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What Happens When The Customer Doesn’t Raise His Hand?

David Brock — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:13:21 +0000

There has been an important revolution in marketing thinking over the past years. The move from thinking about campaigns to rich content programs and nurturing is important. It recognizes something important, that customers want to learn, they want to be educated. These programs enable us to develop “relationships” with customers and nurture them up to the point of their deciding they need to take action and start a buying process.

In our nurturing programs, we design them to have the customer take different actions through the program that help us gauge their level of interest, their urgency, and their readiness to buy.

This is important and needs to be the cornerstone of our marketing programs. But there is a problem with this–it requires a customer to have an interest–to want to learn–to want to consider a change, to be thinking about their needs. Not necessarily to do something today, but to be thinking, “perhaps we need to change at some point in the future, I should start learning and looking around now.” In essence, nurturing works best when the customer raises their hand.

But what happens when the customer should be raising their hand, but isn’t? What about the case where the customer is so busy just surviving day to day? What about the customer that isn’t looking to learn, that isn’t thinking about the future, who isn’t thinking about how they might improve their business?

They may never be a part of our nurturing programs because they don’t recognize the need to be nurtured. They may be part of our programs, but they aren’t taking the actions they should be taking—but aren’t.

Pull is an important part of developing the customer need, knowledge and enabling us to enter a buying cycle when decide they need to buy. But I think push is still critical. But it’s push in a very different sense. It’s helping the customer recognize that they need to change. It’s helping them understand they are missing an opportunity. It’s helping them understand that them see new ways of running their business or function.

Sales people must bring ideas to their cusotmers! Sales people must provoke and challenge their customers. Sales people must create the reasons for customers to raise their hands, to say–I need to do something now–entering into a buying process. Alternatively, to say–that’s something I need to start looking into. I might want to do something later.

I get concerned as I start to see the sales pendulum swinging to “pull” oriented sales strategies. I think exclusively relying on pull–which I see many organizations seriously considering is irresponsible. It’s not because we “aren’t” driving our sales growth as aggressively as possible–though that is irresponsible. But it’s really irresponsible because we see that our customers are missing opportunities to grow and improve and we aren’t taking action to help them understand this. It’s irresponsible because our customers often look to their sales people for ideas–to understand things that are happening in their markets, best practices for their functions, how to be more efficient.

We have to help our customers understand new opportunities–if we are truly customer focused, value based, trusted advisors, we need to get them to raise their hands. Our nurturing programs may not do this.

Creating great value for the customer, developing meaningful relationships requires a careful balance of push and pull. They can’t exist by themselves–we can’t have push only strategies, nor can we have pull only strategies. We have to purposefully execute both.

Do You Have The Pieces-Parts Or A Working System?

David Brock — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:16:32 +0000

Take a look at the two pictures below (courtesy of RapidRepair.com). In one sense they are exactly the same. Both are pictures of the Apple iPhone 4s. One shows the iPhone as a set of parts and pieces. The other shows an assembled iPhone 4S.

You know the next question, “What’t the difference between those pictures?” The obvious answer is that only one works. It’s the assembled iPhone.

A lot of organizations are similar. When I talk to them, they have all the pieces/parts. They have a sales process, they have hired the right people, they have a good organizational structure, they have a compensation plan, they have training, they have demand generation programs, they have marketing and nurturing programs, they have CRM and other Sales 2.0 tools. They have everything—all the pieces parts, but somehow things aren’t working.

Having all the pieces/parts does not give you a working system or a high performing organization. The missing element is those pieces parts aren’t assembled and working together. See each part is dependent on the other parts to perform its function. If they aren’t assembled and working together, the organizational goals can never be achieved.

The problem gets worse, in many organizations there are parts that are missing. Or there may be incompatible or the wrong parts. You can’t even put these together, the organization can never achieve it’s goals.

To many organization are not achieving their goals because of these issues. The most difficult organizations are those that think they have all the pieces/parts, and keep focusing on these pieces, rather than looking at how they fit together and work as a whole. I see sales organizations with a sales process—but it’s not used. Managers don’t use it in doing opportunity and pipeline reviews, sales people don’t use it to help improve their effectiveness, it’s not integrated into the CRM system or other tools.

Organizations implement sales training, but it’s not integrated with the other pieces parts. Marketing works on demand generation, developing content, nurturing customers, but aren’t producing sales qualified leads. Customer service isn’t aligned with the commitments sales has made to the customers or the overall customer experience strategies.

