This article is cross-posted at sparknewthinking.com.
HA! Tricked you! There’s not a single “rockstar” on this list…not in the musical sense anyway. Instead, I thought it would be great to draw some inspiration from true rockstars…people who have reached the top of their game in whatever industry or occupation they chose to pursue.
Like many of our readers, I’m a quote junkie, but boy do I get tired of reading the same quotes over and over. So I searched high and low (mostly high) to find quotes that hopefully you haven’t heard a thousand times before. Oh, and while I love quotes from the ages, I also tried to pick quotes from people who are, well, not dead yet. Enjoy!
“I don’t say: ‘can’t do that’, ‘won’t do that’. I’ve never thought in that way about work. The genuine truth, and I do think about this a lot, is that I’m one of the least competitive people you’ll ever meet. Except with myself.” – Daniel Craig, Rockstar, James Bond Rockstar
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Mark is the creator and chief imagination officer of sparkspace, an inspirational business retreat center in Columbus, OH. Mark is also a keynote speaker, retreat leader, and author of Spark New Thinking.
Right now there are potential customers for your business trying to decide whether or not to choose you. Unfortunately, most of them can’t see much difference between you and your competition. You’ve all got good quality products or services. You all seem to have competent, helpful people. It all pretty much just looks the same. That leaves one factor to drive the decision: price.
Welcome to the commodity trap. It’s a place in which lowest price almost always wins because customers don’t see any other difference. It’s not a place where most companies want to compete. To escape the commodity trap, you have to answer the toughest question in business: Why should I choose you?
From banking services and insurance products to fast food restaurants and medical clinics, today’s buyers just don’t see much difference in their choices. Unless you want to compete on price, you have to clearly differentiate from your competition. You have to have a tiebreaker. You have to give potential customers a reason to say “Okay. That’s the difference. That makes my decision.” The good news is that you probably have one or more tiebreakers right now, you’ve just not developed them as such.
Tiebreakers usually aren’t anything particularly unusual or exotic, but more often the mastery of a basic customers’ expectation. The best way to discover and develop your tiebreakers is to list your customers’ basic expectations of you. Start by choosing one basic customer expectation and stake your claim with it. Improve your performance in that area until it becomes “your turf,” and clearly differentiates you from your competition. Reach the point where you have mastered the differentiator and can confidently say “Nobody does this like we do.”
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Joe Calloway is a performance expert who helps companies align people, culture, and strategy to drive results.
He is the author of four ground-breaking business books including the best-selling Becoming A Category of One, which received rave reviews from The New York Times, Retailing Today, Publishers Weekly and many others.
“As a small business owner, I sleep like a baby. I go to bed at 8:00 pm and wake up at midnight screaming my head off” – Unknown
It is sometimes hard to sleep as a small business owner. It’s not only the rough spots that every company goes through but also all the wonderful ideas and possibilities entrepreneurs have that are always swirling around in their heads.
Here is what keeps most owners up at night and the cure to get back to sleep:
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