Jeremy Miller's Blog, page 28

How To Make Customer Service a Brand Differentiator

Customer service is a point of pride for many organizations, but also a valuable brand differentiator.

Zappos, for instance, treats customer service as its primary brand differentiator. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, said, “We decided a long time ago that we didn’t want our brand to be just about shoes, or clothing, or even online retailing. We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience.”

Zappos is an inspirational story. Founded in 1999, the company has grown into the number one destination to buy shoes and apparel online. The company was so dominant that Amazon acquired Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, but allowed the brand to live on. Amazon wanted to keep intact the culture of customer service that Tony Hsieh and his team had created.

With the right application, customer service can be a powerful brand differentiator. It can help mitigate perceived buying risks, reduce price sensitivity, and give your customers a reason to come back.

Here’s the challenge. Customer service on its own is not a differentiator. Any company can claim to offer exceptional customer service. More importantly, customers expect great service. No customer is going to tolerate being treated poorly or rudely. They’ll take their business elsewhere.

Customer service can only become a brand differentiator after you define how your company delivers service uniquely and better than anyone else.

“Customer service” is actually an abbreviation for how Zappos competes and wins. As the company succinctly states, “Zappos customers enjoy free shipping, free returns, and 24/7 customer service!”

Customer service can be amorphous and nebulous, especially if you focus on “relationships.” Zappos demonstrates how to convert customer service into a brand differentiator. The company clearly defines where it delights its customers and how they do it:

Free shipping, both ways: “Zappos customers get FAST, FREE SHIPPING on every order with NO order minimums.”

Free returns: “If you are not 100% satisfied with your purchase from Zappos you can return your item(s) for a full refund within 365 days of purchase.”

24/7 support: “We are here for you 24 hours a day – 365 days a year.” You can call, email, or live chat with a real human being at any time.

These three areas of service work for Zappos for two reasons:

Mitigate Buying Risk: Anyone who has bought a pair of shoes knows that you try on a bunch of options before selecting the right pair. Zappos mitigates the fear of buying the wrong shoes by providing free shipping and free returns. You can order fifteen pairs of shoes, and only keep what you want or return them all. You can even order one style of shoe in a bunch of sizes to make sure you get the ones that fit you the best. You may over order, but chances are you’re going to keep something.

Increase Customer Loyalty: You may only call the Zappos help desk once, but that interaction can make you a customer for life. A great experience with a helpful person will reinforce brand loyalty, and have you come back again and again.

Focusing on free shipping, free returns, and 24/7 support is how Zappos defines “customer service.” How do you define customer service for your brand?

Customer service only becomes a differentiator when you clearly define how you serve your customers better than anyone else.

To identify the levers of customer service in your brand consider the following:

How do your customers mitigate buying risks?
How do your customers make purchase decisions?
What information or experiences are your customers seeking?
What frustrates customers during the purchase or delivery of services?
What can you do to ease or eliminate those irritants?

I am willing to bet it’s the little things that will delight your customers. The hard part is building the organizational focus and infrastructure to transition customer service into a true brand differentiator.

Define Your Business Strategy By What Won’t Change

A few years ago Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, was speaking at a conference. During the Q&A someone raised their hand and asked, “What do you think will change over the next ten years?”

Bezos replied, “I frequently get the question. And it is a very interesting question. It’s a very common one.” Then he pivoted and said, “I almost never get the question, ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?'” Bezos argued that what won’t change is where you build a business strategy.

What won’t change are the constants in your business. They’re the things that don’t change no matter how a market is disrupted. Uber, for instance, may have changed the way we hail a cab, but the constant is people need a convenient way to get around town.

In Amazon’s case, it has three constants. Amazon knows its customers want

Lots of choice;
Low prices; and
Fast delivery.

No one has ever called Amazon and said, “Amazon, I love Amazon Prime. Next day delivery is the best. But would you slow it down a little?!” That will never happen, and Amazon knows it. This constant gives Amazon an opportunity to innovate. It can invest in drones, ride sharing programs, and bringing courier services in-house all in an attempt to accelerate delivery.

