Dear {FirstName},

We hope you've been enjoying your Monday Morning Motivator. If you've received this issue for the first time - welcome aboard! It only takes a couple of minutes to start your week off right with the MMM! Be encouraged by the success or great ideas of others in your business community.

The Biggest Lie In Business

This week Jim McElgunn shares with us the biggest lie in business. Keep reading to see if you are guilty of the same offense.

The trap never fails. Jaynie Smith invites the roomful of CEOs at her workshop on competitive advantage to write the answer to this question: "What's the No. 1 reason I should do business with you rather than your competitors?" Then she asks those who wrote "Good customer service" to stand up. Next are those who wrote "quality," then "reputation," then "knowledgeable staff." By now, half the CEOs are on their feet.

When Smith gets to the tenth advantage on her list, virtually every CEO is standing. They're starting to look sheepish as the point of the exercise dawns on them: how can you claim a competitive advantage that's the same as everyone else's?

Smith, president of Smart Advantage Inc., a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based consultancy specializing in identifying and communicating competitive advantage, has set her trap more than 200 times for CEO groups and companies across North America. The outcome never varies. Almost every CEO writes down what she pointedly calls "blah blah blah" — claims so lacking in specifics that prospects tune them out. Just seven of the 3,000 chief executives she has spoken to in leadership round tables over the past four years have been able to articulate a meaningful point of differentiation, reports Smith, author of Creating Competitive Advantage. "They answer with clichés," she says. "But if you don't give a compelling reason why someone should do business with you, the tiebreaker falls to price. And we don't want that." These CEOs aren't necessarily wrong to think that their firms have good customer service or knowledgeable staff. What they fail to see is that such fuzzy claims do nothing to make them stand out from the pack.

It's probably true of your company, too. The biggest lie in business is the one you tell yourself: that you know and can clearly articulate why anyone should choose you over your competitors. Unless you've gone through a disciplined exercise to identify your true advantage, the odds are that you're off base. You might be promoting a benefit that customers care little about, or that isn't decisive in their buying decision. You might be promising something your firm doesn't consistently deliver. Or you might be right about the general terrain on which you have an edge over your rivals, but you're communicating it with empty clichés. (The others in Smith's top 10 are good results, our employees, consistent management, responsiveness, innovativeness and trust.)

It's far harder than it looks to state concisely how you're better than your rivals, so it's tempting to stick with a stale platitude and go back to running your business. Yet if your marketing materials don't distinguish your product from that of your rivals, you'll struggle to fill the sales funnel. If you don't supply your salespeople with a meaningful answer to the question "Why should I buy from you?" they'll be forced to compete on price. And if your existing clients aren't crystal clear why they're doing business with you, they could bail the minute they get a better offer.

On the other hand, if you're one of the few firms to get this right, you'll protect yourself from stiffening competition, sectoral slumps and, to the greatest degree possible, a full-blown recession. Should you decide to sell your firm down the road, you'll fetch a better price from investors prepared to reward a business that's laser-focused on its true advantage. Your staff will reward you, too, because working for an employer that knows what it delivers better than anyone else creates a sense of pride and excitement that energizes the entire organization.

The best news is that your rivals are probably hopeless at this task, leaving a market vacuum you can fill. Roger Hardy, president and CEO of Coastalcontacts.com, a Vancouver-based online seller of eyewear whose revenue climbed from $9 million in 2002 to $102 million in 2007, says if you get it right and your competitors don't, "you become the gorilla, a company that gets a disproportionate share of the sales and, most importantly, the profits."

Hardy, who has founded seven companies, admits he was "not great" at identifying the true differentiator at his previous firms, mostly Web-based businesses that competed on price. But without the economies of scale to consistently undercut his rivals, competing on price alone made him vulnerable to market downturns: "I was left without a chair when the music stopped." Yet Hardy was so caught up in the price game he didn't question his assumption that cost was all his clients cared about. "Back then, I was much less engaged with my customers," he says. "When you're having success, you think, 'I must be doing what customers want.'"

Hardy got religion a few years ago about the need to cultivate advantages beyond price when he read Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey Moore's book on surviving in hypergrowth markets. Price remains a key advantage for Coastal. But its true differentiator is continuous innovation to make it ever more convenient for customers. The company streamlined the ordering process so it takes four minutes or less to purchase a pair of lenses. It eliminated any perceived risk in buying from an unknown, virtual vendor by invoicing customers only after they had received and tried the lenses, rather than requiring payment up front. It took the worry out of waiting for product by using FedEx for next-day delivery. And it hammered home its advantage in convenience on its website, in a million e-mails per month to its customers, video ads on Facebook, and TV, newspaper and other advertising.

