these promises that are impossible. That's not the most important thing. If they can see how you are a better fit to help them fix their problems whether it's a product that can fix the problems or a service that they need they're going to choose to work with you more times than not.

Absolutely, you know, and to kind of tie this whole thing together in terms of why sales and marketing need to work together.

We both have kids who are going through the college recruiting and so forth position and then college looking and so forth, if you really use that analogy as a good example. They found it and they have an interest, they want to go to school. They had a situation where they have certain things they want to study. Then you have to do the research to find out what schools are going to fit best. So then when you step in front of that particular school or schools of that nature, you already have an idea of what you want to do in terms of that. It's their job to tell to us, sell us, market to us in a way that says we're the best fit. Because if you look at it in the reverse way, what's funny about it is and obviously your son has had tons of school stuff sent to him and everything else Right. So when you look at it, they send us a brochure and go we're the best fit for your education and your future. They all say that.

Right and my son's getting the postcards every week. And the 1500 student school is letting him know that the 50,000 student school is letting him know that the urban campus, the suburban campus, the rural campus, you know all sending out the same thing. And again it's a matter of you know all sending out the same thing, correct. And again it's a matter of you know finding that right fit.

And if they do a marketing job well enough and you get on campus, there's their opportunity right, and it's their job to sell you from that point right, they may take you to the dorm, they'll take you to the games, they'll take you to the activities right, to help sell the picture better, so that you feel like you're part of the equation, Right. And that's a good analogy to use when you're talking about differentiating yourself. Because, whether it be that or vacation stuff, that's another thing that Amelia, my wife, and I have done. Where we start to look for vacation stuff and they all have white sandy beaches, wonderful pool, lifestyle at night is wonderful what's the difference? Right? I think that that's.

Do you have any other tips in terms of what sales and marketing need to do to work together in terms of differentiating yourself?

It's really just that internal communication. Going back to the example you gave before, if the website's talking about things that the company doesn't do anymore or the marketing is attracting the wrong kinds of prospects, then the company is doomed for failure. Everybody's got to be on the same page and, quite frankly, it needs to be owner-led, founder-led, leader-led in terms of this is who we want to work with. This is what we do really well, and then giving marketing the tools to be able to get that message right and then get that message in front of the right folks. And then the sales team needs to know and needs to buy into. This is what differentiates us. This is why people work with us. And then they need to do their homework, so they're asking the right kinds of questions to qualify the opportunities, they're putting themselves in the right places so that they're in front of the right kinds of target, so that they can end up closing those deals.

And I'll tell you, if any of you guys have been listening long enough, you're starting to hear the same answer. Communication between sales and marketing is paramount to the success of your business. I cannot preach that from the mountaintops enough. The communication I'm going to say it again the communication between your sales and marketing team are paramount for sustainable business growth. I should put that up on a billboard somewhere so that everybody can hear it from and see it, and everything else like that. If I have to stand on that thing and dance around for people to understand it, I'll do it. I'll do it.

I will pay to watch you stand out there and dance around.

Careful, careful, what you ask for. I might just do that so.

Evan, why don't you?

tell them about future episodes, what we're going to do here.

Sure. So for upcoming episodes, we're going to talk about everybody's favorite topic, which is accountability. You know what you can be doing to hold your people accountable If you're an individual producer, things that you should be doing to hold yourself accountable, and what happens when there is no accountability. We're going to talk about developing a really good elevator pitch that will help to differentiate you from the competition, and that first 10, 15, 20 seconds that you're talking to somebody. We'll talk about targeting ideal prospects. We'll talk about value proposition. We'll talk about personal branding and lots of other topics sales and marketing related. So, craig, do you want to share with everybody how they can listen? Subscribe, follow us. So Craig's audio may have cut out. What we want you to do is watch our podcast on demand on YouTube or you can go to wwwyoutubecom at SMP Playbook Unleashed. We want to thank everybody for listening and we will catch you on the next episode.

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