By innovating around the constant of fast delivery, Amazon is working to reinforce its competitive advantage and disrupt the retail market. Amazon knows if it can get you a package within an hour, then it could ship you produce. And if it can ship produce, it can compete with Walmart. That’s game changing, and has the potential to disrupt the retail landscape.

Constants are a powerful strategic tool during periods of rapid change. You may not be able to predict the future, but you can navigate with constants.

To find your constants examine your customer needs. Try a thought experiment, and imagine your industry got Ubered. An unforeseen competitor entered the market, and changes the rules for success. The customers are still there, but they are solving their needs with a new tool or technique.

If your industry got Ubered, what customer needs would remain constant?

Here’s an example. My previous business was a recruiting agency, and we got proverbially Ubered. Tools like LinkedIn and Google changed the ways hiring managers and job seekers connected, and this demonetized the industry. Recruiting is following a similar trajectory to travel agencies: LinkedIn is to Expedia.

Even if technology is changing the way companies find and hire job seekers, the need to hire is a constant. But don’t stop there. This constant can be further refined. Talent is a company’s biggest expense. Can you reduce the cost? Can you improve productivity? Can you improve retention?

Asking questions will help you to refine the constants. Amazon doesn’t just focus on delivery. It wants to make it faster. What is your company’s perspective on your industry’s constants?

Study your customers and their needs to discover the constants in your industry:

What problems are customers trying to solve with your products or services?
What aspects of your services delight your customers?
What frustrates your customers?
What do your customers want more of or less of?

Keep challenging yourself and your team on the constants. Are you discussing “real constants” or areas of your business that you do well?

If you find yourself listing constants like “customer service” or “relationships,” call bullshit. Those are self-serving constants related to your business model. What are the needs that will be constant for your customers no matter what changes in your industry?

The more carefully you define the constants that motivate your customers, the more you can focus your business strategy.

“That’s Interesting. Tell Me More.”

The five best words you can hear a customer say are, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”

When you get a customer to say, “That’s interesting. Tell me more,” you’ve caught their attention. They’re listening. They’re responding. They’re having a conversation. And this is powerful.

Conversations make your brand sticky.

Every company has an opportunity to engage its customers in conversation, but few do. They’re too busy marketing and selling to slow down to have a dialogue. But a conversation may be the most powerful marketing tool in your toolbox, because it’s the most effective way to form a relationship with your customers.

Conversations Lead to Relationships

Customers are looking for ways to differentiate one option from the next.

As competition increases, human connections become even more valuable. When the buying options all look very similar customers will default to one of two positions:

They’ll go with what they know, or
They’ll go with what’s cheapest.

Selling on price is no way to grow a brand. Lean on the first option. Build strong relationships with your customers so they know you, like you, and trust you.

A conversation is one of the most human ways to form a relationship. It helps transition your brand from a stranger to a friend to a customer. And that two-way dialogue accelerates the process. It helps you get to know one another, and that makes your brand more likable.

Use Brand Storylines to Spark Conversations

It gets pretty boring if all you talk about is yourself. The same is true for your companies. Engage your customers with Brand Storylines.

Brand Storylines are a communication device to engage your customers in a conversation.

Brand Storylines are unique because they are not just conversations about the weather or sports, and they are not one sided pitches promoting your brand. They are conversations crafted to engage your marketplace and keep your brand top of mind.

Brand Storylines are effective marketing tools, because they are crafted to connect conversations to your brand.

A Brand Storyline has three fundamental elements:

Expertise: It’s a topic you and your team know well, and draws from your company’s core expertise.

Strong Opinions: It’s a topic your company is passionate about. You can take a stance and boldly share your opinions.

Point of Sharing: The topic resonates with your target market, and encourages others to participate in the conversation.

The three elements function as a three-legged stool. A Brand Storyline is unsustainable if any one of the elements is missing. For example, Strong Opinions without Expertise is a rant. Expertise without Strong Opinions is boring. And without a Point of Sharing you’re talking to yourself.

Get Customers to Say, “That’s Interesting. Tell Me More.”

