The question I ask a room full of competitors

There’s one thing you can do that will grow your business more than anything else. It’s upstream of everything else you typically hear about: how you sell, your process, your scripts, your activity levels, even your marketing strategy, tools, and tactics.

It’s being able to answer one deceptively simple question: what makes you different?

Answering it in a way that matters to the people buying your services is a hell of a lot harder than it sounds.

There’s an exercise I run whenever I’ve got a group of companies from the same industry in one room. I ask, “How many of you can tell your prospects how you’re different than your competitors?”

A few hands go up. So I ask them to share: what is it that makes them different?

If it’s MSPs, I’ll inevitably hear some version of:

Then I ask the rest of the room, “How many of you could say the same?”

Hands slowly go up all over the room. And that’s the point. Differentiation requires being different.

Commodities are really easy to sell… as long as you’ve got the lowest price. Try to sell the same thing as everyone else for a higher price, though, and you’re going to run into trouble. Sales process be damned.

That’s why one of the most important strategic decisions you’ll make about your business is how you’re going to stand out in the “sea of sameness.” And I mean truly stand out from the competition.

Maybe you serve a specific market. You learn how those businesses operate from the inside out: what they need, the inside-baseball terms they use for their problems, and who the key players in the industry are.

Or maybe you run a different business model than your competitors, which lets you package and price services your own way, write your own contracts, or sell offerings they don’t.

Maybe it’s a proprietary process, or a pricing mechanism nobody else in your market uses. Maybe it’s the talent on your team, the culture you’ve built, or the social proof and case studies you’ve documented. Maybe it’s a story your competitors can’t tell.

It could be any number of things. I can’t tell you how to be different. No one can. There’s no formula or template for differentiation. If there was, everyone would use it, and you’d be right back where you started.

Only you can answer what’s going to separate you from the rest of the room.

Everything we usually focus on — sales and marketing strategy and tactics — is downstream of that answer. Here’s what it looks like when there isn’t anything real to point to.

Your setters can’t get appointments, because they sound like everybody else. Same generic call, same pitch, same vanilla offer.

The appointments you do get are tire kickers. Price shoppers. Commodity shoppers. They aren’t buying on differentiation, because nobody showed them any to start with.

At the end of the process, you lose them because you were too expensive. And the deals you do win, you win at lower margins. That’s the margin you would’ve invested in better people, better processes, better branding, and more differentiation. Now you can’t.

Flip it around and the cycle runs the other way. Across our SDR and outside-rep programs, MSPs with a clear market and an introductory offer nobody else has book 3-5x more appointments than the ones running a generic offer to a general market. Downstream, the clients with clear differentiation close at roughly 2x the rate of the ones without it.

It isn’t just MSPs, either.

If you own gyms, you’ve got to differentiate to grow. Planet Fitness looked at a market where roughly 80% of people didn’t belong to a gym, a lot of them because gyms intimidated them, and built a gym for that 80% instead of fighting every other gym in the market. It wasn’t just cheaper memberships. It was more machines than barbells, a “Judgement Free Zone” environment, and an alarm that goes off if somebody grunts too loud. Put Planet Fitness in a room with 20 other gyms and the person who’s embarrassed to work out knows exactly which one is for them.

Every company in that room of MSPs I mentioned earlier says some version of “we have great service.” The Ritz-Carlton decided to prove it: every employee, down to the housekeeper, can spend up to $2,000 to fix a problem without approval. Any hotel can put “great service” on its website. How many back it up with a promise like that?

And we’ve had to answer the same question internally with MSP Sales Partners.

Be like every other sales training company? Another sales coaching program? Or just another recruiter? Nah.

We picked a hyper-specific market, MSPs, so we know the sales process inside and out. I’d be willing to bet that nobody has listened to more IT and AI sales discovery and closing calls in the past 18 months than we have. That’s unique.

I also decided to set MSP Sales Partners apart from traditional training, coaching, and recruiting by taking on a share of the responsibility for results. We aren’t going to train your rep in a session today and leave you to figure out how to implement it.

We aren’t going to coach a sales call that’s running on a bad script or process without helping you fix it. Or hand you a newly recruited rep and leave you to train and ramp them on your own. We built the business around fractional sales management, or what many of our clients call co-management.

It’s different from outsourcing to an agency, too, because we’re building the sales function inside our clients’ businesses. The reps we recruit, the playbooks we write, and the training we create are theirs. We’re building them an asset while we deliver the service.

It may not be what everyone is looking for. But everything about how we do things is designed so that if you are our ideal client, we aren’t the right choice. We’re the only one. A market of one.

It’s harder to do business this way, at first.

Sitting down and making strategic decisions about how to actually be different, rather than how to say you’re different, takes time. It comes with some risk. It takes some creativity, because there’s a good chance you won’t find your differentiation lying around. You’ll have to create it.

That’s the difference between building a unique business and opening a franchise. A franchise hands you the operating manual on day one. It’s paint by numbers. Every one is the same. The template makes a lot of things easier, except standing out.

Once you’ve dialed yours in, it’s easier to hold your price, because you’re the fit for a specific market and you can charge for it. Easier to keep competitors out, because to beat you they have to match what you do and then overcome the fact that your market already sees you as the one for them.

That’s why the question is harder than it sounds. For most businesses in the room, the answer needs to be designed more than it needs to be discovered. And that starts with a decision.

Make that decision. Everything else you work on in sales and marketing is waiting on it.

Adios,

Ray