Graham McGregor: What is your 'Unfair Business Advantage'?

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Opinion

Marketing consultant Graham McGregor talks about how to position your business as being superior to all your competitors.

If you want to get outstanding sales and profits in your business I believe you need what I call an 'Unfair Business Advantage'.

In other words you need to be different in a way that makes it very easy for someone to choose your business over your competitors.

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 hair cuts) 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 the follow up systems you put in place to stay in touch with your customers.

The good news (for your business) is that very few businesses have a great follow-up system for their clients or customers.

The reason this is good news, is that because good follow-up is so rare, you will often gain an unfair advantage by doing it.

You could use this idea by putting into place a great follow up system in just one part of your business to start with. Here's a good example...

Cookies from an Accountant:

An accountant I know has put a great follow up system in place for referrals.

Every time someone sends him a referral he sends the person that gave the referral a lovely box of homemade cookies and a personal thank you card.

The accountant has made this follow-up system very easy to do by contracting an outside company to do it for him.

There are dozens of simple things you can do to create an "Unfair Advantage" in any business.

What is your 'Unfair Advantage?'

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the Unfair Business Advantage Report. www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com