Smart executives come to me, saying “We’ve done everything, we have all the different components, why aren’t things working?” The answer becomes obvious when you think of it just like the two pictures of the iPhone above. The parts don’t produce results on their own, they have to be assembled and working as a system to produce results.

We break up what we do into components and parts. It’s the only way we can manage complexity and solve problems. We have to design each part to perform it’s function ideally. But we have to go further, we have to make sure each part complements and works optimally with the others, then we have to put all the parts together and make them work as a whole.

We have to manage all of these over time–if a part fails or breaks, we have to replace it. If our sales process is failing, we have to fix it, because without it, the other elements won’t work effectively and we will fail to achieve our goals. If we’ve hired the wrong people, we have to correct that for the same reasons.

The pieces/important. If we are missing some, things don’t work (or don’t work well). If we have the wrong ones, things don’t work. We have to have all the right pieces. But we can’t stop there, we have to assemble them and have them working efficiently together. We also have to be using them. Having a sales process and not using it is just as bad as not having one. Likewise, not using your CRM system is the equivalent of not having one–actually worse, you’ve paid a lot of money for it.

Do you have all the pieces?
Do you have the right pieces?
Have you put them together so they work together efficiently and effectively?

All three are critical to maximizing performance. Without them, it’s virtually impossible to achieve our goals.

(Thanks to RapidRepair.com for letting me use these pictures)

The Importance Of Push And Pull In Sales

David Brock — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:45:39 +0000

There is an interesting discussion on Focus on transforming sales organizations from Push to Pull. I can see the reason for the discussion, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a comment about “pushy sales people,” I’d have a huge pile of nickels. It’s also both fashionable and realistic to talk about the customer’s buying process. Customers are in the driver seat, social business can provide customers a lot of information that sales people previously provided. Marketing is developing rich content strategies to nurture and develop relationships with customers–theoretically enabling them to “pull” when they have a need.

There are a lot of important changes that enable us to engage customers in different and more impactful ways. However, with all that said, I remain an unabashed proponent of the sales person’s obligation to Push! I don’t believe sales can afford to be Pulled–in fact it’s irresponsible to be Pull only.

The problem is sales people (and businesses) have always gotten the notion of Pushing wrong. It’s always been focused on the wrong thing: What’s our elevator pitch? Let’s go pitch our product! I need to get this order now! It’s been almost exclusively focused on the sales person, the sales person’s goals and the sales person’s company. It should be clear why customers react so poorly to this, it’s not about them.

Push is important, it’s the obligation of sales people–but it must be correctly focused. It has to be about the customer. It has to be focused on them and what they can achieve. It’s the obligation of the sales person to help their customers think differently about their businesses, to discover new opportunities, to discover opportunities to improve–operations, customer satisfaction, quality. profitability, reduce risk, or whatever. Customers are sometimes buried in the day to day, losing perspective about opportunities to grow their businesses. Often, as prisoners of their own experiences, they don’t realize that they might try something new, there might be a different or better way that improves their results.

Whether it’s called “Challenging,” “Provocative,” “Solutions Oriented,” or “Customer Focused,” top sales people bring new ideas and opportunities to their customer. They create a vision and engage their customers in owning the vision.

Push doesn’t stop there, it continues through the buying process, helping the customer engage the right people, structure their process, and make a decision. Great sales people help the customer keep focused on the goals they are trying to achieve. As the buying decision stretches out–as it often does, the great sales person pushes the customer–helping them realize the lost opportunities and opportunity costs of delaying the decision and implementation. The objective is not the order, but helping the customer achieve their goals on as aggressive a schedule as possible.

Push is critical, push is important–but only if it is focused on the customer and pushing them to achieve their goals.

But Pull plays an important role in supporting Push. Pull is a measure of customer ownership and engagement in the opportunity, and the business result. If the sales person has done the right job in Pushing, all of a sudden the customer starts to Pull. They embrace the initiative, they get actively engaged in the opportunity and in owning the results.

Great sales people look for their customer to Pull as a result of their appropriate Pushing. By itself, Pushing can be slow, but if the sales person can get the customer engaged in Pulling as well, the entire process gets accelerated.

A Pull only strategy is the kiss of death for sales people. However powerful our customer nurturing and development programs, if we wait for the customer to Pull, we are in a seriously disadvantaged position. The customer has already done their research and arrived at some decisions. They have evaluated alternatives (correctly or incorrectly) and narrowed alternatives to a short list. At this point the value the sales person can create is seriously constrained–primarily to responding to the customer need. At this point, too often, the difference between alternatives is very small–often leaving the key differentiator to be price.

