There is a lot of talk at the moment about point of difference and why it is important for “capturing” clients, point of difference is important but it actually matters for so many other reasons. If you stop thinking about your marketing (and the client journey) at the point of capturing the client then you are doing yourself and your clients a great disservice. You also are not going to have the client retention and word of mouth referrals that you need to succeed in your business.
I was talking to two different lawyers this week about their marketing and their approach to their online presence and I was reminded of this important point, your point of difference matters. Due to the amount of DIY marketing going on at the moment there is a lot of talk about terms like this, but mostly (it seems to me) people aren’t fully understanding how point of difference is relevant to everything in the business.
What does it mean?
Call me a lawyer but I almost always go back to defining the question or the key terms. Point of difference (according to Wikipaedia) means -
the factors of products or services that establish differentiation. Differentiation is the way in which the goods or services of a company differ from its competitors.
Think about this, if a client who likes you was asked about you what would they say? If someone asked that client “Hey, you just went through a divorce, can you recommend a family lawyer?” then they are probably not going to respond by telling them that you:
are a lawyer
do family law
have a Masters Degree/went to a prestigious University
have a lot of followers on social media
They are probably going to respond with far more personal factors, factors around:
total price (or fixed fees) and whether it was what they expected
whether they felt you listened
whether they felt you helped them
how the services are delivered and whether that was convenient or helpful to them - (are you a local business, were your support staff helpful, was it impossible to park near your office or to get an appointment, are you an online or remote business)
your personality (e.g. they were lovely, or they tell it like it is)
whether they would use you again
Why does it matter?
Your point of difference matters for two reasons. Firstly, whatever profession or service or industry you are in there are probably competitors, there are probably other people doing what you do. Why would a person choose your business? They don’t actually need to know what you do for a living, they already know that or they will find that out incidentally and fairly quickly. When they first come to your site or when they first interact with your socials you want them to know why they would choose you instead of a competitor.
The answer to why should they choose you is not, of course, all my competitors are incompetent. This isn’t true, and therefore it doesn’t answer their question. Responding with I am more experienced than all of my competitors probably also isn’t true either (unless you are the one person in the entire pool who is the most experienced). Stop focusing on your competitors and start focusing on you. Why are you different?
The second reason point of difference matters is that marketing isn’t just about capturing that initial lead, it is also about preparing the client for the sort of experience that they are going to have with you. Do you hate it when you see an add for a movie and it looks great, then you go to the movies and it is nothing like that add you saw. It probably doesn’t matter at this point how wonderful the movie is, you were expecting something else and you are now disappointed. If you prepare them for a different experience then that is not going to work. You will not retain that client, they will be disappointed and they will leave.
Returning to the first reason though, I am a realist and I know that capturing the initial lead is wildly important. Where most people are making a mistake here is focusing too much on their competition and what they are doing. Return instead to your business, your customers and you. How would your clients answer the question when they are asked for a recommendation? What would your clients say about you?
But how am I different?
If you are still unsure on your point of difference then your first port of call is probably to ask some of your happy clients. Call them on the phone and tell them that you really appreciate their business, that you want to target more clients “like them” because you enjoyed helping them, and so you were hoping that they had two minutes to give you some feedback. Then ask them what they would say about you if they were describing you to another person. Call a few clients but make sure you include in the list the client who you know is bite your head off direct, as well as ensuring that the list is mostly clients who are your “dream client”.
I assure you that you are in fact different. If you are just starting out with this it might feel like there are a lot of competitors in your space and you cannot differentiate yourself. You are different, you just need to think about it from your client’s viewpoint. Human beings actually fail, repeatedly, when they try to be something or someone that they are not. Eventually the truth wins out. You are different, that part is easy to answer, what you need to have a good hard think about is how you are different, and how you are different in ways that matter to your “dream client”.
This is also why, as infuriating as it is when it happens, you should take some solace when a competitor rips off your entire idea and tries to pass themselves off as you. It actually won’t work. The clients that initially buy into it will quickly become frustrated when they realise that what they were sold is not what they have bought.
