How to create a Profitable Competitive Advantage

Choosing which customers you sell to can give your business a competitive advantage. Photo / Thinkstock

Regardless of what type of business you are in, you actually have a surprising amount of choice about how you sell your products and services.

• You can choose which customers you will sell to

• You can choose how you are you going to position yourself to your customers

• You can choose how you will make sales

• You can choose how you are going to stay in touch with customers (before, during and after a sale)

• You can choose how you will add value to customers

• You can choose how you will explain the benefits of what you do to your customers

• You can choose the strategies you will use to attract new customers

• You can choose how you make a sales presentation

• And many more

Changing just one of these things can be how you create a 'Profitable Competitive Advantage' in your business. (And give your sales and profits a huge boost.)

So let's take a look at how you might create a 'Profitable Competitive Advantage'.

Here are three ideas to get you thinking...

1: You can choose how convenient and easy you make it for a customer to do business with you.

Using convenience can be a simple as redesigning a form or process so it's easier for a customer to use.

It could even be the hours you are open for business.

The Vampire Dentist:

Many years ago a dentist in Los Angeles decided to set up a dental practice that only operated from 4pm to 4am. He then took out small ads offering his services in the trade journals that supplied the Film Studios.

He knew that films were very expensive to produce and the people involved in producing them often worked long hours. So they didn't have time to see a dentist during normal business hours.

No other dentist at the time offered the convenience of dental services after hours and he made a great living for many years by doing this.

2: You can choose which customers you sell to

Many people don't give a lot of thought to choosing which customers they sell to.
However this one choice can have a huge impact on your results.

Choosing who you will sell to can be as simple as asking yourself the following question:
"Who are my best customers and what do they have in common"?

The surprising results of a 'short haircut':

A large franchise company began looking at the characteristics of their most successful franchisees, and discovered (to their surprise), that a large number of them had short haircuts.

Now that was pretty unusual; so they decided to dig a little bit deeper. Further research revealed that the majority of these franchises (with short haircuts) came from an armed services background like the air force or army.

The reason these franchisees were so successful was because they were used to following orders from their armed services background.

So they tended to do everything they were told to do in their franchise manual and got excellent results when they did this.

The franchise company began to focus a lot more effort on getting people from the armed services into their franchise business and their sales went through the roof.

3: You can choose how you will 'add value' to customers.

This one concept gives you unlimited possibilities.

When you use added value with clients you can pick something that interests you and may have nothing to do with your product or service.

Warehouse Example:

In the book How Champions Sell is the story of Steve who was an industrial sales representative and sold hardware, nuts and bolts to industrial accounts. Steve dealt mainly with buyers in purchasing departments. His products were considered a commodity and he was under constant price pressure.

Now Steve was an engineer, and became interested in warehouse operations.

During some extended sales calls, and during some of his weekends, he worked with the warehouse manager of one of his accounts. Together they upgraded the accounts warehouse management system. This saved the customer hundreds of thousands of dollars. His customer was very grateful and gave Steve all his hardware business with little concern for price (as Steve was generally price-competitive.)

The owner of this company and the warehouse manager referred Steve to several other companies in the area.

Steve helped install the cost-saving warehouse system at some of these companies. He picked up their hardware business, again with little concern about pricing.

Soon Steve was calling on the owners of companies (not buyers) all over his territory. He offered the added value service of improved warehouse operations.

This was accompanied of course by the purchase of his hardware line.

Steve became the most successful sales person in his company.

Steve's added value service of helping his clients improve the efficiency of their warehouse operations is a perfect example of adding value to his customers. There are actually hundreds of different ways to add value to your clients.

There are dozens of simple things you can do to create a "Profitable Competitive Advantage" in any business.

And trying just one of them could be all you need to give your business a nice boost in sales and profits.

If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete

Jack Welch

Take Action:
1: How can you make it more convenient for clients to business with you?
2: Who are your best customers and what things do they have in common? What can you do to sell more of your products and services to people who are more like your best customers?
3: How can you add value to your clients and customers?

Graham McGregor is a consultant specialising in memorable marketing. You can download his 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage' Ebook at no charge from www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com