Pull is bad for the customer, as well. It puts too much responsibility on them. They probably can never be a knowledgeable in solutions as the people who build those solutions. While there is a wealth of information in the web, the customer in their research may emerge informed, but not well informed. They may emerge mis-informed. Pull is even worse from another perpective–it puts the onus of recognizing opportunities on them–they may miss opportunities, or be late in recognizing them. Customers get great value from others making them aware, challenging them, Pushing them.

Push and Pull, artfully combined is the winning formula for the customer and for sales. They work well with each other, but to my mind, it all starts with a little Push.

What do you think?

Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places

David Brock — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:45:24 +0000

Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas. They are driven for improvement and innovation. But too often, our efforts are stymied. It’s hard to improve or innovate. Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places.

When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?” Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!” Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.”

When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel: “Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.” There are dozens of examples of this–the start up that has a completely different take on things, the game changer that was never on anyone’w radar. The Amazon’s, Apple’s, Facebook’s and others. It’s a dismal but too accurate observation–but we can do something about this.

Benchmarking our competition, looking within our industries is an important element of our business, sales and marketing strategies. We have to have competitive practices, we have to understnad the critical issues in our markets. But at the same time, it limits us. We restrict ourselves to the familiar, to the known, to our experience base. We become prisoners of our own experience, blind to what is happening outside our worlds.

The good news, our competitors and our customers do the same things! They are also blinded and limited. This creates a tremendous opportunity — both to outcompete and outperform our competitors, and to bring ideas and innovation and value to our customers.

If we just started looking in non-traditional places–the web and social media may be one of those new places for us to hang out. Different industries, different regions, different cultures, different business models all give us new ideas. The ideas we may be looking at could be old and stale in their own industries or regions—but they could represent great innovation in our own.

Innovation doesn’t need to be tough, it just means looking in different places, exposing yourself to new ideas. If you live in a B2B world–look at retail and B2C. If you live in a box/product solution world, look at services, subscriptions, knowledge based industries. If you live in high tech, look at high fashion. If you are a Boomer meet some X, Y, Z’s (and vice versa). Expose yourself to different things–different art, different music, different people, different ideas.

You could learn a lot. You might find ideas that twisted, tweaked, artfully adapted could have great applicability for you and your customers. They could set you apart from everyone else. You might also get a chance to see your new competitors–perhaps before they become competitors. That opens a whole new realm of possiblities.

Are you looking for innovation innovation and ideas in the right places?

Before You Can Create Value For Your Customer, You Have To Know What Value You Create

David Brock — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:45:40 +0000

Having a differentiated value proposition, creating value for your customers is critical for sales success. But when I speak with sales executives and professionals, it’s often not clear what really sets them apart.

Everyone believes in their company, products, and services. People have to be enthusiastic about what they sell. But customers need a reason to buy–to select one alternative over another. Too often, sales people don’t know how to articulate this difference.

Sure there are differences in products–but in reality, these differences are minor. If you’ve made the customer’s short list, they’ve already determined your product meets their requirements–as have the alternatives they are considering. Quality and service are all table stakes, so they aren’t differentiators. So what is it that separates you from the competition? Brand? Company Reputation? Price?

When I explore this with sales people, they really struggle, and rightfully so. “What sets us apart? What is the unique value we create for our customers?” The answer to this question is not sales’ responsibility, though too often, organizations leave this to sales. The answer to this question is really an overall organizational question. It’s a fundamental strategic question every organization must really understand.

But most organizations really don’t confront this, they wrap themselves meaningless words like “leadership, global, innovation, best of breed, agility, partners.” Or they differentiate themselves with a technology, like “cloud.” But from the customer point of view, where’s the differentiation? If everyone is declaring themselves as “innovative, global providers of best of breed solutions,” how do they choose?

Understanding what really sets your company apart, the meaning your organization creates for your customers is an organization wide task. Sales, marketing, product development, customer service, manufacturing, finance, administration, everyone is part of this.

Understanding what sets you apart is tough, it requires you to talk to your customers — and listen to what they say! It requires everyone in the company to engage the customers–to drill down, beyond the obvious, throw away answers, to understand from the customer point of view, “what does your company stand for? Why is it that customers buy? What meaning do you create for your customers?”

It’s very hard to do–usually organizations are surprised, often uncomfortable with what they hear. The things they thought were the differentiators may not be. Core strategies driven by the best and brightest within the company may have little meaning to the customer. The investments we may be making in “messaging, branding,” and other things may have little impact on why the customers really buy.

