Aaron Hoos

I was reading Alan Weiss’ book Million Dollar Consulting. It’s a pretty good book (although I like his Ultimate Consultant Series better). In the Million Dollar Consultant he mentioned something that I thought was a valuable way to look at gaining a competitive advantage:

Weiss suggested that there were 3 “levels” of value on which you compete: At the competitive level, in which your offerings are similar to your competitors; at the unique level, in which your offerings are – obviously! – the only ones on the market; and at the breakthrough level, in which your offerings are so insanely valuable and insightful that the others aren’t even in the same league.

That makes sense and I think most entrepreneurs would agree that these are the three levels of value a business’ offerings should have if the business is going to survive.

But here is where Weiss takes a surprising turn: He says that your products should be competitive, your services should be unique, and your relationship with your customer should be at the breakthrough level.

Weiss suggests that it is expensive to implement breakthrough characteristics across all three offerings (products, services, and relationships), and that products and even services can easily be copied by competitors. So instead, he says, your products should only be at the level equivalent to compete with your competitors… the real difference is in the relationship, which should be astonishingly value-added.

I’ve spent some time thinking about Weiss’ ideas and am building on them with my own ideas below:

HERE’S WHY THIS IS GOOD NEWS FOR EVERY BUSINESS

• Existing businesses spend a lot of money on product innovation while their relationship-building remains lackluster at best. Investing even half of the money spent on adding innovating product value into adding relationship value can have a huge impact on customer retention and word of mouth.
• Some businesses – especially smaller home-based businesses (Tupperware, Norwex, Avon) and businesses where there is no product differentiation (real estate, investment firms, accounting firms, dentists, freelancers) – simply CAN’T innovate their products or services. So relationship value is going to be the key differentiator.
• It costs money to innovate products (and often services). It doesn’t cost as much money to innovate relationships. Rather, it costs time.
• Start-ups that have a simple product and not a lot of money can still compete in the big leagues with unparalleled relationship building.

HERE’S WHY BUSINESSES WON’T FOLLOW THIS MODEL

• Product innovation is sexy and gets way more funding in budgets than relationship-building
• Linking sales to products is much easier than linking sales to relationships – and when you innovate your product and see sales go up, it’s easier to make the connection between product innovation and sales.

WHAT CAN YOUR BUSINESS DO TO ACHIEVE BREAKTHROUGH RELATIONSHIP BUILDING VALUE?

• Start by analyzing your sales funnel to understand how you market, sell, and build relationships. Understand how specific activities in your sales funnel move contacts forward.
• Implement a CRM system. In other words, stop leaving customer names on sticky notes on your office wall. Tie your CRM system to your sales funnel.
• Keep diligent notes on your clients.
• Market your ass off to load up your list of prospects and build relationships with those contacts. Sales will happen if you do that.
• During a sale, keep your customer informed at every step. Don’t ever let them wonder about what the next step is or whether you’ve forgotten about them. (Note to self: I’m definitely guilty of this).
• Find out what your competitors are doing and go an extra mile. No, wait. Go an extra ten miles. Call your customers more (without bugging them). Email them. Follow them on various social media. Participate in their conversations.
• After the sale, remember that you have a relationship with them. Don’t ignore them. Don’t treat them like a prospect. Build an entire system around the post-sale customer. Send them valuable things (not just coupons for another product, but information that you think they’ll find valuable). Take a personal interest in them. Figure out what they need in their business and connect them with people and information that can help them… even if it means no additional revenue for you.

Several years ago, I drove a friend to the emergency room at a hospital. We checked in with the nurse and waited around for a while until a doctor saw him. The time we spent waiting (a couple of hours? I don’t remember exactly) was mostly spent wondering if the nurse had forgotten about us.

Compare that to a recent trip to the hospital: I hurt my lower back playing frisbee last weekend and on Thursday night the pain became so unbearable that I had to go to emergency. As soon as I entered, I was met by a security guard who had me fill out my basic information and who seated me in the triage area. Then about fifteen minutes later, I was called up to a processing clerk who checked my information and asked about allergies and stuff like that, and gave me an initial triage bracelet. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, a nurse met with me to ask for details about my injury, to check my temperature and blood pressure, and then to make a final triage assessment. Then, thirty to forty minutes later, I met with the doctor who did whatever doctors do to make us feel better. (Basically a couple of prescriptions to nice, strong medicine).

My experience was very different: Even though yesterday’s experience in the hospital required more people, I felt like I was being moved along in the process. There was a “touchpoint” every fifteen-to-twenty minutes where more information was gathered. Now, some of the information might have easily been gathered by the processing clerk instead of the initial triage nurse, and some of the information that the triage nurse gathered could have been gathered by the doctor instead. But I don’t think this was a “make work” situation. These were distinct events that helped me see and feel that my “file” was being moved in the right direction. Without a doubt, an efficiency expert might have something to say about this but as a patient, I felt like there was forward motion. It kept me from feeling frustrated and impatient.

HOW THIS RELATES TO YOUR SERVICE BUSINESS
Your business has a process and your customers are in that process. When someone buys from you, they want to take delivery right away, which isn’t always possible in service-based businesses. (As a writer, for example, it might take me days or weeks to deliver something that someone bought today).

Service businesses can draw their inspiration from my hospital experience by making sure that customers encounter a touchpoint from time to time throughout the waiting period.

It doesn’t have to be much — a quick phone call; a “here’s an update” email — but it will help your customer to feel confident in the attention you give to them and to sense the value of the relationship you have with them.

