Market Dominating Position – Part 3
In the last article you learned the 5 steps that you need to take to create your Market Dominating Position.
If you’d like to revise it, you may go to:
Since it’s been a few months, let me do a quick refresher of the last article.
The 5 step process to creating your Market Dominating Position are:
Step 1, determine your strategic position in the market.
Step 2, determine your primary market dominating position.
Step 3, determine your supporting business model.
Step 4, determine your secondary market dominating position.
Step 5, create your market dominating position statement or elevator pitch.
After reviewing them, select the one or ones that best fit your individual business.
Category number one involves the level of service you provide.
There are a total of six different areas where you can add value when it comes to service.
The first area is typically one of the most important to prospects convenience. In today’s hectic world, the one thing most people value more than money is more time. How else do you explain the dramatic increase in “convenience stores” that typically charge 40% or more for the “convenience” of shopping there?
Few of us have our oil changed at the dealership where we purchased our vehicle. Instead, we visit the local neighborhood oil change specialty shop because it’s more convenient. These shops have grown exponentially because we no longer feel we have the time or the energy to drop off our car at the dealership, secure a ride home while the service is performed and then arrange to pick the vehicle back up. The lure of the local oil change shop is based on convenience. Anything you can do in your business to increase your customer’s convenience will create a market dominating advantage.
Here are six areas to consider where you can provide more convenience.
First, your location.
Although this is probably the best way to provide convenience, for the vast majority of businesses, changing locations isn’t an option. However, a great location is certainly a secondary market dominating position. For a fitness center located near a major residential area, location is certainly their primary market dominating position.
Second, availability.
Your customers want to do business on THEIR schedule, not yours. Ask yourself what you can do to make your business more available including extending the hours or the days you’re open for business.
For example, five years ago the majority of health clubs were open from 8am until 7pm Monday through Saturday. Today, the vast majority are now open 24 hours seven days per week. The ones that have resisted this schedule are struggling to survive in this extremely competitive market. Same thing with supermarkets and convenience stores. We want to shop when we have time, not when the store thinks it’s convenient for us to shop. Please remember these are just suggestions for you to consider. You need to evaluate your customer’s needs to see if this is a viable option that will produce a positive return for making your business more convenient.
You should also test different hours of operation to see what works best for your business from a financial standpoint. If you’re a financial planner, would changing your hours to include Saturday mornings or Tuesday evenings help your clients that work Monday through Friday? If your business involves your customers dropping something off to you, then consider offering something as simple as a drop box. How long would a customer patronize a video store that didn’t offer one?
Many businesses rely on drop boxes as an integral part of their business such as rental car companies, photo finishing, dry cleaners, container shipping, auto body shops that ask you to leave your keys after hours in a key box and so on.
The third area involves the ordering process.
Ordering should be easy. If ordering is typically a headache for your customers then solving this problem can help you to establish a powerful market dominating position.
Have you ever attempted to contact a business where it was all but impossible to speak with a real live human being? Instead, you’re routed through a maze of automated voice mail messages asking you to select an option that has nothing to do with the reason you’re calling. This is not only frustrating to the customer, but it immediately creates enough animosity emotionally to compel this customer to take their business to a competitor.
In contrast, the business that makes ordering convenient by providing easy access to menus with a live operator option, or the ability to conveniently order online becomes the logical choice for most customers.
A fourth area to look at involves delivery.
When providing your customers with a more convenient location isn’t an option, then the next best thing you can do is to bring your product or service to the customer. There are now businesses sprouting up that specialize in delivering local restaurant items directly to your home or office. All that’s required is for you to call an 800 number and place your order from one of 30 local area restaurants. The service then delivers the meal and charges a set fee that’s typically 50% to 100% higher than patronizing the restaurant in person. This further emphasizes the fact that people consider convenience to be more valuable to them than money. Dry cleaners are now using delivery to dramatically increase their revenue and profits. They now offer to come to your home on a specific day and time to pick up your dry cleaning and then deliver it back to your front door when they complete the job.