You know your Brand Storylines are working when you hear customers say, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”

Those five words reveal so much. You can see the storyline is resonating. It transitions the customer from being a passive receiver of marketing messages to an active participant. It engages them with your brand, and it motivates them to ask questions.

Conversations lead to relationships. Any time you get a customers to say, “That’s interesting. Tell me more,” you have an opportunity to grow the relationship. And with each interaction you reinforce your brand and make it more likable.

Learn In Public: How to be a Thought Leader

The most compelling thought leaders learn in public.

It’s a bit of a misnomer that thought leaders start out as experts. It may seem like Seth Godin, Dan Pink, or Tim Ferriss started out as experts before they built their platforms. But that’s not really the case. These thought leaders built their platform and their expertise concurrently.

Tim Ferriss is the classic example. He calls himself a “human guinea pig,” and he is constantly experimenting and testing ideas. He is public about his fitness regimes, investing practices, and how he developed a podcast with over 100 million downloads.

Tim talks about what works and what doesn’t work, and he learns in public. That makes him such a compelling thought leader.

You can do the same thing. Pick a topic that you want to master, and create content while you learn. You will be shocked by how many people want to learn with you.

Learning Creates Compelling Content

Learning is intoxicating. You get hits of endorphins as you make discoveries and master new skills. This is what makes learning so much fun.

Harness your learning high. It doesn’t last very long. An aha moment may only last a few days, and then converts into your base of knowledge.

The key is to create content while you’re still experiencing a learner’s high.

Content created during the learner’s high is infectious. People can feel your enthusiasm. They see how your knowledge is expanding, and how you’re applying the new skills. That’s fun to be apart of. It’s fun to share in someone else’s discoveries.

Translate Ideas in Context

Sitting through a lecture is boring.

I still get sleepy thinking back to economics 101. The professor knew his formulas and equations, but he droned on about them. He was deeply committed to educating his students, but the content wasn’t interesting for him anymore. He had mastered it.

Learning from the masters can be very useful, but it’s equally helpful to learn with your peers.

You can learn so much by following someone who is developing an idea. You can see how their thought processes evolve, and you can learn from their mistakes and iterations. That public learning can often reveal much more than the tight lessons of a master.

Give your audience an opportunity to learn alongside you. Let them experience the creative process. They may be going through a similar journey.

You’ll Never Experience Writer’s Block

You’ll never run out of things to say when you learn in public.

I am frequently asked, “How do you know what to write about each week?” The answer is simple, “Whatever I am working on.”

Learning in public takes the pressure off of you. Rather than trying to find the next lesson or the next pearl of wisdom, you can explore what you are learning:

You’re latest aha moment.
An area that you are struggling with and can’t find an answer.
How you solved a challenging problem.
What you wish you knew before you started.
How you measure performance.

The well is deep when you are willing to be transparent.

What Do You Want to Learn?

You will often hear an author say, “I wanted to learn about this topic, so I wrote the book.”

You can do the exact same thing with your platform. What do you want to learn? What do you want to master?

Choose a topic that you think will be relevant with your audience, and then dive into it. Learn everything you can. Try everything you can. Experiment and test ideas. Measure your performance. See what works, and doesn’t work.

Create content while you are learning. By learning in public you will form a bond with your audience, and they will perceive you as the expert, especially because they were allowed to participate in the journey.

9 Brand Differentiators to Create a Competitive Advantage

Doing one thing really well is not enough to create a sustained competitive advantage.

“From the moment an innovation appears on the market, the movement toward commoditization goes at a rate that has never been seen before,” writes Jean-Marie Dru in The Ways To New.

As soon as you find an advantage your competitors — both direct and indirect — are working hard to nullify it. They copy, duplicate, and build up on it. They take your ideas and claim them as their own.

Competitive advantage is being eroded at an alarming rate, but you can slow it down.

The 9 Brand Differentiators

Competitive advantage can be broken down into distinct building blocks. There are 9 brand differentiators:

Market Responsiveness: Your company is able to respond to consumer demands quickly, or even anticipate their needs. H&M is the second largest clothing retailer in the world, and they bring designs from the runway to its stores with remarkable speed.

