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Be different in strategy to pull away from competition

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

By Anna Grimes
Venue: Coast Plaza Hotel and Suites – Stanley Park

Roy Osing, CEO of Brilliance for Business and author of BE DiFFERENT or Be Dead: Your Business Survival Guide. Photo: A.Grimes

Never has it been more important to carve out a unique place for your organization in the market than it is today, Roy Osing, CEO of Brilliance for Business, told The Vancouver Board of Trade recently. Because the dynamics of a recessionary economy are different, your business’ strategy must also be different, he said.

“This whole theme of “being different” is a blueprint we need to consider as we navigate through this stuff,” Osing said at a Managers’ Toolbox™, sponsored by DDB Canada.

Seeing the current recession as an opportunity for renewal, Osing shared some of his tried and tested strategic advice, all of it from his brand new book, BE DiFFERENT or Be Dead: Your Business Survival Guide.

In this session, Osing covered the importance of creating your business to ‘be different’: how to distinguish yourself from your competition and thus immunize yourself to failure. His advice centred on four key areas: business strategy, marketing, serving customers (not customer service), and sales:

Business Strategy

• Dumb down your plan
• Be anal about execution
• Focus, focus, focus
• Cut the crap (do the critical few, not the fun many)
• Plan on the run

Marketing

• Market offers based on the holistic needs of your customers
• Create bundles that represent the individual customer
• Conduct deep segmentation of your customer base – seek differences, not similarities

Serving Customers

• Get your “core service” perfect so people are truly satisfied
• Hire “human being lovers”
• Bend the rules; empower your front line to say “yes” and solve problems

Sales

• Sell relationships, not products
• Compensate and reward relationship-selling behaviours, not just product-selling behaviours.

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