Creating Competitive Advantage: Give Customers a Reason to Choose You Over Your Competitors [Hardcover]

This is a quick-read, common-sense book with some useful ideas. Jaynie Smith's main theme is that everyone tends to promote the same "competitive advantages". The top ten most common `competitive advantages' she hears touted include good customer service, quality, our reputation, good results, our people, etc, etc. Her point is that if everyone a potential client is evaluating says they deliver these things, the decision is going to come down to price.

Her advice is to "come up with some good numbers". For example: "Over 90% of our business comes from referrals", "After switching to our product line, our customers report an average 25% boost in manufacturing productivity" or "Our customer retention rate is 95%, twice that of our nearest competitor".

She suggests a management team comes up with these kind of differentiating statements in a workshop, and then tests them on customers using a good research firm. None of her clients have ever come up with a `What our customers want most' list that ever matches what real customers actually say - hence the value of the research.

The robustness of well researched differentiators is evident, and because most companies do trade on `our reputation, our people, etc' there is clearly scope to gain a significant advantage by developing such statements. I'd be intrigued to know Smith's methods for gathering competitor intelligence, as so many of her examples are along the lines of "We do X, which is Y% better than our competitors."

The book is packed with examples from Smith's own work facilitating workshops and helping clients come up with and test the right messages. The majority of these are for smaller firms, and mostly product based. I work for a business-to-business professional services firm and there weren't many relevant examples I could draw from, although the core concepts apply well.

For smaller firms, there's a very useful section on what to do if you're up against a big `category killer' - ie: a dominant brand in your market. Smaller firms will also benefit from being able to implement Smith's advice on marketing literature, web sites, etc more readily than someone in a large company who might not be able to influence such corporate communications.

That said, the book is relevant to anyone who has to get their firm's offer across in a competitive market - particularly those in sales, business development and marketing roles.

Smith also recognises that not every company will be in the habit of gathering the relevant data to formulate the right kind of statements, or might be in a commodity market. She offers a good contingency plan in how to create a competitive advantage and how to develop `competitive positioning' statements, ie: even if you're basically the same as your competitors, spell out and quantify some aspects of your operation that give you the competitive high ground.

All in all, a refreshing and encouraging read that provides some easy-to-implement ideas that should increase sales and margins.

Before i say what i really like about this book, one thing that really surprised me is the lack of reviews and the mention anywhere else of how good this book actually is.
I normally make my purchases based on recommendations from other people i admire, or from blogs etc, but this i picked up by chance.
Great book, which explains dealing with the competition isnt just about competing on price.

My business mentor bought me a copy at a time when we were looking at all our sales messages.

This is one of those books that you need to read with a pen and paper beside you as the ideas it will give you are seemingly endless. Our sales conversions are already well up as a result of it. It has also helped us present our brand values much more consistently