Product or Service Superiority: Your products and services are definitively better than the competition. Your company sets the standard of quality in its industry.

Production Efficiency: Your company is a well oiled machine. It invests in production, distribution, and total quality management.

Natural or Human Resources: A natural advantage could be a prime retail location. A human resource advantage might be a celebrity CEO or an irreplaceable member of your team. Apple had Steve Jobs, for instance.

Market Dominance: Being #1 or #2 in a category is a competitive advantage. Unseating brands like Coca-Cola or McDonalds would take Herculean effort, and even that may not be enough. Size provides credibility, but also forces competitors to invest disproportionately more in sales and marketing to get similar levels of brand awareness.

Short Term Profit: Cash in the bank gives your company options. You may not be able to count on a surge in profits for ever, but if you can capture it, take it.

Method of Sale: Dell transformed the PC industry by cutting out the middlemen. It invested in direct sales channels to increase consumer preference and undercut its competitors with lower prices. Innovations in sales techniques can open up new markets while cutting costs.

Distribution Methods: Distribution is your company’s ability to get products to your customers. One of Apple’s core advantages is its supply chain. Tesla skipped the need for expensive dealerships, and opened showrooms in malls.

Technological Advantage: Netflix and Amazon know what you like. Their data scientist have developed remarkable algorithms to give you the content and products you want when you want it. Technological advantage can take many forms, but it’s fundamentally the application of software, hardware, and other intellectual property to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, or reach of the business.

Blend Brand Differentiators to Create a Competitive Advantage

Each brand differentiator is broad, but they consume a lot of resources and expertise to achieve. For example, a company that’s driven by quality and craftsmanship will demonstrate a strength in #2, Product or Service Superiority. Where as a company focused on being a low-cost competitor will gravitate towards #3, Production Efficiency.

The challenge is you can’t be excellent in just one differentiator. Competitive advantage is eroded too quickly. Create a competitive advantage by blending two to four of the 9 brand differentiators.

As a starting point, rank how your company is performing in each of the 9 differentiators:

Which brand differentiators does the company excel at?
Which brand differentiators are most important to your customers?
Where does your company excel compared to its competition?

Make the Brand Differentiators “Strategic Choices”

You may find that your company does not excel in enough of the 9 brand differentiators to create a competitive advantage. That’s ok. You may not have those differentiators today, but you can convert them into objectives.

The 9 brand differentiators are principles. Make them actionable by converting your top two to four differentiators into “strategic choices.”

Express each of your brand differentiators as set of strategic choices. For example, there are different ways to demonstrate product superiority. One may be speed, and the other may be strength. This could be expressed as,

“We make the fastest cars from zero to sixty in Europe.”
“We make the longest lasting and most reliable engines.”

By converting your brand differentiators into strategic choices you make the concepts tangible. This is essential for your team. It helps your organization in two distinct areas. First, it helps to focus your company’s resources so that it can serve customers better. Second, it helps you define where to play and how to win in a competitive market place. You can’t be all things to all people, so choose how you play the game.

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We’re here and always happy to chat. Feel free to Contact Us with any questions, comments or ideas.

Get Unstuck with a Transformative Goal

Nothing fires up creativity like a complex problem or challenge that you want to solve.

This is what fuels entrepreneurs. It’s a rush to work really hard and build something that didn’t exist before. That’s what makes startups so exhilarating. But maintaining the fuel and energy can be challenging, because success can squelch the fire.

Entrepreneurs can struggle inside their businesses. On the outside it may look like everything is going well. They have happy customers, a strong corporate culture, and they’re making money. But inside, the entrepreneur is struggling.

Some call it the seven year itch. Others call it the ceiling of complexity. Whatever you call it, there’s a disconcerting feeling that kicks in when your business plateaus: boredom, apathy, frustration, not achieving your potential.

Kickstart your creative when you face these plateaus. Success is not the destination. It’s simply a marker along the way. Your goal is to define the next big challenge or problem you plan to solve.