Engaging customers in these conversations, listening, understanding is difficult and threatening. But if the company takes the time to understand and internalize these conversations, it provides the cornerstone to not only the company strategies, but to sales and marketing in really understanding and delivering the value that’s most meaningful to their customers.

Do you understand what your cusotmers’ really value, what sets you apart and why they buy from you? Is everything your company does, focused on reinforcing and growing this value and differentiation?

If not, you may be wasting lots of time, resources, money, and opportunity on things that do not set you apart.

What’s Your Focus?

David Brock — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:07:30 +0000

I work with dozens of organizations and hundreds to thousands of business professionals every year. Over time, I’ve noticed some important differences in the focus of many of these people and organizations. Some (too many) focus on avoiding failure, some focus on achieving success.

Aren’t they the same? They actually can’t be more different. We frame our view of the world in very different ways, pose questions in different ways. develop very different strategies, take different risks.

When your focus in on achieving success, you sometimes fail. But you learn from that failure, you apply those lessons to achieving success.

When your focus is on avoiding failure, you sometimes fail. If you are smart, you apply those lessons to avoiding future failures. But you miss something important, you don’t kearn how to achieve success. Sometimes your focus on avoiding failure blinds you to what success looks like.

We all fail. What we do with it depends on our focus. We can focus on avoiding failure, or we can focus on achieving success.

What’s your focus?

Does Sales 2.0 Make You A Better Sales Person?

David Brock — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 06:45:50 +0000

The short answer is Yes–and–No. I sit through all sorts of conferences that promote great technologies and the great capabilities of the Sales 2.0 tools. If you believed the claims, or even discounted them by 50%, virtually every sales person should meet or exceed their quotas if they had access to Sales 2.0 technologies and tools. They seem to be the answer to sales manager’s prayers for quota attainment.

Sales 2.0 tools offer tremendous capabilities to sales people. They enable us to dramatically leverage our time–making us much more efficient. Some of the tools (primarily the Business Analytics tools), enable us to do things we never have imagined in the past. With these, we can intercept the right customer, at the right time, with the right message, and the right offer—dramatically improving the customers interest and receptivity, as well as increasing conversion rates.

So the tools offer tremendous capabilities. I cannot imagine being a high performing sales person and not leveraging these tools to their full potential. These tools enable great sales people to accomplish even more!

But what about the rest of the sales population? These tools can possibly make some of them slightly better. They can also accelerate the ability of a mediocre to bad sales person, to execute terribly (just look at some of my recent posts of the sales calls from the Sales 2.0 suppliers).

What is missed in these discussions of hot new technologies, how well sales people execute the basics. The principles and underlying principles of sales remain the same. Strong skills, the right mentality, sales people who are capable of being good sales people because of their characteristics and behaviors all serve as a foundation. Strong strategies, processes, and programs, well defined customer segments, are all critical. Without these basic foundations, Sales 2.o tools are unlikely to produce results.

Sales 2.0 tools will not fix bad sales people. These tools will not fix bad strategies or bad processes. They will fill gaps or deficiencies in the organzation’s abilities to execute. These tools amplify, extend and enhance the capabilities of the individual and the organization. In the hands of great sales people, good organizations, they help enable these organizations to outpace their competition and better serve their customers.

So Yes, Sales 2.0 is critical for great sales people and great sales organizations. These tools will help you achieve more than you could imagine. But if you aren’t there, you are better served by focusing on the basics. Build a strong foundation in the people and organization so you can really leverage these tools to their full benefit.

Performance Management Friday — Balanced Performance

David Brock — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:45:17 +0000

As sales people, we may be responsible for a lot of different things—we may have a number of product lines we can sell, we may have responsibility for retaining and growing current customers, as well as acquiring new customers. There may be a number of different strategic objectives our company may have for us.

However, sometimes, we get stuck in a rut–we have our favorite product lines–the one or two products we know very well, those that we have had great success in selling. Or we are stuck calling on the same customers–people who we know, customers with whom we have great familiarity.

While we are comfortable with certain product lines or customers, it creates real problems for us and our companies. Great sales people continually look for balanced performance. They try to sell the entire product line. They try to balance the results they produce between acquiring new customers and growing the relationships with existing customers.

When we fall into bad habits, we limit our ability to be successful. If we just sell our favorite products, we’ll miss opportunities to expand wallet share (we’ll cover this in another post) with our current customers. We’ll miss the ability to find new customers–they may not be interested in our “pet product lines” but may be interested in other product lines.

