Aaron Hoos

In nearly every industry, there is so much competition. Businesses have to fight ruthlessly for the attention of just a few customers.

I don’t think this problem is going away any time soon: As access to the web becomes easier and cheaper all around the world, the barrier to start a business will become increasingly minimal and businesses will face even more competition.

Unfortunately, for many businesses, increasing competition means a downward pressure on prices. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this excellent article at Harvard Business Review, David Aaker talks about innovating in your brand to make your competition irrelevant.

Make Your Competition Irrelevant – David Aaker – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

After reading this article, think about what you can do in your business to innovate your way ahead of the pack.

I love innovation! It’s a great way to stir a business’ stagnant waters and compel positive change.

Here are some of my previous blog posts on innovation and how to nurture it in your business:

• Inexpensive differentiation to easily outdistance your competitors (while selling more): Your sales funnel is the most important asset in your business, AND it’s a great place to innovate. Innovating in your sales funnel can transform your business and eliminate the competition.
• Faster, easier innovation that won’t piss off your customers: Customers don’t always welcome the changes in a business. But businesses have to adapt to stay in business. I show you exactly where your business you can innovate without the customer-specific growing pains that will accompany it.
• Want a competitive advantage? Offer the same products as everyone else: Using a simple tool from a respected resource, I talk about where innovation best fits into your business and I give some specific ideas to get there fast.
• What’s the next Twitter? In this blog post, I explore what makes up some of the biggest media and communication innovations in the past decade, and I recommend how someone can discover the “Twitter of tomorrow”.
• Repurpose failed innovation: This is still one of my favorite activities to do for my business and for my clients’ businesses.
• Cheap yet effective innovation – Switch mindsets: Discover an affordable way to focus in on an innovation opportunity using a business analysis tool I developed.
• Innovation ideas from an ambivalent customer: Find out how to wow your local customers with these service innovations

Are you innovating in your small business? I’d love to hear about it: What you are doing, how you are doing it, what the results are (or what you hope the results will be). Post a brief synopsis of your innovation in the comments below.

As consumers, we all happily go about our merry little lives, until we realize we need or want something. Then we’ll consider buying it. But until then, everything is status quo.

For businesses, status quo is a big problem. New start-ups build businesses and then wonder why people don’t buy — it’s probably because the customer didn’t realize that they needed the product or service (and they were content with the way things are).

The purpose of a sales funnel is to help people see that the status quo isn’t as good as life with your product or service. And it’s a sales funnel (not a single sales event) because you don’t move people instantaneously off of the status quo. You need to gently nudge them away from the status quo toward a sales with baby steps.

Marketing consultant Matt Heinz offers a great blog about consumer complacency and satisfaction with the way things currently are, and he lists four problems that businesses have with fighting against the status quo. Briefly, his four problems are:

1. You haven’t created or communicated enough value for your offering.
2. You haven’t made your solution a big enough priority for your customer.
3. The cost of changing is greater than the perceived benefit.
4. The risk of staying the same is lower than the risk of doing something different.

He also gives ideas and suggestions about how to solve these problems to loosen up the strongholds in your sales funnel.

Check out Four reasons you will lose to the status quo by Matt Heinz and apply his ideas to your sales funnel to win against complacency.

Oh, and don’t miss this: In the comments to Matt’s blog post, someone added a link to a brilliant blog post by Andrew McAfee written way back in 2006 about a phenomenon called “the 9X problem”. In short, the 9X problem that says consumers value their current situation/solution over a proposed one. Read McAfee’s The 9X problem.