Also, you don’t have to be completely different. Returning to the Wikapaedia definition, it goes on with -
Indicators of the point of difference's success would be increased customer benefit and brand loyalty. However, an excessive degree of differentiation could cause the goods or services to lose their standard within a given industry, leading to a subsequent loss of consumers. Hence, a balance of differentiation and association is required, and a point of parity has to be adopted in order to allow a business to remain or further enhance its competitiveness..
At the end of the day you are who you are. Don’t get too hung up in being totally different to your competition because actually there is probably enough work to go around, but also you are at the end of the day providing the same service. There may be some differences, but you cannot reinvent the wheel here.
Don’t forget you are a person, dealing with people
Often the points of difference are quite personal, either personal to the client and their preferences, or personal to you the person providing the service. As an example, while price is certainly important you probably won’t win the race to who is the cheapest. You need to talk about price but this factor alone is unlikely to win the new client. Factors around price that might win a client could include fixed prices, the price of other services that they need at the same time, weekly or fortnightly billing and updating of cost estimates, or access to technology where the client can do some of the work (and therefore not pay you to do it). This is where you need to understand your dream client and what they want from you.
In relation to you as an individual, when I do consulting work as a lawyer my boss in that role often describes me as direct, as someone who has no icing on the cupcake. Now some clients like that, they are having a tough time and they need a straight answer, some clients don’t like that and that is fine because they won’t in the end enjoy working with me. There are many other solicitors out there who are direct and have no icing, my individual points of difference don’t have to be wildly different. I am a collection of points of difference not simply one point of difference. This is just an example of something that relates to me as a person but that informs the way that a client might choose a lawyer, and will inform the way that I approach marketing my services.
So how does it work?
Alot of the chatter that I see around point of difference at the moment is incredibly contrived, focusing on setting up things (and setting them up only once) to emphasise your point of difference. While yes it is important to emphasise your point of difference with your clients it shouldn’t actually be difficult at all to ‘set it up’. Your point of difference needs to be honest, and so it should just flow naturally.
If your point of difference is not honest then no amount of setting things up is going to fool your client, they are fairly quickly going to realise that what they bought into is not what they have now received.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t review your workflow and your processes, for instance you may be stuck in systems that you haven’t thought about for a while that aren’t serving you or your clients. Think about that part of the client journey that really annoys you, that is probably where you should start because it probably isn’t “like you” and isn’t assisting you or adding value for your dream clients.
Also don’t forget that point of difference also isn’t one thing, the name is a bit misleading as it suggests that it is singular. If you have three main points of difference then probably a competitor shares one of those points, but do they share them all? Particularly if at least one of those points of difference is less about the service and more about you then someone else is unlikely to be exactly that combination of factors.
If you are in a service industry then you the person does matter. This is more difficult to market well in a large organisation but in a smaller business your own marketing for your own particular service should have it’s own flavour. Also your discussions with potential referrers and leads can emphasise you, the person, as well as your business. Don’t make the mistake of separating you the person and you the professional.
So returning to the question how does it work, sure you need to set up some marketing to emphasise it but actually if your point of difference is honest then it is going to naturally flow through everything that you do. Where the hard work probably comes is sitting down and figuring out your points of difference, doing some research with your clients to ensure that your view of yourself and your service is accurate, and thinking which points you are going to emphasise in your marketing because they speak to your ideal client. Write them down so that you remember them when you are updating your blog, posting to your socials or speaking to a prospective new client on the phone. You should also pull them out when you are revisiting systems and workflow.
If you have accurately selected which points of difference to emphasise then they shouldn’t be a lot of work. Yes you still need to put in the time for things like marketing, setting up and running the business or revisiting systems within your business, and so sometimes your points of difference might feel like hard work but actually what is hard work is running a business.
So why does my point of difference matter?
To return to the question at the beginning, your point of difference matters because it is the reason that someone chooses you instead of a competitor, and beyond that it is the reason that someone stays with you rather than leaving you for a competitor, and the reason that they recommend you to others.
You do need to emphasise your point of difference, but is also needs to just naturally be a reflection of who you are, how you interact with your clients and how you do business.