One area involving delivery that’s now growing by leaps and bounds is mobile services. This is where the business comes directly to your location to perform their services. Home decorators now offer “shop at home” service. The decorator comes to the customer’s home loaded with samples and swatches.
This is not only more convenient but it also enables the decorator to perform a consultative type sale by helping the customer select colors that match their home and their lifestyle. This type of personalized approach often leads to dramatic increases in conversion rates, but more important, it often takes price out of the equation.
You see ads on TV everyday for window replacement services for your car where the technician comes directly to your location and puts in your new window instead of you having to bring the vehicle to them. Commodity businesses like this one should attempt to use mobile services whenever possible. Adding convenience into your mix can easily position your business as the logical choice.
The fifth area to investigate involves payment terms.
If your competition doesn’t offer any type of financing options, you can differentiate your business by offering payment terms over 30, 60 or 90 days. Offer multiple payment options such as a “three easy payment plan.”
Did you know that the latest research shows that a product or service that typically sells for $39.95 can be sold for twice that price by offering the customer a two-payment option where they pay $39.95 at the time they place the order and then an additional $39.95 in 30 days?
Although this is a 100% increase in price, it only decreased the order rate by 17% versus offering the product at the original $39.95 price point.
Consider accepting credit cards if you don’t currently accept them. This alone can increase your sales by as much as 80%. How would you feel if you had to pay cash every time you filled your car up with gas, or had to make an emergency run to the store? The sixth and final area to consider involves miscellaneous services. What additional services do your customers consider to be important?
If your business attracts parents with small kids, consider offering child care services while the parents shop or take care of business.
How much more pleasant would it be for everyone if restaurants offered a separate and secluded child care area professionally supervised and loaded with games and toys? Do you really think that parents that show up with noisy kids really enjoy doing that? Do you think they would relish a quiet hour to have an enjoyable kid-free meal that evening? And do you think that ANY restaurant that offered this one-of-a-kind service would literally dominate their market, practically overnight?
What about the local bank? How often do busy parents have to drag little Sally or Johnny into the bank and spend their entire time trying to corral the kids instead of taking care of business? If your business requires parents to evaluate their purchase decision, such as buying furniture, a new computer or clothing, or requires a lengthy transaction time or office visit, such as the dentist, doctor or health club, then having a child’s play area can be a huge area of differentiation.
So consider these six areas when looking for ways your business can provide more convenience.
In the next article you will learn the 2nd to the 6th of the six areas where you can add value to your business.
Hope this read opened your eyes to opportunities that are missing in your business, don’t forget to apply what you learn to see the difference it will make in your business!
If you need help identifying your market dominating position, try my FREE test drive to gain access to our resources and tools.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
Market Dominating Position – Part 2
CREATING A MARKET DOMINATING POSITION INVOLVES A FIVE STEP PROCESS.
Step number 1: Determine Your Strategic Position in the Market
What specific niche market or segment of the marketplace should your business focus on? Determining this involves combining the skills your business has with the unmet needs of your targeted prospects and then designing your product or service to fulfill those needs. Domino’s strategic position was “fast hot pizza for hungry college kids.” For Starbucks, “delicious hand-crafted beverages that makes life better.”
Step number 2: Determine Your Primary Market Dominating Position
This is the most dominating advantage that separates you from your competitors. Domino’s claimed it could deliver its pizza in 30 minutes or less, or they would give it to you for FREE! This was the primary advantage that met the needs of their newly defined market position – hungry college kids that wanted food fast.
Step number 3: Determine Your Supporting Business Model
How will you specifically deliver what your strategic position and primary market dominating position promises? What changes, if any do you need to consider making to your business to ensure you deliver consistently on your position and your promise? Domino’s built a supporting business model that enabled them to consistently provide their promised primary advantage, which was fresh hot pizza delivered within 30 minutes. To make good on this promise every time, they were forced to create a supporting business model where they built low-cost, plain vanilla stores strategically located near college campuses. And since college kids aren’t the most reliable workers on the planet, they were forced to hire additional delivery staff and have additional drivers on a stand-by basis. Together, these innovations allowed them to consistently meet and often exceed their primary market dominating position.
