This week’s book review on Small Business Trends is on “Creating Competitive Advantage” by Jaynie L. Smith.   You can see a summary of the book review as a feature video as well.  It’s one thing to read the book, get the principles and think that it’s a great idea, it’s quite another to sit yourself down and start comping up with a real competitive advantage that you can use to actually increase your sales.

I’ve got the book and will be pulling concepts from it while we go through this, but I would encourage you to get a copy for yourself – it’s stellar.  Rather than simply creating a list of what to do, we’re going to start actually doing it over a series of posts and let’s see what we come up with!

Getting Your Brain Around Competitive Advantage

A competitive advantage has three pre-requisites – otherwise it doesn’t count.

1. Must be objective.  This means that it’s a statement of fact; 3 locations, open 24 hours, etc.  If you think about it, it’s kind of like a “feature” of your business.
2. Must be quantitative. Specify how much, how many of anything you’ve got as a feature.  In the example above we made some specifics here are a few more: each service representative has at least 20 hours of training (specify what kind), your pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.
3. Not claimed by any other competitor.  This is where it gets tricky,  your competitive advantage could truly be something that no one else is doing OR it can be something that they are not claiming – or focusing on.  This gives you a lot of creativity.
4. No cliche. Stay away from empty phrases like “your solution provider.”

Start With a List

To get your brain bubbling take a moment and list as many “factual features” of your business.  Aim for a list of 49!

Here are a few areas to get you started:

• How would you respond to your customer when they ask “Why should I buy from you?”
• What’s most important to your customer when they are buying what you are selling?
• What features of your business give the customer what’s most important to them?
• In what ways does your business deliver what’s most important to your customer?

This is just a short list of thought starters – spend about 45 minutes on this exercise.

Stuck-Buster Ideas

Are you stuck on this?  That’s totally normal… here are a few brain-busters to get you started again.

• Draw a picture (stick figures are great) of your customer at the moment when their mind should be triggered to contact you.  What’s happening, where are they?  In what ways can you be “present” to remind them that there is a solution?
• Go outside for 10 minutes with a notebook.  Walk around and note the first thing you see.  Now make a list of all the ways that this item reminds you of the reason your customer chooses you.

Try this and let me know how you’re doing.

How did you discover or uncover your competitive advantage?