As business owners, all of us are so busy building our businesses that it becomes very easy to drop the ball on something. Maybe we don’t keep in touch with prospects as well as we should. Maybe our competitive research falls short. Maybe there are just too many social media sites to keep track of. Maybe we’re not closely watching the people we aspire to be like. (haha, as I write this, I realize that these are all criticisms I’ve had with my own business in recent years!)

Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) solves these problems. Netvibes is a site that lets you build dashboards so you can view your business landscape all in one place. It’s like the cockpit of your business.

I’ve started using Netvibes recently and have been really impressed by it and I suspect that a lot of business owners will find it as useful as I have.

DISCLAIMER: This blog was not sponsored, endorsed, or approved by Netvibes and I have no affiliation with them beyond my free account. And I’ve only been using it for a little while so there might be additional functionality or problems that I’m not aware of. Check it out and decide for yourself.

Netvibes works like this: You sign up for free and build a bunch of public or private dashboards and each dashboard can have a bunch of tabs. Your dashboard can pull in all kinds of data from all over the place: RSS feeds, calendar information (like from iCal), your email inboxes, stock market feeds, social media feeds, and there are other tools you can add like a calculator, notepad, Box.net access, and more.

The dashboard concept itself isn’t new. It’s been used by large companies for a long time (I’ve done some writing for SAP a few years ago and they were big on dashboards in their Enterprise Performance Management solutions). And sites like myYahoo, iGoogle, PageFlakes, and more all tried their hand at this… but (in my opinion) none of them are as easy to use or have as nice of an interface as Netvibes. (Oh, and Netvibes looks like it’s getting into the enterprise dashboard space, too).

So, why will a business benefit from using Netvibes? The biggest benefit is this: You don’t have to go to a million different places and sign in to each one of them to stay on top of your business. It’s all pulled together for you in one place. That’s going to be a huge timesaver. Now you can have your email and calendar and social media all in one place rather than handling a calendar and email in Google, and some social media in Tweetdeck and another email elsewhere and some more social media directly in the site interface… (etc., etc.) One place for everything. Easy!

And, you can extend the effectiveness of your dashboard even more:

• As mentioned, pull all of your email and social media into one place.
• Consolidate your calendars.
• Set up feeds of competitors’ blogs and tweets so you can keep an eye on them.
• Set up feeds of your prospects so you can listen closely to them.
• Set up feeds of your customers so you can listen closely to them.
• Set up feeds with your name and brand so you can see how other people are talking about you.
• Set up feeds of all the stuff you are paying attention to in your industry, or in marketing trends, or in the news… wherever your product or service and customers are impacted.
• Set up a feed of all of your stuff and publish it as a Lifestream on your public page.
• Keep bookmarks handy
• Set up feeds from various marketing opportunities
• Set up feeds from sites where you get business (i.e., RFP sites or Elance)

Okay, I could keep writing forever. You can set up your dashboard in different ways. This is what I’m working toward: One dashboard with pages for Admin (email and calendar and social media), Trends and News, Listening Post (Competitive), Listening Post (Prospects/Customers), Sales and Marketing. I might end up with a few others in the future but that’s where I’m starting.

Okay, lest you think that I have converted to the church of Netvibes, let me give you one criticism that I haven’t been happy with: Their mobile interface hasn’t worked so well for me. At first it didn’t display anything and now I’m getting error messages. That’s something I would *really* like to see improved but hey, you can’t have everything and I’m not paying for the service… and maybe it’s just me.

So, stop running around and signing in to a million different places to stay on top of everything. Pull it all together and fine-tune it so you can spend more time on your business.

This is a portion of a video with Richard Branson on listening to your customers for new business ideas and direction.

Real estate agents, you’ve got it tough. Many markets are crowded with agents and all of them offer exactly the same service at exactly the same price. Every agent seems to use calendars and bus benches to advertise.

If every agent is saying exactly the same thing, how do you differentiate? How do you position yourself as THE agent to call when someone wants to list?

This week, we’re looking at the different ways that Realtors try to attract attention from their prospects. All of these ideas will be familiar to you — in fact, you might even use some of them — but I’ll show you why these common real estate practices might be keeping you from success.

The marketing idea that can hurt a Realtor’s business:

“I GIVE GREAT SERVICE”

The idea: The agent promotes their service as being superior.

My opinion: Superior to what? All the experiences I’ve ever had with real estate agents who were helping me to buy or sell a home have been EXACTLY THE SAME. They’re all nice, they all engage me in conversation, they all do the paperwork, they all work on my behalf. I know (and so does everyone else) that the service I’ll receive from one agent will be comparable to the service I receive from someone else.

Folks, service does not sell. You have to have it if you want to stay in business, don’t get me wrong, but it shouldn’t be a tagline. Ask yourself this question: “Exactly what quality of service do I offer my clients that no other agent offers?” I think you will be hard-pressed to come up with the answer.

I hear lots of ideas on this matter when agents defend themselves. They say things like “I treat every listing as if it’s my own home” or “I’ll take you by the hand and walk you through the sale”. These sound great, but every other agent does these things, too. (Yes, they do. Don’t argue with me on this point).

So drop the use of service as a differentiator unless you…

• Pick people up in a chauffeured limo
• Pay for their babysitting
• Pay for lunch and coffee
• Flood them with free stuff
• Personally visit when the deal closes with a bottle of expensive wine
• Help them to arrange the details of the move

… I could go on and on here, but I think you get the idea. Your service needs to be jaw-droppingly amazing to be able to advertise with that you offer exceptional service.