The main ways to stand out from the competition depends on what problem you solve and how you solve it.

A market research blog by Priority Metrics Group states that a “difference is worth establishing when it meets at least one of the following criteria:” 

• Valuable: the perceived benefit exceeds the cost
• Important: delivers a benefit critical to success
• Distinctive: unique or offered in a distinctive way
• Superior: better technology, faster
• Emotional: ties to a core emotion — love, hate, desire
• Communicates: understood and visible
• Preemptive: cannot be easily copied
• Affordable: customers can pay the higher price
• Profitable: contribution (margin times volume) exceeds cost of difference

In order to identify which criteria are best to focus on, it’s easier to look at your current customers and understand what was the hook for them.  

With Lead411, I did an exercise where I looked at our G2Crowd reviews  for common words that are associated with the differentiating criteria above.  Words like: Time, Cost, Customer Service, Love, Hate, Price, Success, Easy, Fast, etc.  I looked for patterns and was able to see how our customers really felt, which is what I use in our marketing.

For Lead411, our customer reviews mentioned the following by frequency:

• Easy/Easier (31%)
• Time (22%)
• Price/Cost/Affordable (21%)
• Accurate/reliable (20%)
• Best (16%)
• New Leads (11%)
• Love (10%)
• Quality (10 %)
• Customer Service (6%)
• Useful (5%)
• Success (3 %)
• Fast (3%)
• Inaccurate (1%)
• Hate (0 %)

This was a useful exercise to identify what words our customers are using when describing Lead411.  Using these words I was able to establish differentiators which I use in marketing content for the company. It is important to note that looking through the words used in our reviews, I determined a positive/negative connotation and also combined results for fast/faster etc. 

Seeing “Easy” and “Time” at the top of this list is consistent with our perceived value and superior technology as differentiators in our market space.  We strive to make our solution easy to use for our customers, so they can save time finding ideal prospects quickly.  It was also nice to see that people love our solution more than they hate us 🙂

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