Seek First to Understand

by | Apr 20, 2013

The next step in marketing system development is to create a Positioning/Differentiation Strategy for each target segment. The Positioning/Differentiation Strategy dictates how you will present yourself in your chosen market segments, and how you will clearly differentiate yourself from your competition.

Segmentation forces us to identify a well defined group of target prospects.

To develop a Positioning/Differentiation Strategy that captures the attention of prospects, and makes it obvious you’re the best choice, you must make sure these segments are well understood.  The more you know about your segments, the higher the probability of success.

Creating a Positioning/Differentiation Strategy requires a depth of understanding (for each market segment) about two things:

1. Prospects
2. Competition

As business people, we’re typically intent on telling people about ourselves – how great our products and services are, how much our customers love us, how much better we are than our competitors, etc. And yet, these things may not be the least bit important to your prospects. For that matter, your competitors may be doing a better job in the areas you are touting.

Stephen Covey, the author of the “7 Habits” series of books, states: SEEK FIRST TO UNDERSTAND, THEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD. One of our most important jobs as business people, and marketers, is to understand our prospects and competitors better than anybody else does – Seeking First To Understand. Armed with this insight, we’ll do a much better job of communicating with our prospects – in a way that focuses on what’s important to them and clearly differentiates us from our competitors.

This commitment to “seeking first to understand” is foundational in a marketing system. It’s this insight that drives our strategies and tactics. It’s this insight that allows us to stop guessing, and to know exactly what we need to do to be successful in our chosen markets. It’s this insight that identifies new market opportunities, and points us to innovations that will give us a leg up on our competition.

It‘s this insight that will make you confident in your ability to win so you can make the necessary investments to achieve predictable and sustainable growth. This commitment to understanding prospects and competitors better than anybody else does must be on-going, and must therefore be systemized and a core element of any marketing system. Why does it have to be on-going? Because markets change, competition changes prospects change, the rules of the game change.

In business, if you stand still, you die. There’s always a competitor out there who wants to take all of your business. Just ask Ford and General Motors about Toyota and Honda, or American Airlines about Southwest Airlines. And the expectations of your prospect changes. Before the internet, you could respond to inquires in hours and days. Now the expectation level is minutes or even instant!

The good news is that developing an in depth understanding of your prospects and competitors is not that difficult. In our upcoming newsletters, we’ll explain precisely what you need to know about prospects and competitors, and how you gather this information. Once you understand your prospects and competitors better than anybody else does, you’ll have struck gold. Why? Because you’ll know exactly what value your business needs to deliver, and how to position yourself in the market, in order to increase your market share.

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Ben Molfetta
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