You might be thinking “who is on first and what is on second?” if you’ve had any exposure to the old Abbott and Costello joke.  What I’m actually referring to though is the first thing that should be done in business; finding the WHO that is your client and defining them as descriptively as possible.  To get to second base you do want to find your “What” which is defining your unique offering.

Back in 2007 at the Fortune Growth Summit in Las Vegas, I had the pleasure of meeting and getting to know Robert Bloom (engaging in conversation around Italian food and his love of the country).  Bob is the former CEO of advertising giant Publicis Worldwide. He also wrote a very influential book in the business world titled The Inside Advantage.  Why so influential?  Because it gives you a process to discover WHO your client really is and HOW you are going to sell them WHAT it is that you have to offer them.

This blog I want to focus on the WHO.  A few months after hearing Bob speak and reading his book, I called him up.  I shared that we were going to go through the process of finding our Inside Advantage at our upcoming annual retreat, and Bob so graciously gave us some pointers and even engaged in a call with my team at our retreat to help us through a few stucks.

Your WHO, as defined by Bob, is the core customer most likely to buy your product or service in the quantity required for optimal profit.  Finding the right WHO is important because, as Bob says, “The easiest and most profitable growth will be achieved by adding additional customers very much like your current most valuable customer.”

So how do you find your WHO?  It is a process, and going through it will generate a lot of awareness about your business.  How we did it was by gathering our entire team and brainstorming what our most valuable clients look and feel like.  This is not a demographic exercise…you have to be more specific and know by sitting across the table from that person how they would think and feel about what you have to offer.  With everyone contributing their (brilliant) ideas, we started with a few words and ended with a plethora of words that describe our potential client.

Afterwards we threw out the duplicates and honed in on the top 10 to 15 words that were the truest representation of our core client.  There was a lot of intense debate, but finally we narrowed it down.

Our core customer is:  A technical business leader who has an intense need for a reliable solution (software) delivery partner.

What is your core customer? If you don’t know, Bob’s book is a great place to start helping you find out. 

Recently I wrote two blogs on the Inside Advantage, discussing the Who and What that make up your offerings.  Today I’m going to finish up this topic and talk about the How and the Own It’s of this great strategy.

The HOW part is your persuasive strategy that gets your Who (your core customer) to buy your What (your uncommon offering).  This approach doesn’t void out competition, but it does allow you to stay ahead of them and to stand out from them, a process that is both dynamic and constant.

Bob (author of Inside Advantage) states that there are five hallmarks to a good persuasive strategy:

1. It must be action-oriented, not just a vague promise or sincere commitment.
2. It must define the specific action right up front; the first word must always be an action verb.
3. It must be strategic, not tactical – it must state “what” your product will actually do, not “how” the product will do it.
4. It must be honest and achievable, not imagined and unaffordable.
5. It must be tightly integrated with your definition of the core customer and the reality of your uncommon offering.

A few good examples (the book has several more) of How statements are:

Triaminic

Help Mom select the symptom-specific Triaminic formula that has only the medicine her child needs to get well as quickly as possible.

Juicy Juice

Demonstrate that Juicy Juice is the healthy juice for kids by comparing its 100 percent pure juice-absolutely no added ingredients formulation with the ordinary competitive juice beverage drinks.

After you’ve discovered your Who, What and How, the last part is to define your Own It’s, which are the imaginative acts that celebrate and support your advantage.  The Who, What, and How are your own private awareness that can only be made known to your clients through “imaginative acts” that celebrate your What (your uncommon offering).

Demonstrating imaginative acts might look like this:

A newspaper wants to earn the community’s trust by making it a better place to live, so they offer reader coffee talks with reporters, free article lamination service, advertiser appreciation lunches, recipe contest, new-neighbor showcase or an amateur art contest.

The book provides Own It examples for an upscale tanning salon, a sports and entertainment marketing agency, a prominent wealth management firm and a renowned symphony orchestra just to name a few.  Implementing Own It’s for your company is a great driver to support the message you want to convey to clients and to prove to them that you mean it!

Often times in business we say and write about who we are and what we do, but it’s in the Own It process that we put actions with those words and prove to our clients how we’re different.

We’ve made it to first and discovered our “who” in the last blog.  Now it’s time to talk about our “what” that is sitting on second.  To further the discovery into your Inside Advantage, we need to have a cleare understanding of the “what” that you offer to your clients.

What you learn is the difference between what business you think you’re in, versus the business you are actually in.  Many businesses think that the transaction that takes place between them and their client is their business.  For example, if I remove junk, I’m in the junk business.  If I develop software I’m in the software business.   If I sell coffee, I’m in the coffee business. You get the idea.  This perspective won’t get you far according to Bob (Inside Advantage), because it lacks the most important aspect, which is the customer’s emotional connection to your business.

Let’s try turning this around and looking at it from another perspective.  If I remove junk, I am also in the business of giving you back your space.  If I sell coffee, then I am in the business of creating an escape from everyday life, like Starbucks.  I develop software, but we are in the business of helping you gain execution around your goals, streamlining your processes, making your work like more efficient so that you have more time for your personal life.  Make sense?  See how this relates to people’s emotions, and why people flock to FourBucks for coffee?

It’s all about the emotion that is generated from the interaction with what you offer.  Bob worked with L’Oreal, which you would assume are in the business of cosmetics and hair care.  That’s not the case…L’Oreal markets and conveys in everything they do that they’re in the business of helping women look and feel beautiful.

Bob refers to this as an “uncommon offering” because it focuses on the customers’ benefits and emotional experience that are provided by your product or service.

If you’re thinking that your business is just another copy of competitors, don’t lose hope.  Bob says that in every business there is a hidden uncommon offering, waiting to be revealed, and it is just a matter of looking in the right place to find it.  This isn’t a marketing strategy…this must be an honest and meaningful uncommon offering.

We went about discovering our uncommon offering just like we did with our WHO.  It wasn’t an easy process, but was definitely very rewarding.  If you feel you are a commodity, Bob has lots of examples that prove that you can pull out your uncommon offering in any so called commodity.

Our What is: More than a software company, a trusted technology partner committed to ensuring the best customer experience. 

Have you discovered your WHAT?

Note:  I have recently transferred the publication of my blog from Google to HubSpot. You may have noticed a few small changes in appearance, and possibly received a few additional emails that slipped out during migration.  I’m very sorry for the disruption, we’re trying to make this as smooth and painless as possible!