What’s wrong with your Christmas Tree?

Here’s a scenario. You go out on a sales call to sell your product or service. The potential client greets you and listens to your spiel. You have a great presentation and marketing materials. They seem impressed.

Then comes the dreaded question. Your company host says, “I’ve seen four companies this week that do the same think as you. They all have years of experience, the best technology, competent staff, and great presentations. WHAT MAKES YOU DIFFERENT?”

I call it the Christmas Tree Tinsel theory. In this situation you don’t want to bad-mouth a competitor, or say something you can’t deliver on, or lower your price in a race to the bottom, but in their eyes you look like everyone else they've seen before.

So what do you do? How can you distinguish your business from the other businesses in your space? They all look like the same Christmas Tree.

I’ve often said, you need to have something different to bring to the table, other than, we can do it for a lower price. An analogy would be going to a Christmas Tree lot and looking at all the pretty, decorated trees. What separates your tree (service or product offering) from theirs?

For many years we went out on sales calls. The one area that we hadn’t spent money on was a client portal. What did the potential client always ask about? A client portal. In one of our annual meetings we were discussing sales and why we had lost business on a couple of particular clients to our competitors. The answer was the client portal. I used the tinsel analogy and it stuck in everyone’s head. Within two weeks we started building a client portal and new interactive reports.

I read an article this week from Investopedia entitled 10 Breakout Ideas for Small Business, by Jean Folger and it made me think of the Christmas Tree Theory. She said that many businesses stagnate after an initial growth period, and gave 10 ideas how to kickstart your growth again. I won’t go through all of them, but here are a few she had.

Diversify by offering new products and services. I have a friend who owns a large backyard recreation type company. He added a product that was integral to his normal offering and the product took off, giving him another source of revenue.

Find Niche Markets. I have another friend who came up with an idea for a new baby product. He built some prototypes and surveyed a number of “Mommy Blogs.” I didn’t even know there was a “New Mommy Blog” niche. His product was a hit and within two or three years he sold the company to a larger player in the baby products industry.

Build a Social and Digital Media Presence. This is an area I struggle with. I’ve found that being on Facebook and Twitter doesn’t increase my sales, but not being on it is worse. I know an author who had a lot of success screenwriting police serial episodes in the 70’s and 80’s. He had a number of successful thriller novels. However, as people say, “The only constant you can count on is change.” The publishing industry changed, but he didn’t change with it. I was given the opportunity to advance read one of his upcoming thrillers which I enjoyed. When I went to buy another one of his books on kindle, he had no presence. It was almost impossible to purchase his other novels or connect with him digitally. Get on digital media. I was a long-time skeptic of Amazon, but to my error, it has changed the marketplace. Now authors, and all types of businesses need a presence on the internet, social media, and Amazon. Is your digital presence getting your business to where you need to go?

Fill and Unmet need. Bear with me on this one. About five years ago, after another school mass shooting my wife had the idea of adding a bullet proof panel to school backpacks. As sad as this is, that it might be helpful to have a bullet proof backpack, they are now an item you can buy for your kids. We had the idea and just didn’t act on it. Do people constantly ask you for something you don’t offer? That might be a clue to add a product or service.

License your Product. Love him or hate him, this is one thing that Trump does well. He tries to license his name on everything. If I remember, he has something like 500 different LLC’s, most are used for licensing. I once knew a man that had a small beauty and makeup store. As a sideline, he created his own colognes and perfumes. He didn’t have the financial resources to manufacture, distribute and sell his own line. He reached out to a larger perfume manufacture and they were willing to license his special creations giving him a royalty for each one. The licensing agreement gave him a long-term income stream which was not possible given his limited funds.

Win a Government Contract. If you can swing it, this is almost a guaranteed success. Jean wrote, “the US Government awards nearly $500 Billion in government contracts each year.” This doesn’t include state or local contract. One caveat to this is there is a large amount of research and understanding of what it takes to win a government contract, before you see money rolling in. Some companies hire niche specialists to guide them through the government and regulatory contracts. Talk about a niche business.

The bottom line is that if your growth is stagnating it may be time to look at what’s wrong with your Christmas tree and think outside the box for your next growth spurt.