A founder should pick one differentiator: quality, service, or price. Amazon chose price and selection, not quality. A consulting firm built white-glove service for Fortune 500 clients, but discovered not all of them would pay for premium service, even when impressed.
When thinking about your offer, think about which of these 3 attributes you plan to embrace: quality, price, and service. If you think of a company like Amazon, they focus on specific attributes: price, selection, and convenience. But quality is not typically mentioned as a differentiator. So for you, the startup entrepreneur, if you're passionate about customer service, embrace it and make it a key attribute. If you obsess over high quality, choose that. But don't fool yourself by attempting to compete on every business differentiator. You can't. In one of our consulting businesses, we established a business unit to service our high-end, high-margin clients. They got true white glove service, full support teams working to help clients strategize and implement those strategies available at any time. We worked with mostly Fortune 500s, and they were blown away by the service, and we attracted even larger clients in the Fortune 100. As we were growing the practice, we assumed all clients in this segment would require, expect, and were willing to pay for such service. We were wrong.