When we focus on our favorite customer, not acquiring new customers, we miss many new sales opportunities—leaving them for our customers.

Balanced performance is critical to our companies. To support new product development and extension of the product lines, and the execution of the company’s strategies.

It’s easy to fall into bad habits–we have the product lines we’ve been most successful with, so we look for more of those opportunities, we have the customers we’ve been most successful with, and keep calling on them. Sometimes when companies have been merged, we see this happening—we sell the products from our former company, and are slow to pick up the products from the new company. Or our company announces new producst–but we aren’t comfortagle in selling them, so they languish. There are all sorts of other reasons we may fall into those bad habits.

Make sure you balance your performance:

1. Look at the opportunities in your funnel, are they dominated by a few product lines, or is there a good mix of opportunities across all the product lines you are responsible for. If more than 70%* of the opportunities are from one product line, you may be missing a lot of sales opportunities.

2. Look at the opportunities in your funnel and the balance between new and current customers. Unless your territory assignment is strictly new customer focused or current customer focused (for example, covering a few key accounts), make sure you have a good balance across new customer acquisition and current customer growth. Consider roughly a 50-50* split.

As a manager, making sure your people have balanced performance is very important. Think of this, from the point of view of executing the company’s strategies. is a sales person that makes their quota with a balanced performance in selling all the product lines and acquiring new customer a better performer than a sales person who makes their number with just a few customers or by focusing only on one or two product lines. Tactically, we like the revenue performance from both, but strategically, the sales person with balanced performance is contributing much more.

Set goals for your people, set goals for new customer acquisition, set goals–maybe guidelines for balanced performance, don’t get too detailed or prescriptive, but look at performance across major product categories. Keep coaching your people about the importance of balanced performance, not just from the point of view of the company, but from their point of view–having more to sell to more customers is always helpful when we are trying to fill our pipelines?

Take a few minutes this weekend and look at your funnels:

1. Do one or two product lines dominate the opportunities you are pursuing?

2. If so, what are you going to do to look for opportunities with other product lines?

3. Have you looked at your current customers and how you can sell them more of your product portfolio?

3. Are you going back to the same customers all the time? What percent of the opportunities you are pursuing are from potentially new customers?

4. Look at your territory, what are you doing to go after new customers?

* There’s nothing magic about these numbers, choose whatever might be appropriate for you.

Strategic Thinking, Getting The Big Picture

David Brock — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 06:30:08 +0000

I’ve been participating in an interesting conversation at Focus.com— “What are some non-selling skills that sales reps need to master?” Leanne Hoagland-Smith made some important observations. One of those is the importance of Strategic Thinking.

Leanne’s right, but we don’t talk about it very much. I think there are a couple of aspects to Strategic Thinking, first–how sales professionals manage their opportunities, time, and territories. Second, how we engage our customers in thinking about their businesses. Both aspects are critical for high performing sales professionals.

Managing Opportunities, Time, and Territories:

Too often, sales people are interrupt driven or response oriented. Sales people tend to be transaction oriented, that is–what’s the next email, what’s the next phone call, what’s the next meeting. We need to respond to something, we need to find out something else, we need to present something.

Days and weeks are consumed in acting and reacting. We seldom take the time to sit back to think and plan. We don’t take the time to develop a deal strategy, but look no further than the next step. We don’t take the time to plan a sales call, choosing instead to shoot from the lip. We don’t examine our prospecting, choosing instead just to do the same old thing over and over, even though they produce diminishing returns.

The highest performing sales professionals schedule time to plan, strategize, and think. They look at the long term–are they getting the most out of their territories? Are they investing their time in areas that produce the greatest return? Are they being as effective as possible?

They look at each sales opportunity strategically. They start with the end in mind, developing strategies to get them to the end goal as quickly and effectively as possible. When surprises happen, rather than reacting, they pause to understand, assess the impact to their strategies, they think several steps ahead, adjusting their strategies where appropriate.

Top sales professional understand the value of planning—planning a sales call, planning a deal strategy, planning how they will maximize the growth in their territory, planning how they will achieve their goals, planning how to most effectively spend their time. Top sales professionals are also execution oriented–they execute their strategies and plans. They focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of their execution.

Strategic thinking, understanding the big picture,, is the way top sales professionals approach every aspect of their job, it’s what separates them people chasing transactions.