Chase the Next Revenue Plateau

Companies have predictable revenue plateaus: $1 million, $5 million, $10 million, $25 million, $100 million, and so on. In the sub-$1 million category, the plateaus are based on incremental growth stages of $10,000 per month: $120,000, $240,000, $360,000, $480,000, $600,000, $720,000.

Each plateau involves a major shift for the business. It requires different skills, management resources, talent, and systems to break through the plateau and reach the next level.

Growing through the plateaus is fundamentally a challenge of infrastructure building. You are building an engine for scale.

These plateaus are ideal targets for an entrepreneur looking for a challenge. Ask yourself, “What do we need to do to grow to the next plateau?”

Chances are your business doesn’t have the model, talent, or systems to get to the next level. And in some cases, you will have to create new business units or services to expand your growth potential. Your current asset can take you only so far, which is why the question is so powerful: What are you building next?

Create an Opportunity to Change

“A business’s ability to grow is dependent on the entrepreneur’s ability to change,” says Jim Stewart, President of ProfitPATH.

Jim is a longtime friend and mentor. He taught me that evolution is a fundamental skill set of leadership. The strategies and habits that got me to where I am today won’t be sufficient for the next leg of the journey. I have to evolve to succeed.

Sometimes you need to accelerate that evolution. You need a reason to challenge the status quo, and to give yourself permission to change. This is when you need that external goal.

Revenue targets might not be the vision for your brand, but they can be an effective change agent. Each new revenue plateau will force you to change as both an entrepreneur and a business.

The goal is only the starting point. Change is what we’re really driving for. To facilitate the process ask yourself three questions:

Where am I today, and where do I need to move towards?
What’s working, and what isn’t working?
Who do I need on my team moving forward, and who has stopped growing and can’t keep up?

These are deep questions, but they will help you uncover what it will take to get unstuck and drive for the next phase of your business.

4 Steps for Leaders to Grow their Personal Brands

Personal branding can be challenging if you have a job. You don’t have the platform and leeway of an entrepreneur or an executive, but that shouldn’t stop you. With a little effort you can grow a powerful personal brand inside and out of your company.

There are four steps for leaders to grow their personal brands.

Step 1: Empower Others to Succeed

The best leaders make other people successful.

One of the best sales managers I ever worked with said, “My number one measure of success is how many people are promoted off my team annually.” Dave is a top performing sales manager at an industrial distributor. His team regularly goes to President’s Club, and many of his reps have gone on to have remarkable careers.

The alumni, as Dave calls them, are his pride. “Every year I am forced to rebuild my team, because my top performers receive promotions,” said Dave. “It’s not the easiest route for me. That’s for sure. My job would be a lot easier if I kept these reps, but my personal brand is based on the people I develop.”

Dave is an exceptional leader, but he highlights a key attribute of personal branding. Your brand is based on the impact you have on others. The more people you serve and make successful, the more your personal brand will grow.

Step 2: Distill What You Do Brilliantly

It takes self-awareness to grow your personal brand.

Andrew, a VP of Sales at a software firm, is affectionately referred to as the “CEO Whisperer.” He has an incredible knack for finding and closing massive deals.

One of his sales reps told me, “He’s like a truffle pig sniffing out a deal. He roots around and finds opportunities no one else can find.”

Andrew already has a reputation for making his employees successful. His team is highly ranked, and most of his sales reps go to President’s Club annually. Andrew has another advantage. He knows what he does brilliantly, and he has honed that reputation amongst his colleagues and customers.

Self-awareness is an essential ingredient for success. You can’t be all things to all people, and you can’t help in all areas. The clearer you are on how you make others successful, the more opportunities you will have to use those talents.

Step 3: Share Your Wisdom

There is a critical inflection point in personal branding. It’s where you transition from being present in your job to documenting and sharing your wisdom.

Leaders grow their personal brands by writing it down.

Your personal brand cannot grow if it’s limited to direct personal interactions. Writing is the best way to share your wisdom when you’re not there. Get into the practice of documenting and sharing your best ideas:

What can you share to make your colleagues even more successful?
What ideas, stories, strategies, or pearls of wisdom do you have in you?

These are the things that need to come out on the page.

