As a business owner, you are no stranger to understanding your customers’ needs. After all, you built a business around providing goods or services that fulfill those needs. What proves to be a little more difficult is understanding and marketing your competitive advantage.
According to smallbusiness.chron.com, “A small business builds a competitive advantage by providing a better overall value to customers than competitors are able to.” That competitive advantage is the message that you want to include in all of your marketing efforts, as it is the reason customers will choose to do business with you rather than your competitors.
Providing a better overall value does not mean that you have to be all things to all people. For example, if you know you can offer the highest quality widget on the market you probably cannot also offer it at the lowest price. Just make sure that you have a firm understanding of your target audience. If offering the highest quality widget drives the price higher than the market will bear, your business will suffer. “Losing sight of the customer is a sure way to get your competitive advantage wrong,” says Salesbenchmarkindex.com. You must make sure the market values it and is willing to pay for it.”
Aligning services with customer needs
Once you have a firm understanding of your core competencies and the marketplace demands, Salesbenchmarkindex.com encourages business owners to “create strategic alignment across the organization by making sure everyone understands, and rallies around, this advantage.”
Take L.E. Smith for example. Our core competency is in our commitment to helping our clients become more profitable as a result of their partnership with us. Although we can’t always do this by offering the lowest price, we can provide superior customer services that allow our clients to become more efficient. That increased efficiency often results in higher profit margins.
When we really started thinking about how our core competencies aligned across our organization, we knew that it would require the involvement of employees at all levels. We created teams that were charged with continuous improvement efforts that would not only benefit L.E. Smith but also our clients. As a result, we began aligning our internal functions to directly address the customer service demands of our target market.
- Industry Leading Turn Times – On-time delivery is a huge priority for our clients. We took this one step further and streamlined our internal processes so we could offer faster turn times than our competitors without sacrificing the quality of our products or services.
- Project Management – Knowing that our clients don’t have time to learn the processes of every supplier they work with; we took steps to match our processes to that of our clients. Not only did this make partnering with L.E. Smith easier, but it also made it possible to offer project management services on large, commercial jobs. This service is unique in our industry, and it allows our clients to focus on other priorities that will help them increase their profit margins.
- Scalability – We wanted to make it easy for our clients to work with us on every job, large and small. We created internal processes that are scalable and offer the same quality with industry-leading turn times.
Leveraging your competitive advantage for effective marketing
According to Smallbusiness.chron.com, defining your competitive advantage does not just help you align your internal operations, it also has the added benefit of helping you develop a marketing strategy. “A sound marketing plan includes a carefully crafted message that presents the company’s competitive advantages in a concise and compelling way.”
At L.E. Smith, customer services are at the forefront of everything we do, from our internal operations to our external marketing strategies. Our mission is to ensure our clients are more profitable as a result of their partnership with us. That is not just something that is written on the wall, it is practiced in every decision we make.
For more information on L.E. Smith’s products or services, or to discuss how we can help you leverage your competitive advantage, contact our sales team at https://www.lesmith.com/contact-us.