Strategic Thinking–For Your Customers:

Top sales people contribute to their customers in a different way as well. They don’t just compete to solve their customers problems, they look at their customers as if it were their own business. They aren’t worried about making the sale, getting the deal. They want to win the customer’s total attention. They do this by thinking about new ways for their customers to grow their businesses, new ways to do things. They are not just Problem Solvers, but are Opportunity Solvers.

Because of the way they think and they way they help customers grow their businesses, customers view them differently from normal sales people. They become trusted advisers, they become critical to the success of the customers. Customers don’t avoid them, but actively seek them out. Customers know these top sales people are focused on their success.

Strategic Thinking, the ability to simultaneously look at both the big picture and tactical issues is what separates top performers from everyone else.

Imitation May Be A Sincere Form Of Flattery, But It’s A Loser’s Strategy

David Brock — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:30:52 +0000

It seems imitation is rampant, we’re surrounded by it. Often there seem to be more imitators–copy-ers than innovators and leaders.

In the music world, we see all sorts of tribute bands. (I’m a fan of a Doors tribute band, Wild Child, –their lead singer is Dave Brock. I keep trying to convince folks that’s me playing Jim Morrison). These bands are great, but they never achieve the greatness of the bands they are imitating. They always be just what they are, facsimiles of the real thing. In the case of tribute bands, we know they are imitators so, as customers, we don’t feel cheated.

We see “imitation” with counterfeit products–clothes, watches, shoes. software. In China, there are even counterfeit Apple Stores. These imitators try to fool you, making you think they are just the same as the original, but they never are. Somehow, there is a real difference between a Rolex and a Rolecks.

In business and sales we see too much imitation. Following the same business strategy as our competitor, matching their products feature for feature, but never surpassing them. Copying our competition with, “we can do anything they can do.” (This is usually followed by the words “cheaper.” )

If we aren’t careful, responding to our competitor’s moves in a sales situation can become a form of imitation. We can end up mirroring the competitor. Not outselling or outcompeting, but looking the same. Not setting the stage for success, but responding, copying, saying “me too.”

Sometimes the imitator, or copy-er will win. Usually, the folks that say “we can do the same, only cheaper.” But it’s not a sustainable strategy for success. You are always playing catch up, you are always comparing yourself to something better (after all, that’s the crux of imitation). To continue as an imitator, you are totally dependent on the person or company you are imitating. You can only compete on the basis of the “rules” they establish.

Customers really need more than imitators. They need innovators, they need leaders. Customers need suppliers who can help them look at their businesses differently. Sales people who can help them see new opportunities to grow or better achieve their objectives. Customers want sales professionals who will work with them solving tough problems, they don’t want some one who can just follow or just copy. Too often, when a customer succumbs to the “me too, only cheaper” argument, they end up feeling cheated. These companies can’t really solve their problems, they can’t really offer leadership. The customer is stuck, trying to figure it out themselves, getting no help because there is none there.

The secret of business and sales longevity is not in saying “me too,” but it’s in innovating, constantly improving, constantly moving forward, differentiating what you do and how you do it from everything else. Leaders worry about their competition. They watch, the analyze, they understand the competitors’ strategies. But in dealing with competition, leaders don’t copy. They differentiate, they constantly demonstrate their superiority, they are constantly upping their game, making it tougher for the competitors to copy and imitate. The leader’s response to competition is very different than the copy-ers.

Imitation is easy, anyone can copy something, it doesn’t mean they can solve a customer’s problems. Being the real deal is tough, but it’s what sets those leaders apart. They are the people customers will listen to. They understand what the customer needs to do, providing a clear path to solving the problem. Over the long tern, the success of these people and organizations far outshines all the imitators or copy-ers.

So how are you competing? Are you offering real leadership, are you contantly innovating and improving? Are you challenging your customer, are you presenting them new ideas. Is your differentiation distinct and sustainable? Or are you just following the crowd, playing catch up, trying to get the few crumbs left behind?

Afterword: I originally started to write this article out of anger. I had discovered an “imitator,” someone who was liberally copying my material and claiming it as his own. I was angry–I still am. I was going to write an article on the evils of plagiarism, lashing out at this clueless soul. Then I realized it’s a no win–it distracts me from offering my clients and readers some insight and leadership. Competing, growth and success has little to do with the imitators and copy-ers. They can’t make a difference.

After-afterword: That cool dude in the picture is Dave Brock of Wild Child. He’s not bad. Me–only in my dreams, though I do a mean version of Light My Fire.