atkinson advisor

Understanding and job alignment are two keys to high performance. Executives often face a difficult challenge of explaining their company’s business in a simple format.

The Business Model Canvas helps solve this problem. In a single page, the canvas captures:

1. Key partners
2. Key activities
3. Key resources
4. Value proposition
5. Customer relationships
6. Channels
7. Customer segments
8. Cost structure
9. Revenue streams

Originally designed for business brainstorming, we see useful applications for explaining the big picture to employees and engaging them in the process of improving all business functions. It’s a document that executives can use for presentations, leave with employees after meetings, and post in public spaces around the company.

As a bonus, it’s a useful strategic planning document for the executives to use in retreats and other strategy sessions.

Interruption is a staple of any consumer marketing. Marketers interrupt television shows with commericals. Billboards interrupt your drive to and from work. Spam interrupts your e-mail inbox.

Here’s the rub: consumers are building up strong interruption immunity. You see on average 4,000 interruption messages a day. How many do you remember from yesterday? (We remember this one out of the thousands we saw.)

We’re moving very quickly from a world where we demand simultaneous attention from a group of people to a world where we earn attention one person at a time.

All buying decisions are selfish. They just are. Consumers buy the product that makes them feel better about themselves.

This applies to personal decisions – “I look good in this suit.” – and business products – “The boss is going to notice my good work.” Or it could be, “I’m not going to get in trouble for recommending XYZ Company.”

These decisions don’t involve the features that marketers so often turn to when selling products. “I look good in this suit” doesn’t make reference to the color, the cut, the craftsmanship, etc.

Transforming features to personal benefits is an enormous challenge. Fortunately, researchers have invented a tool to help.

The Benefit Ladder is a process for understanding the personal benefits of your products and services. Here’s how it works:

• Take a feature of your company’s product or service.
• Ask yourself, “What does this do for my customer?”
• And then, “Why does the customer care about that?”
• And then, “Why does the customer care about that?”
• Stay with the process until the answer is, “It makes my customer feel good about herself.”

The personal benefits will be clues to help you develop more relevant and personal messages that connect with customers.

Kudos to Sonia Simone from Copyblogger and Remarkable Communication for introducing us to the benefit ladder.

YOUR TURN: How do you help customers better understand benefits of working with you?

Creating Competitive Advantage by Jaynie L. Smith

Smith’s thesis is just as relevant today as when Creating Competitive Advantage was published in 2006. In fact, it may be even more critical in today’s increasingly competitive environment.

One of Smith’s most important points is that companies often confuse strengths for competitive advantages. They focus on strengths such as integrity and client trust, which are great and essential to business.  However, these strengths are not competitive advantages.  Some of your competitors likely have these strengths.

Her definition of competitive advantage is the “reason people do business with you.”  It’s what your competition doesn’t have, what allows you to close the sale.

A competitive advantage must be quantifiable, i.e. it must have supporting proof points. 

The following statement is not a competitive advantage:  “Our people are the best in the industry.”  However, it become a competitive advantage when you add:  “Our engineers have a minimum experience of 15 years in the business, twice that of our nearest competitor.” It gets even better when you can add the customer into the mix: “Our clients realize a 4x return on investment because our engineers average twice the experience of our nearest competitor.”

Smith cautions the reader, “Remember that competitive advantages are always moving targets.  You have to review your own, and your competitors’, at least quarterly.  Business is a chess game.  You need to think two or three moves ahead if you expect to win.”

YOUR TURN: What book helped you get a competitive edge in business?

Continuing with the political theme, the election provided some lessons about defining messages in your communications. Here are three approaches political consultants use:

1. Define yourself. This approach is the easiest for most companies. This type of communication focuses on the benefits that your organization provides to clients, members, patients, consumers, etc.
2. Define your competition. This approach requires more subtlety because, politics aside, most businesses rarely criticize their competition publicly (some national advertisers are exceptions). However, you can emphasize the challenges — additional time, extra cost, missed opportunities, etc. — if someone chooses not to use your services or products.
3. Solve a problem. People buy because they have some pain. Through case studies and other testimonials, you can emphasize how you solve a key customer problem better than anyone else.

These three approaches will also help you simplify and clarify your message.