Positioning Yourself For Business Success

Why does golf guru David Leadbetter make ten times as much money as an average teaching professional? Why does one attorney make a hundred dollars an hour while his peers from the same class at school make five hundred? Why does a prospect in your town choose a dentist, dealership, or hospital over an another? The answer is Reputation!

No matter who you are, or what business you are in, your reputation or lack of it precedes you wherever you go. The greater your reputation for speed, excellence, quality, price, or whatever your unique selling proposition happens to be, the easier it will be for you to do business. People will seek you out, pay you more money, and happily refer others to you. People do business with people they know, trust, and like.

Even in small towns, very few people, if you're really honest, can name your business. Think about your town; can you name a realtor, accountant or attorney other than the one you now use? How about a second one? In most cases people cannot, and when you expand the question to include mechanics, dentists and a host of other everyday businesses and services, the results become even more dismal. Your goal should be to build such a legendary reputation in your business, career, industry or town that competing against you becomes a very, unattractive proposition.

To reach this status you want the largest percentage of people in your town, industry or state to answer with your name when asked the question, 'do you know someone in the XYZ business?'

First you must determine how you want people in the marketplace to perceive you. If you heard people talking about you behind your back, what would you want them to be talking about? Your experience, quality, status, pricing, service, reliability or speed of delivery? Specifically, what is it that your business does better than anybody else? Now, don't say things like quality or value. These are good, but everybody claims them. For example, what comes to mind when you hear Domino's Pizza? "Domino's delivers in 30 minutes or less." That's was their unique selling proposition. Domino's isn't really selling pizza, what they're selling is time, 30 minutes or less. To demonstrate the power of that perception, you might be interested to know that those ads haven't run in over a decade! The 30 minutes or less perception remains!

Select one main perception that you want to convey in your marketplace, and back it up with a couple of subsidiary points. IBM is known for service. Sears has a reputation for long-lasting tools. Wal-Mart has a reputation for low prices.

What words or feelings would you like to own in the minds of the public? If you had to sum up everything you do in a simple one-line slogan, what would it be? Once defined, these answers should be woven into all your marketing efforts!

Here's an example of positioning in action. Imagine that you are at a party with a small group of people and you casually ask what each of them does. The first tells you he is an attorney. The second a life insurance agent and the third a dentist. A fairly typical response, that quickly sends you looking for a new group of people. Imagine instead that you were told that, they were, a consumer protection specialist, an asset protection consultant, and a smile consultant. It's a completely different perspective, isn't it? It allows conversation to be opened rather than killed. This is not merely an exercise in being cute. It's about opening up doors of communication and building personal relationships with others. The more people who remember what you do because it was presented to them in a unique way, the greater your chance of being referred or talked about later, which is the whole point!

Let's turn a mutual fund salesman into a wealth architect, (hey, that might work for all you insurance people, and perhaps even MLM consultants). How about a body sculptor instead of a gym instructor! A transportation specialist instead of a used car salesman. With a little ingenuity you can turn the most mundane-sounding job into something that opens greater possibilities with others. My very first job was as a bag boy at the Wellington Country Club in West Palm Beach. I sat out front and waited for the big old Cadillacs with New York plates to roll to a stop. Then I pulled their oversized golf bags out of the trunk and secure them to a golf cart not ten yards away. I never much cared for the title 'bag boy' so one day, when someone asked me what I did I told him I was 'Director of Bag Operations.' He seemed to buy the idea and shortly after that I even had a small number of business cards printed up. Within a few weeks an amazing thing happened, people started to treat me with a little more respect, and my tips almost doubled. The fact is you can quickly change people's perceptions of you and your business with a little shift in positioning.