If you’re selling a service to other companies and are under the illusion that they are looking simply to buy your services to fill a need, get in line. There are a million other people they can buy from. In fact, one of my earlier posts is about the crazy fact that 86% of buyers can’t tell the difference between suppliers. That’s because there are lots of people who are selling the same service, in the same way, to the same buyer, using the same words.
The Expert Touch
The best way to elevate yourself above the competition is to become an expert in a very specific pain point that your ideal target client group is having. For example, when a client who was having a tough time breaking into large corporations selling leadership training, we found out about a really interesting industry problem. Our research found that the biggest reason for delayed projects in tech companies was the poor quality of interpersonal relationships amongst engineers. This was so prevalent and such a costly issue that we niched her company as an expert in Engineer Interpersonal Communications. Now, this company has a highly differentiated and motivating expert positioning that resounds loudly with anyone in the technical industries.
Not An Expert At Anything?
Author Malcolm Gladwell claims that you need 10,000 hours of doing the same thing to become an expert in that thing. Let me be clear: I don’t expect my clients that I position as experts to wait that long. The expert positioning is just that-it’s a positioning. It’s a marketing plan that is geared to feature and communicate your expertise about that very specific pain point. Your competitors are not doing that. One, because they don’t know to and two because they don’t know how to. It is very easy for a targeted industry to start thinking that you’re the expert in a very specialized pain point. It only takes seeing you continually talking about how you solve this one problem. This could be at their industry events, in articles in their trade journals, on LinkedIn group discussions and even at Executive Roundtables you put together about this very topic.
So stop trying to simply sell your services like everyone else is doing, elevate yourself to an expert in a very specific solution to a very costly pain point and see your equity soar.
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