Step number 4: Determine Your Secondary Market Dominating Position
What additional competitive advantages does your business offer that your customers will perceive as being different from your competition? Domino’s secondary benefits might include special pricing, assorted sizes, a much broader selection of toppings or additional menu items.
Step number 5: Create Your Market Dominating Position Statement or Elevator Pitch
This is a simple statement you can create by combining steps one through four. This helps you to state unequivocally what differentiates you from your competitors to your targeted prospects and customers. Domino’s market dominating position is neatly summed up in its slogan, “fresh hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, or it’s free.” An expanded version of this might say: “Domino’s provides busy customers with fresh hot pizza and other food items within 30 minutes or less. Our assorted pizza offerings combined with our value pricing makes Domino’s affordable to everyone.” This presentation will focus on helping you to define your market dominating position and then we can help you create a powerful and compelling elevator pitch that will effectively communicate your value to your marketplace.
After reviewing them, select the one or ones that best fit your individual business.
Get ready for the next step!
Hope this read opened your eyes to opportunities that are missing in your business, apply and see the difference it will make in your business!
There are a total of six different areas where you can add value when it comes to service. We will cover that on the next article.
If you need help identifying your market dominating position, try my FREE test drive to gain access to our resources and tools.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
Marketing Your Ideas as Extraordinary, Different and as New as Possible
Don’t Forget to Search & Implement
People only remember the extraordinary, strange, wild, surprising and unusual. You need to make sure your ideas and marketing reflect these reactions. This doesn’t mean you have to have a product or service that is completely out of the norm, in fact, this could easily drive customers away. You need to have a product or service that is high quality and easily marketable, then you need to market it as extraordinary and new.
As you’re research word of mouth, there are some questions you need to ask along the way:
What are the users willing to tell the non-users?
- Exactly how do your customers describe your product?
- What are the non-users willing to ask the users?
- What are the things they need to know, but are unwilling to ask?
- What happens when these issues are raised?
- Exactly what do your prospects have to know in order to trigger purchase?
- Exactly how do your customers answer the objections, concerns, and qualms of your prospects?
- How do your customers persuade their friends to use your product?
- How do your customers suggest they initially get to know or try your product?
- What warnings, safeguards, tips, and suggestions do your customers suggest to your prospects?
- Are your sales messages, positioning, and important facts about your product getting through and surviving word of mouth?
- What messages do you need to inject into the marketplace in order to turn the tide in your favor and how will you deliver them?
There are two main reasons why word of mouth research is so important:
- To get the real impression and feedback from customers
- To define word of mouth itself and the concept it creates
There is a simple formula that can help you conduct your word of mouth research. It’s called the “2-2-2” model.
2-2-2- Model
What this breaks down to is:
- 2 groups of customers
- 2 focus groups of prospects
- 2 mixed groups (enthusiasts & skeptics)
In these groups you need to ask the following questions:
- What would you tell a friend?
- How would you persuade a skeptic?
- What questions would you anticipate from a skeptic?
- How would you answer their objections?
The best way to conduct these groups is by teleconference. This ensures you’ll get a good variety of demographics for your customers and potential customers. It also allows people to feel safe and more able to express their true feelings. These teleconferences should not be conducted by you, but an independent party to avoid adding pressure to the situation.
