Trying to be everything to everyone, means ending up as nothing to anyone

Many of us continue to obsess over what we think makes us different and wonder why buyers still lump us together with everyone else. The reason why most of the market doesn't see us as standing out in any meaningful way is less about any vague academic grandiosity around lacking differentiation, and it's more about none of it registering with buyers because it's presented as a feature of the business rather than a consequence for the customer. You know, we'll wax lyrical about things that we think that matter, like our global footprint or proprietary process, when buyers are wondering if we understand their compliance headache or the concern they have over response times. Almost regardless of business size, industry, or category, it's the same cosplay theater, just with different costumes. Conference rooms full of people whiteboarding what they think makes the business unique. It's the methodology they use, or their proprietary state-of-the-art technology platform. Now, these things may well be real tangible differences at a technical or applications level, but they all get thrown into the same bucket to be packaged into selling points that are regurgitated everywhere— the website, the sales deck, and Unfortunately, every single cold call. We're too full of our own ego. We're talking about ourselves when the buyer is trying to solve something that has nothing to do with us yet. Think about the last time you hired someone to solve a problem that was really complicated. Did you care about their proprietary project management system? Or did you actually care whether they understood that you had two young kids at home and you couldn't have your kitchen torn apart for three weeks? You see, buyers choose based on whether someone demonstrates they understand the specific situation. Not the vendor's situation, but the buyer's situation. Compound this with the fact that most businesses can't even get their own people to tell the same story. Ask the CEO, CRO, and CMO of pretty much any business what the business actually does and 10 will get you 5, that you'll get 3 different answers. There's no shared understanding of why a buyer should care in the first place. And if leadership can't agree on what you do and why it matters, how on earth will a confused sales team have any chance of articulating it, let alone a prospect trying to make sense of it? What ends up happening is everyone defaults to stuff that doesn't need a contextual sensitivity check beforehand. So we talk about the company, the year we were founded, how many employees, how many offices, the industries that are served, what our process looks like, blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. While it's all accurate information, it doesn't actually help the buyer make a decision, does it? The person sitting opposite us has an actual problem. Their current provider is missing deadlines, there are regulatory changes in their industry that they don't fully understand, and here we are banging on about some award we won in 2019. Most times the answer to the buyer-specific problem actually exists. It's been solved before. There are case studies. The expertise is there. But it gets buried under corporate speak and generic positioning because of this fear of getting too specific will narrow the market. We think that talking about solving compliance headaches for mid-sized manufacturers will alienate retail or enterprise deals. So instead, everyone stays vague. It's the same nonsense about optimizing operations, driving growth, and so on. Now, of course, every competitor in our space is making the same claim, just with slightly different words, which means buyers have no framework for choosing. So they default to price or whoever they've heard of. Or they stick with what they've got because at least that's a known. Look at the positioning and messaging of B2B organizations in pretty much any industry, and you'll see the same generic vanilla phrases come up again and again: innovative solutions, best in class, customer-centric approach. You know, everyone is saying the same thing because everyone is afraid of saying something that might turn someone away, maybe. Possibly, but the result is complete interchangeability. Optimizing for mass appeal means we're sanding down the edges of creating anything distinctive. Our brain's memory recollection process doesn't work by remembering things that blend in, that look or sound similar to each other. We remember what stands out, what surprises us, what breaks a pattern. When every business sounds identical, none of them are remembered. And if buyers can't remember us when they're ready to purchase, we may as well not exist. Real differentiation doesn't come from better processes or smarter people. It comes from demonstrating how we see something specific about the buyer situation that actually matters to them. It's not the "we understand the challenges facing companies in your industry" type of nonsense. Is articulating the actual tension they're dealing with. The thing that's keeping them awake at night. When we do that, the conversation shifts completely. Instead of being seen as pitching, we're discussing a real problem with someone who gets it. Differentiation happens not because we describe ourselves differently, but because we've demonstrated how we understand buyers differently. Most businesses don't bother with this. They go straight from "this is who we are" to "here's what we can do for you" without ever proving they understand what "you" means in this context. And then they wonder why their buyers see their offering as interchangeable with the competition's. So how do we fix this? By taking the time and making the effort to actually understand what a particular buyer cares about and speaking to them directly. About that directly, even if that means turning down opportunities that aren't a good fit. Because trying to be everything to everyone means end up being nothing to anyone. The businesses that are winning today are making buyers feel understood. That means shutting up about how great we think we are long enough to listen to what the buyer is actually dealing with. But most of us don't do that. We're too busy explaining why we're different to notice that no one's listening. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kixino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.