Differentiate Yourself

Depending on the maturity of your industry, your competitor’s strategy, and your competitor’s dealings with distribution, services can differentiate you in a really big way. The more complex your products, the more they cost the customer; and the more mission critical they are to your customer’s business, the more the value-packing promise of services. Leading services researchers note from their studies that more and more companies in tough competitive markets are looking at services to yield competitive advantage (Brown, Gustafsson and Witell, 2009). If your competitors don’t have full portfolios of strong service offerings or if they don’t know how to sell them, this is a huge opportunity for you if you embrace the challenge.

Give your customers what they need, want, and will pay for while locking out everyone else.

GIST: Services are the drivers of market dominance.

Tags: differentiation, selling services