A reader writes:
I’m looking for great ideas, and you ALWAYS have them. Our company moved their corporate headquarters to Oklahoma from Texas, where we were the established business in our area. We still have great business coming through Texas, but Oklahoma has not been so kind. In this market, twenty-plus year relationships have already been established and I’m finding it near impossible to “break-up” those relationships. I’m getting great meetings, but I’m NOT able to offer what our competition can because we are so small. I’ve stressed that because of our size we are able to offer more personal service and that we ARE available 24/7. My question is: What do you do when you KNOW you can’t beat the competitor? We can’t afford to have a $5 million dollar bond and we can’t afford to have $1 million dollar insurance. We never needed those things before. We have an impeccable reputation and that’s what we’ve got to sell. I’m trying and dying. Help!
Thanks for writing.
First, let’s diagnose the problem. There is apparently a fairly large risk involved in buying your services. In Texas, your pre-existing reputation acts to lower the perception of risk to your prospect. In Oklahoma, you have no reputation, so prospects are asking for risk amelioration that you can’t afford. In Oklahoma, the perceived risk of doing business with you outweigh the potential rewards.
You have attempted to address this problem by adding to the reward side of the risk/reward equation. Unfortunately, the market differentiators that you’ve chosen (personal service and constant availability) are insufficiently unique and valuable to tip the equation in your favor. As a result, your meetings with prospects, though pleasant, go nowhere.
Here’s my prescription: simultaneously lower the perceived risk while increasing the potential reward. Here’s how:
Step 1: Get some high-quality referrals. Revisit every one of your happy Texas accounts. Ask them if they know anybody in Oklahoma who might need your services. Then ask for a personal introduction. When you sell as the result of a referral, you’ve already cleared some of the risk hurdles. A referral allows you to transfer some of that impeccable reputation from Texas to Oklahoma.
Step 2: Create a no-risk guarantee. Make sure that it’s clear to the prospect that you don’t expect to get paid unless your product or service does exactly what you claim it will do, and more. I know it sounds corny, but there’s a good reason that so many television offers have a “no-risk” guarantee. If buttressed with the referral in Step 1, your guarantee will be taken seriously.
Step 3: Create a “must-have” differentiator. Find some existing feature of your offering that’s unique to your company in your market. Craft all your sales materials to emphasize this feature and denigrate all competitive offerings that lack it. Make sure that the feature (or lack of it) ties strongly to the prospect’s emotions of fear or greed. (E.g. Tell a story where lack of 24/7 access put a competitor’s customer out of business.)
Step 4: Leverage your local successes. Once you’ve won an account in Oklahoma, promote the heck out of it. Highlight it in your materials. Issue a (well-written) press release ($400 at eRelease.com) that reinforces your messages from Step 2 and Step 3. Get a commitment from the Oklahoma customer to provide you with referrals once they’re delighted with your offering.
That all sounds easy, but there’s a fair amount of work involved. The key to the entire plan is referral selling. The expert in this field is Joanne Black, author of No More Cold Calling. Here are some previous posts where I’ve discussed what’s she’s taught me about this important subject: How to Generate Your Own Leads, References and Referrals are Different, and Five Rules for Great Referrals.
Good luck!
