Is Your Business Standing Out?

Originally posted via our weekly business newsletter,?"This Week's Good Advice". Get it here.

We're different... Right?

This week, I interacted brand marketer who was essentially chatting about digging in to one simple question for your business:

How do I stand out among my competitors?

It’s a fair question, and one that successful businesses often forget to consider until a newer, more innovative company takes their industry from under their noses.

And on this conversation, a lot of times people pair this question with a more introspective one:

How am I different? What makes me unique?

Again, these are fair questions, and anyone hoping to grow a business surely understands the importance of answering them.

But it’s interesting to me how dishonest we are with ourselves when we try to answer this question.

I run a coaching business called Good Advice. In my mind, I’m different than everyone else. I really trust my process with my customers, and I really believe in the results I give.

But when someone googles, “Coaching NWA” for our area and my business pops up with all the others… is there really anything that separates me from my competitors?

I think one of the hardest conversations I find myself in with customers is navigating this question.

It’s hard because honestly, we’re often the biggest fans of our own businesses.

We love what we do.

We really believe in it.

In many cases, some of us have left behind entire careers and even taken on incredible debt just to build it out.

But simply put, we’re too close to it. And that keeps us from being as objective as we need to when we think about who will actually buy what we have to sell.

In turn, what makes this a hard conversation with my clientele is pointing out that all those special nuances turn out to not be all that meaningful when your customer makes a buying decision.

This is all the more reason to let your customers drive the development of your business, and all it’s features, offerings, and whatever else you want to design to truly make it stand out and be competitive.

So let’s talk about one easy example of letting customers drive your competitive advantage in your industry — and we’ll use an example from a customer we’re working with currently.

One customer of ours is a home organization service that is doing quite well in our area.

Part of the owner’s process has been consulting with customers on the room they want organized — like a pantry or closet.

Once the customer has committed to working together, the owner would then go and create a Pinterest board that would detail as much of the design of the pantry as possible.

The thinking here is pretty spot on — give your customers something tangible to see when they evaluate what working with you is going to be like, and compared to other home organization businesses, no one else was using Pinterest.

It could serve as a really cool competitive advantage… except that this business in particular had bottlenecked.

As the owner put it, she had done a consultation with a few dozen customers all of whom were excited and ready to buy… but between running the business and doing the actual reorganization delivery work, her business had bottlenecked.

She simply didn’t have the time to create all the Pinterest boards she needed, which meant many of her customers were waiting in limbo.

Now in this situation, you could hire someone whose job explicitly is around building and designing the Pinterest boards. But that would mean finding and/or training someone with the skillset and style that matches how the owner approaches her business with her customers.

And it’s not a bad idea either… Often when you find yourself overwhelmed with a particular element of your business, it’s a fair thought to offload it onto someone else.

But in this case, I asked one simple question.

”How many of your customers actually look at the Pinterest boards you make?”

She thought for a moment before answering, “Not very many.”

I replied, “So why do it?”

You could see the lightbulb turning on in her face.

This was something that really felt unique and special about her brand...

But if it doesn’t matter to your customers… it’s probably not worth doing.

This can be incredible freeing for a business owner — because a lot of times we spend enormous time and energy on elements of our business that we see as really competitive, only to find out that we can still deliver just as valuable a product in a simpler, more timely and cost effective way.

Or, it can be incredible hard to swallow… because more often than not, we’ve designed our business and all its products and services around the experience we’ve always envisioned.

Which leads us all to a good reminder that business isn’t about us.

It’s about serving the customer.

I’ve heard owners groan about this and even say, “If they don’t like how we do it, they can go somewhere else!” while being oblivious to the fact that the customers WERE in fact going somewhere else!

Your business — for all the emotion you’ve put into it in building it — simply isn’t about you.

Contrary to what some may say… your customers really do know best.

They just don’t always have the means or words to describe “best”.

So engage in honest conversations with them and let them drive your business.

You’ll be glad you did.

Blake is the founder of?Good Advice, a consulting company that grows and scales businesses by acquiring 1,000 Raving Fans via customers and culture. Want more content like this??Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Blake also runs the Good Advice Podcast, one of the top business podcasts in the country, available on every podcast platform. Listen via Spotify.