We’re going to transition a bit and talk about how to construct a word of mouth campaign. First we’ll talk a look at the essential ingredients you need to put together a campaign. These ingredients are:
- A superior product
- A way of reaching key influencers in your marketplace
- A cadre of experts willing to bat for you
- A large number of enthusiastic consumers
- A way of reaching the right prospects
- One or more compelling stories that people will want to tell to illustrate your product’s superiority
- A way to substantiate, prove, or back up your claims and how the product will work in the real world
- A way for people to have direct, low-risk experience, a demo, sample, or free trial
- A way of reducing overall risk, an ironclad guarantee
Once you have those ingredients ready to use, you should consider the situations in which your company can benefit from a strong word of mouth programs. Some of these situations are:
- When there are credibility problems
- When there are breakthroughs
- When there are marginal improvements
- Where the product has to be tried in large numbers or over time
- Where there is high risk in trying the product
- With older or mature products that have a new story that people tend to ignore
- With unfair competitive practices such as spreading rumors, or telling lies about your product
- When there are governmental or other restrictions on what you may say or claim directly
While, most of the word of mouth tactics are positive for your word of mouth program, there are a few products to avoid using in this program. They are:
- Products where a seminar would not provide meaningful added value
- Products that can’t be tried and where there is no consensus among experts
- Products that are clearly inferior, without having a compensating superiority for similar products
- Products that are so personal or emotion that rational discussion is irrelevant to the decision
- Products where the decision value is so small (low price/low volume) the medium will not be cost-effective.
This wraps up this post on word of mouth research and how that research can be used when putting together your word of mouth campaign.
If you need help with the research and a plan to use the results of that research, try our FREE test drive to get all the help you need with our top notch resources and tools.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
How Well Do You Know Your Vendors?
It’s extremely important to build relationships with your vendors and those around you can bring in new customers/clients and increase awareness of your company branding.
The people you work directly with on your products and services are really the ones with the most to gain when you find success. By taking the time to get to know them, you’ll find a whole host of opportunities you didn’t realize were there.
Look for great ways to offer your vendors rewards for helping grow your business and everyone wins. One of ways you can do this is by offering performance based incentives that are much larger than their normal charges.
Here’s the step-by-step process to putting together a partnership with a vendor:
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Approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on performance.
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Put the generous incentive plan together from their perspective, even take suggestions.
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Develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan, this will increase competition between vendors and therefore higher performance levels.
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Encourage subsequent sales instead of focusing only on the initial sale. By doing this you can give away more of the profit from the initial sale to your vendors and make higher profits off the back end products. Encourage:
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Future sales
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Upsell better and more profitable products/services
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Cross-sell to additional products
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Create an incentive plan that’s irresistible to your vendors by offering generous, exclusive compensation.
Think of all the vendors you work with and the creative ways you can put together an incentive plan that entices them to be part of your business. Use their talents, capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.
Putting together an incentive plan doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Use our FREE test drive to come up with some great ideas and put your incentive plan together for maximum results. Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com
Direct Response or Bust!
Direct response marketing is a marketing that demands a direct response from your potential customers. This type of marketing is used to answer questions, present your branding, products and the reason you do what you do. Customers love this, as they are offered the opportunity to response, whether that be in the way of signing up for a newsletter, posting a comment on your site or blog, or purchasing a product from you.
So, what does direct response marketing look like? Well, it comes in many forms, including:
- Direct mail
- Print ads
- Radio and TV ads
- Coupons or other incentives
- Telemarketing
Some of the advantages of direct marketing are:
- A great way to use free time during lulls in business
- Productive way to communicate and empower you to create more relationships
- Great way to up- and cross-sell to current customers
- Low cost way to rustle up new business
- Used as leverage to turn small sales into large sales
- Supplement your current marketing program
- Cost-effective way to reach target markets
- Offers measurable results
- Reach outside your local area for new business
- Increase the effectiveness of your sales force
These are all great things that can come from just taking a few simple steps to putting together a direct response marketing plan and executing it.
“I honestly don’t think you’ll ever find a safer, lower-risk, higher-profit method of increasing your business or profession than direct-response marketing.” Jay Abraham
Direct response marketing is one of the best ways to launch your business on a large scale and reach out to everyone in your target market whether they are in your local area or not. Our FREE test drive can help you put together a great direct response marketing plan and get you on your way to heightened success.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions