Summary: When we think in terms of what makes us different from our competitors, a lot of it should be addressing who is our ideal target market? And it's largely going to consist of people who want to do business the way that we do business, and then matching up our style of business with the way that they want to do it.<br> <br> <br> <br> David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will ask the question, what makes you different? Welcome back, Jay.<br> <br> <br> <br> Jay: Thank you for asking me to be with you again. David. I love this question because if we don't know what makes us different, I think it becomes harder to sell or to present yourself or anything else, knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and playing to your strengths.<br> <br> Well, that's obviously something that we should be doing, but I've met a lot of people that don't have a self-awareness. They wouldn't be able to answer this question, and so they don't really know where to focus and they're kind of haphazard.<br> <br> David: Yeah. In the promotional products industry in particular, people struggle with this because you have all these distributors who are essentially representing very similar lines of product or the same lines of product from the same manufacturers.<br> <br> So a lot of people look at that and they say, well, how can I be different if I'm selling exactly the same products as all the other people that I'm competing with? And if you ask that question in a rhetorical sense, well, how can I possibly do it? You're doing it wrong. You need to actually ask yourself that question in a way where you demand results of yourself and sit down.<br> <br> Bullet point it out. What is it that makes me different? What could make me different? What can make me different? A lot of times when I ask the question in live seminars and I say, what is it that differentiates you from your competition? And sometimes people will shout things out and sometimes somebody will say service, right?<br> <br> And I'll say, who here feels their service differentiates them and sets them apart, and 40% of the hands in the room go up? And I say, okay, keep 'em up and look around. You know, can you all be right? Can your service differentiate you from the other people who have their hands in the air?<br> <br> And it's kind of a rhetorical question, but the answer kind of has to be yes. It has to be yes. I have to be able to differentiate myself in a way that justifies my existence in the market. And so I can be different. I can be different than you. We can both be great potentially in different areas. You know, if you think in terms of the Walmart approach, you know, their thing is cheapest price.<br> <br> Ideally, we don't want to be that in our market, right? But there is probably something that we can do that will better serve the clients that we're looking for than what other people in our market are doing.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah, it's such an important question if we're all selling the same product. Then what's going to make somebody choose me over somebody else?<br> <br> And we talked about it in the last podcast. Relationships can be a, a certain part of that, but our systems are turnaround. You know, there's so many things we can look at internally to say that we live up to that.<br> <br> I think the other hard part, and maybe it's an important part, is to figure out how to assess what your competitors are doing.<br> <br> If you're losing sales to your competitors, can you try and assess what they're doing that is making them win and you not?<br> <br> David: Yeah, and for a lot of people, the difference between an online business and an offline. Is like night and day. Very often there are offline businesses that are trying to compete with online businesses, which have a completely different set of rules and a completely different set of ben...