Get into the habit of documenting and sharing your best ideas with your team. It can be as simple as a weekly email with motivational tips and tricks.

Create a schedule. The minimum is monthly, and the ideal is weekly. This doesn’t mean you have to create massive documents. Rather, you are forming a habit to share your wisdom frequently.

It may feel awkward at first, but stick with it. The act of writing will organize your thoughts, and help you distill what you do brilliantly. More importantly, it will give you another opportunity to empower others to be successful.

Step 4: Amplify Your Content

You can grow a remarkable personal brand inside your organization by simply following the first three steps:

Empower others to succeed
Distill what you do brilliantly
Share your wisdom (monthly or weekly)

To really grow your personal brand amplify your content. You need to reach more people than your teammates, direct reports, and customers.

As a leader you have something that every author would kill for: a captive audience. This is your team.

The first group to share your content with is your teammates and direct reports. This is a well defined group that you can help become more successful. It’s also an ideal group to test your ideas, find your voice, and prove you’ve got a worthwhile message to share.

As you find your voice, experiment with sharing your content more broadly. Publish your memos and ideas as articles on LinkedIn Pulse or Medium. This is an easy way to get your articles out to a larger audience without the hassle of starting a blog or creating a website.

The expertise you develop in your job has value, and there’s a whole world of professionals that can learn from you.

Sharing your wisdom outside of your company is exciting, because you will start to see your ideas travel. This has the added benefit of opening new doors:

Speaking at conferences and events
Career advancement with promotions or working on task forces
Recognition by industry peers and thought leaders

The public recognition and validation of your work is intoxicating. It’s exhilarating to see others use your ideas. This will fuel you to go even further, and lead you to other forms of social media, publishing, and sharing.

There’s never been a better time to grow your personal brand. Anyone can create one. The first step is yours.

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We’re here and always happy to chat. Feel free to Contact Us with any questions, comments or ideas.

Another Way to Say “One Stop Shop”

“One stop shop” is not a value proposition. It’s a cliché and a terrible way to describe your brand. Do your brand a favor and eliminate the phrase from your vocabulary.

“One stop shop” is a shorthand to describe a broad service offering. The phrase originated in the late 1920s as a positioning strategy for an automotive repair store. At the time the business model was unique. Auto parts, auto repairs, and auto sales were separate businesses. If a customer needed to fix his car he’d have to visit two or more stores. Bringing parts and service together in one business at one location was a paradigm shift in the automotive industry in the 1920s and 30s, and it created a huge value proposition for customers.

Describing the company as a “one stop shop” was a brilliant tagline. The service offering was unique, and the phrase summed it up perfectly. And the alliteration of one stop shop made the phrase fun to say and easy to remember. It was so good that the tagline outlived the business.

The catchiness of the phrase propelled one stop shop into pop culture. Generalists in every industry — printing, marketing, electronics, legal, distribution, you name it — have used it. The phrase has transitioned from a brilliant tagline into a cliché, and that’s why you should avoid using “one stop shop” with your brand.

Established brands with a broad product offering focus on what makes them unique:

Walmart provides everyday items for the household at low prices. The current tagline is “Save Money. Live Better.”
Target is jokingly referred to as Targét. It’s a discount retailer with style. Its tagline is “Expect More. Pay Less.” The “expect more” is what the company emphasizes in its store layout, customer service, product selection, and brand identity.
Amazon is the “Everything Store.” The company’s mission is to create “a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

Each of these mass retailers sells a lot of stuff, but that’s not what makes them unique. Each company has pushed beyond the product inventory, and created clear strategies to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

This is my challenge for you and your brand. Drop “one stop shop” from your vocabulary. Better still, ban the phrase from your company. Push yourself to find a better phrase — one that truly describes what makes your business unique.

Describe Your Brand in 10 Words or Less

I can rant on the failings of “one stop shop” for days, but that’s not the point of this article. We need to find better ways to describe your brand and what makes it unique.

The first Principle of Sticky Branding (the book) is Simple Clarity. This is the ability to describe your business and what makes it unique simply and succinctly. The ideal is to be able to describe your brand in 10 words or less.

