What skills can you use to keep your value proposition and differentiation unique?

I focus on honing skills such as continuous market research, innovation, customer-centricity, effective communication, adaptability, and fostering a strong company culture. These skills enable my business to meet evolving customer needs, and effectively communicate its distinct values to its target audience.

As a consultant, maintaining a unique value proposition involves honing specialized expertise, adaptability, problem-solving, strong communication, client-centered approaches, relationship building, business acumen, tech proficiency, leadership, and ethical practice.

There is a difference within the consultants themselves. Some are very analytical, can digest data, query it and then provide actionable insights. Then there are others that would get to the root cause, liaise with the client, build out ideas around data, involve team members but then not have the technical skills to go on and design insights. Both of these people are heavily utilised in the consulting sphere.

The aim should be to keep the offering unique, and for that, you should also keep your skillset unique. It requires deliberation and more effort, but the same is achievable if, in your mind, the goal is to offer a unique product or service. Thus, it also requires remodeling your offering or service to make it unique and, at the same time, further honing your skills to further that goal. You have to ask yourself the questions: What more can I offer? How can I offer it differently from others? It requires deliberation, effort, practice, remodeling, and more practice.

Creativity links with innovation. How to propose to deliver your solution, which tools will be able to make the best impact. Challenging the status quo can also been seen as evolving what it is that you do. Technology really doesn’t stand around and neither should your methods of delivery.

Bind all that you do in an effective comms plan. You can be innovative, design lots of insight but it’s means nothing if it’s not digested and actioned on. I always find small easier pieces of information better, delivered in a method chosen by your audience.

While a right combination of analytical, creative, communication, learning and leadership skills are very much needed, it is important to remember, majority of consulting services rely on standard proven theories or formulae. What brings differentiation and value, is how you correlate and customize the client's problem to the proven solution and deliver the results in a efficient manner. The customization is differentiation whereas, value add is seeing beyond the problem and providing the client a long term and implementable solution.

In my experience Clients are the best ambassadors in a crowded market place. 1. Impact mindset - Focus on high impact problems 2. Experience - Ensure great client experience 3. Build long term relationships - don’t be transactional 4. Reliability and credibility - “Do whatever it takes” mindset and bring “best in class” capabilities