You absolutely must differentiate service offings that you are presenting to the marketplace.
As a follow-up to last weeks post on how to differentiate product, today I’m shifting over to the service side of your business, which in pricing has virtually identical reasoning behind differentiating yourself from your competition.
If you don’t have a definitive uniqueness to your services, then the default differentiator will be price, and you never want to try on compete on price alone or you will get creamed. You can see a previous post I wrote on that topic here.
Competing on price only works for a short time, and unless your prices are significantly less than your competition, then someone else, likely someone larger or another small guy that is willing to work for a lower profit margin than you are will undercut you and put you out of business.
When you are competing on price, it’s a race to the bottom and a no win situation for sustainability. You would be much better off in the long run by actually raising the prices you charge by providing more value that your customers are then willing to pay you more for.
How do you differentiate service offerings from your competition?
If the service offerings in your business don’t have a specific differentiator, then by default you are competing on price, which I think I have shown, you don’t want to be doing.
So if you don’t yet have one, then you need to come up with it immediately.
It isn’t going to happen in 15 minutes, this is a process that you need to seriously consider and take the time to do it right.
If you have a staff of employees, then involve them in the process, especially management, because as the saying goes “two heads are better than one”, and they could have some fantastic ideas.
What do you do different? Better? Best in class?
What is going to make your customers and potential customers choose you? Why are they going to do business with you over the other guy?
If you can answer emphatically, then you are in great shape, and I’d love to hear what you are doing to thrive in your business to differentiate service, so post a comment below.
If you don’t have an outstanding answer to how you differentiate service in your business, then you have some serious work to do, and I’d love to hear about that as well.
As always, I’d appreciate a Like too.
Have A Prosperous Day!