A colleague shared an observation from a CRO. The CRO had discovered the secret to his team’s competitive advantage.
Drum roll……..
The secret to your competitive advantage has nothing to do with your products, your pricing, even your company and it’s reputation.
The secret to your competitive advantage is “Mediocrity!”
Not yours, but your competitors!
We live in a world of increasing sameness, at least in selling and our GTM strategies.
Everyone does the same things in the same way. We use the same playbooks. We have the same sequences, leveraging the same tools. We measure the same KPIs. We are using AI in the same way.
Our products/solutions aren’t that different. We aren’t that different.
One way to stand out used to be “doing more.” More outreach, more calls, more social engagement. Just through the high levels of activity, we could start to stand out. But everyone is on equal footing today.
It used to be that bringing some level of enthusiasm and excitement into a discussion helped us engage others. But today, we stick to our scripts, read the questions knowing that our AI tools will record the answers so we don’t really have to pay attention. We just wait for the customer to stop talking then ask our next question.
At one time, we sought to be differentiated. Today, we seem to be on a path, perhaps unwittingly, to sameness, to mediocrity.
But, there is hope.
If we can be different, in just a small way, all of a sudden we stand out. We are differentiated and it’s this differentiation that creates our competitive advantage.
It’s not that difficult.
Perhaps, it’s caring a little more. And through that simple, act, standing out to the people you engage. Perhaps it’s listening for what’s being said, rather than what we want to hear (Part of me thinks, maybe listening is enough of a differentiator). Maybe it’s engaging the customer in the things that are important to them, not just focusing on what’s important to us. Maybe it’s the ability to hold up our end of a collaborative conversation. Maybe it’s as simple as meeting our commitments, or being prepared.
It’s amazing how little it takes to stand out from mediocrity.
We don’t need tools or technology to do this. We don’t need to leverage AI to give us an advantage. We don’t have to do more than anyone else.
It comes down to four things: Preparation, attention, relevance, and caring.
And it’s probably a safe guess that your competitors won’t notice, afterall, they are committed to mediocrity. So even if they did notice, they wouldn’t do anything.
If you’ve gotten this far, here’s the challenge.
I’m desperately hoping people pile on and say, “Dave you are absolutely wrong and off base!”
I desperately hope I’m wrong—more in error than I’ve ever been before.
Sadly, I don’t think I am……….
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion this post. A fascinating discussion diving into the human connection much more than I expected. Enjoy!
Customers do not what “difference” they want “safe”. Marketing wants to be different from other marketing because they think that that will be sufficient reason for buyers to buy, and sometimes it is and sometimes it is not. If being different was all that is required for market domination, it would have been done by now, but it has not. There are several big players not just one. Safe now and safe into the future, at a safe price is what buyers want and they are going to put in the effort to get it, which means listening to salespeople until they get to the safe points. Then they choose the safest of the bunch and the salespople can help by giving them complex and/or complicated reasons to business-buy to disguise the fact that they chose: safe. Differentiation is for the sellers not the buyers, gives then something to talk about, all that rot is just a lever to get the buyers to re-decide; sometimes this is called change (for the better is implicit). Buyers also are happy to change: but to the safer. If you want to sell, make it safe; from top to bottom. Repeat – all buyers want is safe, in its fullest sense. The rest is padding which may make it look clever and be a platfrom from which sellers can sell and safe may be mediocrity: and safer is better mediocrity. Safe now; make it the safest decision, make it stay safe, make it easy to make it safer later, make it so that you will be constantly keeping it safe and at the cutting edge of safe and finish it all off by You being the safest to work with. You will not have to discount and you can spend all day choosing which colour it should be, which is a safe decision, as it should be.