Hardy says Coastal never stops working to deepen its advantage. His managers take turns phoning 20 customers per week to chat about Coastal's service. They routinely discuss competitive advantage at staff meetings. A sales team runs online experiments to gauge customer response to new ways to make it easier and faster to buy from Coastal. "We've spent the most time on identifying and constantly building a successful competitive advantage," says Hardy. "That's why this company has been the most successful and my other companies have been, at times, mediocre."

Why aren't all companies beavering away at defining and articulating their unique value proposition? The biggest reason, says Smith, is that most firms don't think they need to: "They believe, 'We're already successful, we're doing fine, we already know our customers.'" Hardy says it can be tough to admit you've succeeded largely by floating on a rising tide — or maybe "you don't know that you don't know what your competitive advantage is until the tide starts to pull back out." And many entrepreneurs mistakenly believe you can pull a competitive advantage statement out of a hat.

Still other companies think their marketing messages already convey their true advantage, not realizing that these have no connection with what the company was built to offer. Ian Chamandy and Ken Aber, partners in the Toronto-based consultancy Blueprint Business Architecture, help their clients strip away meaningless marketing verbiage — what Aber calls "veneer and shellac" — to find a relevant message in why their firms were founded. Chamandy says people launch businesses because they want to fix things that are being done badly or not at all. Blueprint searches for this reason to help it craft an Inspiring Proposition (IP), a positioning statement of seven or fewer words. "Every company is started to be a cause," says Chamandy. "It happens to be a commercial cause, but it's a cause nonetheless." Uncover that cause, and you can inspire people to buy from you rather than having to convince them. Equally important, you can align your staff with that cause.

There's another reason many businesses avoid the whole subject of their true advantage: they fear they have nothing distinctive to offer. Indeed, many of Smith's clients insist they're commodity players without any real advantages. "If you get your eyes off the darn product or service, you'll see that you're not a commodity," she explains. "Your product is a commodity, but how you deliver it is not." She says most advantages stem from things that clients value above and beyond the product or service. Unlike your rivals, you might offer free installation, more flexible credit terms or more convenient delivery times. Smart Advantage's list of potential "deliverables" tops 1,500, and Smith says every firm has an edge in at least some of them.

Admitting you don't know your firm's true advantage is a big step. Next comes an even bigger one: figuring out what it is. If you need help, give us a call. We're good at it!

Have a great week unless you choose otherwise.

Drago

PS -  We have created our MMM Archive Page,so if you missed a week you can always find the latest MMM.

PPS - Project: The Body Revealed

Imagine the next time you have a migraine or acid reflux, having access to a video databank containing interviews with experienced medical practitioners, specialists in their field, explaining what it is you are experiencing, how to treat, manage and prevent it from happening again.

Welcome to "The Body Revealed" Trailer.

We travel alongside Wendell in the 'Body Pod', a tiny vessel that is able to travel through a body, namely a 3D character called L-015 (Lois) and examine and show in glorious 3D all the things that happen when something like a migraine affects you.

We were responsible for making the visual experience a reality for the 3 minute trailer, that will eventually become a full TV series.

Using green screen compositing and 3D set design we created the visual experience you are about to see. Click on the following link Go2productions .

Success Profile

This week we profile Ranka Burzan and her company Solutions Organizing.

Ranka started her company buy seeing a need by those that don't have the time to maintain their homes and offices. Working with children in the classrooms and other settings gave Ranka an opportunity to organize classrooms, multicultural events, daycares and other institutions.

If getting organized is a challenge for you then Ranka's team at Solutions Organizing & Staging can help. They will demonstrate many simple ways to conquer your clutter, provide you with tools and tips, and most importantly assist you in developing a system to help you get and stay organized.

Ranka's team is energetic, highly motivational, non-judgemental, compassionate and known to get results. To find out more about the company and their services go to www.solutionsorganizing.com .

The Adam Advertising Group is proud to play a small role in the on-going success of many of the companies featured in the MMM. 

Can The Adam Advertising Group help your business, or do you have a success story we should hear about? Contact Drago Adam at drago@AdamAdGroup.com or
call 1 866 923 - 6477

PS : We wanted to say Thank You for sharing your Monday Mornings with us, and also for the positive feedback we receive weekly. The MMM started three years ago with 35 subscribers, today's issue is going out to over
14,336 Weekly Subscribers.

The Adam Advertising Group