David C. Baker’s book, The Business of Expertise, has a really great exercise in it called “Drop and Give Me 20”.
He shared a video from Chris Do that talks about the exercise
:https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xCCoQT-5mlc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
One thing I find that folks struggle with is their differentiation.
In my language, “Why you?”
Consider this your value proposition, the reasons someone should buy from you.
In the spirit of David’s work and Chris’s video, I looked up a few examples and wanted to put together a list of my own.
And, I want to ask you to do the same.
Here we go.
- Price = Perceived Value. Price is actually irrelevant compared to the value that people perceive from buying your product or service.
- Brands are more important than ever, not less. Scott Galloway said we’ve left the age of brands and people just want to feel secure in their choices. That signals to me that brands are more important, if you are only picking one thing and need to be sure it is the right decision, the brand of that product is essential.
- 80%+ of businesses don’t have a real strategy and not having a real strategy is business malpractice.
- Planning = Procrastination in most cases.
- Discounts are for dummies! The same as it ever was.
- Research is proactive. Data is reactive.
- Revenue is a vanity metric. Profit is key.
- A generic sales funnel is worse than no sales funnel at all.
- If “everyone” is doing something, “everyone” is probably wrong.
- Most marketing is shit because most of what we call marketing isn’t marketing at all, just promotion and that’s less than 10% of the job.
- No one really cares about your brand and they definitely don’t care about your purpose!
- Start with why is horse dung.
- You get tired of your marketing and sales efforts before your market even knows they are supposed to be paying attention.
- The starting point for any good strategy is knowing what success looks like…at the start. Remember Alice and the Cheshire Cat, “If you don’t know where you are going…”
- Don’t let your salespeople tell you what your customer “really” wants…they’ll always say it’s a cheaper product.
- If you don’t stand out in your market, you don’t exist.
- Everything is marketing. So, pay attention to every detail.
- Pricing is marketing’s MVP moment. That’s where you capture the value you’ve created with your marketing.
- Setting the right price demands market research.
- The world is crazy, but that doesn’t give you an excuse for not having a strategy. In fact, it makes having a strategy more important.
Now…it is your turn!
You can reply here or you can leave them in our Slack Channel.
Dave