MBA1461 The Only 3 Ways You Can Differentiate and Compete

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Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 RMBA show where your business brain gets stronger every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will Learn the only 3 ways you can differentiate and compete. If you're in a crowded marketplace, that's a good thing. That means there's money in that market, people are spending money there, there's plenty of customers. You can get a slice of that pie. But. But how do you differentiate yourself and compete with the competition? How do you carve out that slice for yourself? Well, there's only really three ways to do it and we're gonna go over them in today's lesson. I'm gonna give you some solid examples from real world businesses and ask you some pivotal questions that you can ask yourself so you can differentiate and grab that market share. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I wanna start by saying that I've come up with these three ways just through my own experiences in business. Our business webinar Ninja, our webinar software competes in a very busy market with some big players. Competitors like Zoom and Gotowebinar that have literally millions of users. How do I get a slice of that pie? This is a question I had to force myself to ask. And it really just boils down to three ways of differentiation. Let's start with the first one, and that's niching down. Whatever your product, whatever your service, you can serve lots of different markets. But if you focus on, on one market, on one group of people, you become their choice because you've built a product or service and experience around their needs. Say, for example, you want to start a software business that helps people build their websites like a website builder. Instead of building a website builder for anybody who needs a website, let's say you focus on photographers and videographers and your website builders really cater to that market. These customers have unique needs and there's certain things they don't need that they don't want to be confused by. So if you become the website builder for photographers and videographers, all the videographers and photographers that are using something else can move over to you because you serve them directly. Let me give you another example, a real world example. Canva. Canva.com is a cloud based graphic design tool. It's incredibly popular, but it's a niche product. Is Canva more powerful and feature rich than Adobe Photoshop? No, it's not. It's. It has a fraction of what Photoshop can do. But not everybody needs Photoshop. Professional graphic designers, they need Photoshop and they're going to use Adobe Photoshop and they're a ideal customer for Adobe. But for people that are just trying to print a flyer for their book club or for a garage sale, they don't need Photoshop. They need something simple, easy to use, with limited features so they don't get confused. And this is where Canva comes in. Canva actually provides a product that's limited and they kind of force their market by saying, hey, we're for people that are trying to just easily design something in a few minutes without a graphic design degree. This means they are excluding the professionals, but by niching down, they speak directly to people that they serve that their product really is for. So the first way of differentiating is niching to a group of people in your larger marketplace. The second way to differentiate is implementation. And I believe this is the most powerful way to differentiate. It's what makes the biggest difference. The most popular example of this is Facebook. Okay, Facebook is not the first social media platform. There was MySpace or Friendster, but Facebook implemented it in a way that Made it easier. The concept is the same, but their implementation was different and therefore they were easily able to differentiate themselves and stand out. There was a period of time where Friendster and MySpace had more features. So it's not about feature sets, but it's more like, hey, they figured out a way to make social media work and they implemented the idea differently. Here's another real world example. In the automobile industry before Tesla, if you were conscious of the environment and you were a green customer, you would buy a Toyota Prius. Toyota's implementation to serve this customer was to create a hybrid vehicle. It's a compact car. It's not really that performance driven. It's not very fast, it's not really great to handle, it's not a great drive, it's not luxurious, but it was a symbol. If you drove that car, it was a statement, I care about the environment. That's why Leonardo DiCaprio drove a Prius until Tesla came around. And Tesla said, hey, we want to serve this market, the people that care about the environment, that want to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, but we don't want to sacrifice style or speed or comfort or luxury. We're going to implement this idea differently. It's going to be a little bit more expensive, but we believe people are going to buy it and enjoy our implementation of this idea more than Toyota. And history speaks for itself. Leonardo DiCaprio drives a Tesla now. But the point here is, is that they decided to implement this idea differently with your product, with your service, how you implementing your solution differently in a way that adds value. With us with webinar Ninja, there's a lot of different webinar softwares out there. There's different ways that you can create, you know, meetings and do mastermind calls. There's so many ways you could do this. Coaching calls. Why us? Well, our implementation is quite different from everybody else. Really focus on ease of use, a great experience in terms of building the webinar and incredible quality. So this is how we want to really implement this idea. We understand if our users find it easy to use, they're going to continue to use it and they're going to use it more often and therefore they'll be long term customers. So we're attracting people that say, hey, I love doing webinars but I don't want another headache. Right? We actually have a testimonial, a quote, a message that came from one of our users, said, I love webinars Ninja. I've tried other platforms but I said no because they're overly complicated. You know, I need a webinar service and not another headache. And that's exactly who we attract. All right, number three, the third way to differentiate is service. This is a game changer. When you understand this, you understand this is really a way for you to propel your business. Your competition can copy you. They can copy your features, they can copy your pricing model. Heck, they can copy your sales copy and even your branding. But the one thing they can't copy is your service. How you treat your customers before, during, and after the sale. The customer service experience, the whole experience of being a customer. The emails you send out, the chats you have, the live webinars you do, all that kind of stuff. That interaction you have with your audience, with your customer makes the difference. Okay? This is something that we tripled down on in our business for the last three years, and it's paid off. And now when we look at our customer surveys, the number one reason why people love webinar ninja is because one, it's easy to use. Two, the customer service. If you're a small business, this is a great way for you to get a leg up on the bigger businesses. Larger companies, it's hard to regulate great service. They have large customer service teams and sometimes things become impersonal. But if you're a small team and you're managing tickets yourself or you have a small team running customer service, you could still train them and be very friendly and very, very personal and helpful and be available and human. Our biggest challenge is as we grow as a business, how do we maintain that to make sure our customer service never suffers? Because it's one of our biggest differentiators. So you can differentiate with your service the way you treat your customers throughout the buying journey that past their purchase, when they buy the next product with the next service or the next, you know, thing that you offer them. So there you have it. Niche implementation service.

