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"We're dedicated to our customers." Shit. I'd sure hope so. Would you choose to pay a significant amount of money to someone who's not dedicated and does an incompetent job? How do you define who's more dedicated, when everyone also claims the same? Maybe dedication (as effort, or passion, or how long it took you to know how to) is not your differentiator. Maybe it's the bare minimum expected from you. What makes you different in your market?
Who told you it's greedy / needy / bad to have high prices? Who told you it's good to give discounts? Who told you that giving a discount is a show of appreciation? Who told you that a discount is "making the customer feel good"? Who told you that your offering is "too expensive"? Who told you you need to do what your competitors are doing? Who told you revenue is the thing to focus on? Who told you pricing is covering your costs and adding a margin? Who told you things are this way because...
A common belief is that over delivering delights your customers. That's a misconception. You can delight them with delivering on your promise. Over delivering entails expanding your costs without a defined scope. You train your customer to expect more than what they pay for. You train your customer that if you raise your prices, you'll expand the scope. You underprice your offering. Delighting your customers has nothing to do with over delivering. It has to do with setting expectations and...
It's pretty clear on a lot of replies to yesterday's email that under delivering is not the best option of them 3 (under delivering, delivering, over delivering). That's great. And even with that, you'd be surprised at how often a large portion of players in the market do under deliver. The bar is SO low that by doing a decent bare minimum, you kinda get away with it. If it's that obvious to you, what do you think make other businesses not deliver on their promise?
You made your promise to your customer (aka value proposition). Delivering it is as important as making it. Which one do you think is best? Under-deliver Deliver Over-deliver
"Every customer is important." It's not. If you had only 4 hours to have face-to-face conversations that define the future of your business, who would be these customers you'd have those 1:1? Physically, you can't do it with all of them. Who would you choose? In your gut, you already know. Just as you know the ones who are not. Focus. It's all about choosing. Choose wisely.
After a 2-month break, we're back. This time off was important to re-evaluate some thinking, pressure test some more, and focus more. Anyways, now that we're back, let's get down to business. :) As such, you might focus on certain things, and maybe leave others. That's ok. You can take a pause (short or long). Regroup. Rethink. And then you can retake things. At your own pace. Just remember to get back to it.
One way that makes the process of articulating what's different about you simpler (not less painful, though) is through your insight. April Dunford defines insight as "the thing we understand about the market that the others do not." It starts with what you see in the market that doesn't make sense, that makes you cringe, that pisses you off. And the way you approach it that's in another direction from what everybody else does. It's your understanding. That's what makes you different.
They're all a by-product. You don't look for them as the main focus, they are the result of what you do in service to your customers.
A common pattern that I see in people who are new in leading positions is they try to maximize the results. What's that even mean? That in order to get the best results, you have to seize the right time. At uni, it might work. In real-life... not so much. Because it's about waiting. Waiting for the right time. Time that might never come (as perfect as expected). In business, the right time is not too early, nor too late. The right time is when you make a decision. A decision that might be...