On Differentiation

Differentiation is critical in buying/selling. Differentiation gives buyers choices and helps them choose.

We invest in never ending differentiation battles: “My product is better than the others, we have more features and functions, we have a more impressive customer base, we have great references, we have high NPS scores, we are cheaper……”

Our websites are filled with comparative charts, listing features/functions, capabilities compared with the alternatives. And we ensure we always have more “check” marks in our columns than the alternatives. And our competitors have their versions of those charts.

We spend so much time focusing on how different we are from the alternatives, we forget about the customer and what they are trying to achieve. We focus on competing against each other, failing to help our customers compete.

And despite all our efforts in being differentiated, any solution on their short list will solve their problem. And we continue, “but we have more options…”

Our engagement strategies are remarkably undifferentiated. We do the same things our competitors do. We follow the same formulas and models. We have endless email, digital, social outreaches, just the same as our competitors. We have our cadences that look the same as everyone else’s. When someone does make a change, all the competitors copy the change, so we are no longer different.

We, each, master the algorithms applying the same formulas. We process the prospects/customers in exactly the same, undifferentiated manner. Lead gen, SDR, demo, close. The same formula for every prospect, we optimize our process and work. And our competitors are following the same playbook, so they are doing the same things.

It’s an interesting irony, we focus on our differentiation efforts on the parts of the process that are probably least important to the customer, yet we design our engagement strategies to be undifferentiated.

Don’t get me wrong, the solution selection is important to the customer, but once they have a shortlist, any of the alternatives will address their problem.

But where they struggle is in the change/buying process.

There is endless data around how the customers struggle. No Decisions Made, Buyer Regret, Decision Confidence, Sensemaking all show complementary data. Change/buying cycles lengthening, the wandering, starts/stops/shifts in direction are indicators of their struggle.

Yet we all do the same thing in our engagement process. And our focus is on differentiating our offerings from the competition, not differentiating our engagement strategies.

And our buyers are demonstrating their dissatisfaction with this process. They engage sellers later and later in their process. They prefer, increasingly, not to involve sellers at all.

But every once in a while, there are sellers that engage customers differently. They focus on the customer, their change initiatives, their problem solving process. They focus on what the buyer cares about, helping them navigate the process. They recognize their solutions have to be “just good enough,” but they create differentiation in the areas where everyone else looks the same.

And, they recognize every buyer is different……..