In a Tough Market, Rediscover Your Uniqueness
Posted on July 23, 2013 by David Gazave, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
How not to play the price game and get paid more. Give your target customers a defining reason to work with you. Why should they buy from you?
The most successful strategy that I have employed with my clients in the last few years in a very challenging economic climate has been review and refinement of their USP, or Unique Selling Proposition.
To illustrate the power of this strategy, I submit to you an example from one of my coaching clients.
This particular client’s primary business was building the frame, foundation, and outer finish for new home developers. As you might conclude, this business all but evaporated early in 2009. When he called me to find out about our coaching programs, he was down to his last $90,000 in work under contract and had not won a new bid in over three months. I asked him why he felt he had to get work by low bid and his answer was, “Isn’t that what everybody does in this business?” My answer was: only if you want to live and DIE by price. Someone will always be a little cheaper in a slow market when you are playing the price game.
After giving him an idea of how we would approach his situation together, he agreed to sign up for our PowerUP COACH program and my work began.
In the first month of the coaching program, I took him through our USP and Guarantee Builder questionnaire, redefined his ideal customer, created a powerful guarantee, and aligned his marketing material to create a compelling offer to the new target market. We hired two new experienced commissioned sales people, created a marketing calendar of events and strategies to put them to work on, and within the fourth month of coaching, he had landed $500,000 in contracts that he had signed at the price he could make his target profit at. 12 months after starting the program, he had built his book of business to $2 million, and 24 months later, he had a total of over $8 million either under contract or in negotiations. All of this happened within a construction market period where other contractors were crying and dying.
He is now picking his customers at his price instead of letting his customers pick him in a low bid arena.
The fortunate thing for him was he was able to put aside his “I Know” attitude and stopped doing what “everybody in this business is doing” to look at his business from a different angle. His willingness to change saved his business and his personal life.
Are you simply covering your head and waiting for things to change back to your customary way of doing business, or you ready to come at the market from a different angle and attract different customers? Your answer to that question may be the difference between extinction and survival.