Simple Clarity is the foundation of your brand. It’s often described as your elevator pitch or unique selling proposition. Regardless of what you call it, it’s got to be clear to be effective.

A good way to think about Simple Clarity is it’s like a label on a file folder. The label doesn’t provide a lot of information, but it has to be clear and descriptive to be effective. Too much or too little detail makes it hard to categorize, store, and retrieve.

For a label to be effective it should have three things:

Short: Ideally 10 words or less.

Descriptive: The label offers an explanation of the contents.

Memorable: Easy to find and easy to refer.

Simple Clarity follows the same principles. Without using “one stop shop” create another label to describe your business.

You can do this by answering three questions:

You are: What is your company’s industry or category?

You do: What does your company do? More importantly, what does it do better than everyone else?

You serve: Who does your company serve?

Simple Clarity distills you are, you do, you serve into a statement about your brand.

Avoid One Stop Shop Synonyms

As you create a Simple Clarity statement for your brand avoid the trap of looking for another way to say “one stop shop.”

Yes, you can find new and creative ways to say one stop shop. You can use synonyms like full service, soup to nuts, or everything you need from A to Z. But the synonyms are worse:

The synonyms don’t sound as good. One stop shop has grown into a cliché, because it’s fun to say and easy to remember. The alliteration makes it superior to any of the synonyms.
More importantly, the synonyms don’t resolve the real branding problem. Being a generalist is not a differentiator. Google killed the generalist by making it very easy to find anything you want with search.

Strike the one stop shop metaphor from your vocabulary and your marketing. It’s not doing your brand any favors.

Study your customers to uncover your value proposition:

Why is the breadth of products and services a benefit to your customers?
Quantify it. What tangible results do your customers achieve from your company?
What types of customers does your company serve best, and why?
What do they get from your business that they don’t get from your competitors?

Test Messages with the Win/Loss Card™

Chances are you won’t come up with a perfect alternative to “one stop shop” on your first try. You’re going to have to play with various messages, and see which ones resonate with your customers.

The best way to test your Simple Clarity statements is to go out and use them. Go out and sell. It’s amazing what you will discover in a sales call when you’re listening.

Pay attention to how prospects and customers respond to your Simple Clarity statements:

Did it resonate? What statements, facts, figures, or stories resonated with the customer? What worked well?

Did you face objections? As you experiment with alternative ways of describing your brand — alternatives to saying “one stop shop” — you may encounter resistance. Did your statement cause confusion or objections? Did the individual express any complaints, issues, or challenges?

What did they ask? What questions did you receive? Did they ask for more details at any point?

Every time you share your Simple Clarity description is a learning opportunity. Keep track of the responses. You will gain insights after a single pitch, but the real gold is found when you deliver the statement five to ten times. This is when you start to see patterns, and this knowledge is invaluable in developing and refining alternative ways of saying “one stop shop.”

To aid in the testing process I developed a tool, the Win/Loss Card™. Print a bunch of copies, and complete the form after each sales call. You can track all the questions above, and it will make it easier to spot the trends when you track the questions in a consistent format.

Download Win/Loss Card™

Transition Away From One Stop Shop

Unfortunately there isn’t a simple replacement for the phrase, “one stop shop.”

It’s going to take creativity to look for other ways to explain your business and what it does. But I’m confident if you move beyond the cliché you’ll find a statement that does a much better job describing what makes your business unique.

The key to this exercise is to dive deeper into your organization, and really explore how it delivers value to customers. Selling a lot of products may be a benefit, but it is not an effective differentiator. Push the idea further. Explore why customers value what your company does, and why they choose it over the competition. This is where you will find better language to describe your brand.

Describe your brand without using any clichés, fluff, pomp, or buzz words. You are, you do, you serve. The facts are far more compelling than saying “one stop shop.”

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We’re here and always happy to chat. Feel free to Contact Us with any questions, comments or ideas.

3 Brand Naming Mistakes: How to Avoid Screwing Up Your Brand

Brand naming is one of the single most important branding decisions.

A great brand name will set your business apart, but the wrong one can hold it back. Avoid these three cardinal sins in brand naming.