Those are the three ways ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like, what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.

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To wrap up today's lesson, I want you to notice the fact that I didn't say, hey, you can compete on price. You can compete on features. Competing on features or price is a race to the bottom. There's always going to be somebody willing to sell your product or service at a lower price. Walmart has proven that their whole business model when they first came out was to undercut all the retail shops that competed with them. That was their long term vision. They showed that, hey, if you're going to try to compete with prices, they show that, hey, if you're going to try to compete with price, hey, we're going to price our products even lower. And their game plan, they document this that they said the first 10 years we're going to run at a loss, we're going to lose a lot of money, but in the meantime we're going to put a lot of people out of business. Pretty cutthroat, I know, but this happens every day. Online businesses, brick and mortar businesses, side hustles. You can't compete on price. It's very dangerous to try to be the cheapest product out there. The same thing with features. You can never chase the next feature and hope that your whole business is going to turn around. All the features in the world can make your product more confusing, more daunting, not approachable. It's also hard to maintain. You might have more bugs, you might have more issues, you might have more complaints, more customer service issues. So I never recommend competing on features or price. Stick with niche implementation and service. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you have not already, hit subscribe right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you automatically get access to over 1400 business lessons, our archives of all our episodes. It's absolutely free to subscribe, but it's the only way to get access to all our lessons. Also make sure that when our next episode's available, it's ready on your device. We're on all the platforms whether you use Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, Himalaya or on the mall. Hit subscribe right now. And if you're on SoundCloud. Move on over to any podcast player. That way you never skip a beat and you can subscribe to the podcast. It's also the biggest compliment you could pay us by hitting subscribe. Okay, I think I made it clear. Hit subscribe. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. We've been running Webinar Ninja for almost six years now. And in those six years, we've seen so many competitors pop up, so many countless. And some of them die down, some of them disappear. And the only way we've been able to stay relevant is sticking to our strengths and understanding that if we want to compete, we gotta just focus on these three different shaders. Business can be hard. It can be competitive. But in that struggle, in that challenge is where all the sweetness is. It's where you really feel proud when you get over those milestones and really get a slice of that pie. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free Ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.