Differentiation Is Meaningless
- Dan Greenberg
- Mar 7, 2024
- 5 min read
It has been drilled into us that differentiation is the key to success. There are many books and articles written on the subject, including Jack Trout’s ‘Differentiate Or Die’, which, dramatic as it sounds, is a good read. The issue for sellers is that your buyers just don’t believe you when you tell them how differentiated you are from your competitors. Why should they? They may have been persuaded to explore your solution because of a marketing message, and they may be interested in a solution more generally, but hearing it from you is different; you are biased. As soon as you start talking about differentiation, you are just like every other biased sales rep they have ever talked to. And, the fact that you are biased leads to something much worse than disbelief, it leads to intellectual resignation and apathy.
Your buyers are rarely thinking what you think they are thinking as you sit there continually trying to reinforce logical points about your differentiators. In fact, most of the time they are not really thinking at all. Or, at the very least, they are not thinking about you. You are sitting there trying to convince them that you are right, and they are sitting there thinking, “Who is this guy, why is he here, and what’s his name again?” Obviously that’s an exaggeration in many cases, but the point is that your clients care a lot less than you think they do. You are just one of a number of people who will talk about why their company’s solution is the best. Differentiation is certainly important, but it is important at the company level and the marketing level. You and your business need to know what you are good at, where to focus, and how to attract attention, and this can only be done with focused, differentiated messaging that highlights strengths and areas of distinguishment. The issue arises when differentiation becomes the goal of sales interactions.
When you finish a pitch, or a meeting, or a conversation with a client, you may do a debrief, or think about it for a while after, or talk to your manager about it. But do you know what your client does? Nothing. The answer is nothing. Well nothing that has anything to do with you, anyway. You are out of sight, and out of mind, faster than the client can move their mouse cursor to the red hang up button at the bottom of the zoom screen. They may remember your name, maybe, but they won’t remember much about your products and they certainly won’t remember, or care, about why you are differentiated from your competitor.
Yet, how much time do you, and your managers, and your sales trainers spend talking about how best to differentiate your products, and how to describe the value that you add for the buyer and the client organization. A lot, I assume, that’s what most sales organizations spend the majority of their time training on. And I get it. Client-facing individuals do need to be able to explain value and differentiators in very clear and concise ways, but convincing a buyer to buy takes a lot more than building a logical case for your solution.
99% of the time when you are done talking to a client, they place you and your product in the mental filing bin that is reserved for all vendors, and as much as you think your product and solution may be differentiated, they just don’t see it that way. Sure, you may actually be different, but do you really think that sellers at your competitors didn’t come in and explain why they were differentiated? Do you really think that they are too inept to build a presentation that shows off why their product is better? So, why would the client believe you over them? If everyone is differentiated and provides unique and superior value, then no one is differentiated and no one provides unique and superior value. So, the answer is that your client won’t believe you. They won’t care. Your pitch is the exact same to them as everyone else’s pitch, and it will be received with apathy, just like everyone else's. You imagine your company to be differentiated from competitors, because that is your job, but to your client, you are the same as all the other vendors.
In addition, buyers are just simply jaded. As the internet has become ubiquitous in our work lives over the past 25 years, things that were once novel are now commonplace. Buyers have seen it all. A buyer who would have gotten cold calls from 5 sellers per week in the early nineties, now gets 25 cold emails per day. Not only that, but there are only so many unique combinations of words, so that buyer has seen pretty close to every subject line, opening remark, demo, and pitch that could be conceived. Emails, LinkedIn messages, and other outreach mean very little as inboxes are flooded with good faith attempts at establishing relationships as well as mass-produced borderline spam that is completely irrelevant for the reader. These same buyers can sit through online demos, and product explainers long before ever engaging a seller. Regardless of the realities of solution comparisons, there is very little that will feel unique or differentiated to a buyer anymore.
There is an old saying that goes: “Bad sellers sell products, and good sellers sell solutions”. There is some merit to it, but it leaves us far short of understanding the actual mechanisms of sales. Sure, it is better to sell a solution to a problem than to sell the features of your product because buyers don’t care about features, they care about their problem and how it is solved. But the saying doesn’t go nearly far enough for two reasons.
First of all, there is a level beyond solutions, and that is outcomes. The buyer knowing the solution does not do the trick, they need to be shown the future state of the world, and how much better they will feel when they exist in that state compared to the status quo. You, as a seller, need to inspire emotion within the client that viscerally reminds them about their disdain for the status quo, and about their hopefulness for their desired outcome. This is not a logical process; it is an emotional one. It’s not about differentiators and solutions, it’s about problems, feelings, and desired outcomes.
But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, selling solutions, or even outcomes, just won’t have any impact on the buyer unless they believe in what the seller is telling them, and they won’t. You are no different from everyone else who walks into their office, you didn’t earn a right to be there, and your credibility is limited and certainly no better than your competitors. So the buyer has no reason to trust your assessment of your solution. The only way that you can sell your solution and your outcome is if you first jolt your client into a state where they are receptive to something new, and do a good enough job of selling yourself to convince that client that you have credibility and that they can rely on what you say. The only way to do that is to add value to the conversation and focus on the problems and the outcomes. Any focus on the solution itself, prior to establishing credibility, will just remind the client of your bias. Conversations about problems, the industry, and the clients desired outcomes help them understand what they need absent of their feelings of seller bias.
Inspiring negative client emotion around their problem, and positive client emotion around a desired outcome, as well as adding value and establishing credibility are both hard things to do, but they are eminently doable.
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