Avoid Creative Spelling

Misspelling brand names is a cardinal sin.

Flickr is the classic example of a brand naming screw up. Flickr started the Web 2.0 trend of dropping a letter to get a .com domain name.

Caterina Fake, Flickr co-founder, explains, “We tried to buy the domain from the prior owner who made a beer called Flicker Beer. He wasn’t interested in selling … We liked the name ‘Flicker’ so much we dropped the E.”

The decision was costly. The site lost more than than 3.6 million visitors per year to flicker.com. And it’s rumored that Yahoo paid over $600,000 to acquire the domain.

Dropping a letter or coming up with creative spelling will haunt your brand, because people will naturally use the proper spelling first.

Avoid Invented Words With Latin or Greek Roots

Some of the most iconic brands have invented names: Kodak, Acura, Google, and Yahoo. These names are easy to remember, easy to say, and have an evocative quality.

But not all invented words are equal. Invented words with Latin or Greek roots — names like Cingular, Xarelto, Agilent, or Xypex — are problematic. The structure of these names make them hard to spell and even harder to remember.

The best invented brand names are based on phonetically constructed words. Phonetically constructed brand names are fun and experiential. For example, George Eastman invented the word Kodak, because he loved the letter K. He said, “[K] seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.”

Avoid invented name that are hard to say or hard to spell. They will cost you way too much in advertising and marketing to seed the name with your target market.

Avoid Being Stuck in the Herd

The third cardinal sin of brand naming is following the herd.

Following the popularity of Flickr lots of tech companies jumped on the bandwagon: Tumblr, Grindr, Sbribd. Even Twitter launched as Twtter in 2006, because the .com was taken. Thank goodness they solved that issue.

One brand may achieve success with a lousy name, but that doesn’t mean you should copy them.If you’re following the herd you’re cursing your brand.

A great brand name will position your brand. It helps customers understand your products and services, and separates them from the competition. It just fits.

Take the time to find the right brand name, because there’s no reason to compromise with an avoidable naming mistake.

New Keynote: Dealing With Disruption

We are living and working in a world of rapid change. And we know it.

We can feel the world shifting, and we can see it. There are disruptive companies like Uber and Airbnb, and disruptive technologies like 3D printing and artificial intelligence. The signs of change are everywhere.

It’s a steady drum beat: change, change, change. But so what? Change is a fact of life. Why is this topic garnering so much attention? Change matters, because there are winners and losers.

This is an important topic, and the focus of my new keynote presentation: Dealing With Disruption – How to Win When the Rules Keep Changing.

What the Talk Is About

Chances are your business will be on the receiving end of a disruption. In fact, you’ll probably face multiple disruptions.

Disruptions are problematic, because they create winners and losers. Some companies are able to innovate and adapt, while others become obsolete. It’s a matter of relevance. Changes in your marketplace will challenge the very relevance of your brand.

Do you have the ability to adapt and win?

In this interactive keynote, I provide a framework on how to win when the rules keep changing. I show you how successful people and companies are out innovating the competition, and what it takes to win right now.

This is a talk you won’t want to miss. It’s funny, insightful, and incredibly practical. You will gain ideas that you can apply to your business right away.

Formats & Audience

Dealing With Disruption hits on universal themes that all companies are facing, and I work tirelessly to customize the talk for each and every event.

The talk is available in two formats:

1 Hour Keynote. This is an interactive keynote. The talk is 45 minutes, and I incorporate 15 minutes of table talks and Q&A.

20 Minute “TED Talk.” Dealing With Disruption is available in a TED-style talk. It’s a fast, fun, action-oriented talk.

Dealing With Disruption is ideal for sales conferences, management and leadership retreats, and for keynote sessions at conferences and association events.

Further Reading

I have been researching and developing this talk for over a year. Check out a few popular articles on the topic:

Strategy Without a Map
Dealing With Disruption
The Battle for Relevance

Let’s Work Together

Would you like to have me speak at your company or event?

I am always happy to chat. Give me a call at 416.479.4403, or fill out the Contact Us form and I will reach out to you.