Note: This blog was inspired by a conversation with Jeff Calderone, the very sharp and always insightful owner of Denver Web strategy firm Elevated Third.
If you run a business or own a company, at some point you will be the unsafe choice, and maybe you have already been.
It goes something like this. The customer/prospect is considering three choices. Choice 1 is the customer’s regular brand, but she is a tired of the same-old same-old and is looking to make a change. Choice 2 is her best friend Cindy’s favorite brand. Cindy has been working on her for years to make the move over to Choice 2, and frankly, the customer has a bit of a soft spot for Choice 2.
You are Choice 3. The customer has heard good things about you; in fact, she has done her research on you, asked around, even tried you out, and she secretly thinks you might actually be the best brand of the three. But you are also the least safe choice. She knows Choice 1 intimately well, and Choice 2 is the trusted brand of her best and most trustworthy friend. You, on the other hand, have no strong personal bond with her.
So how do you overcome being a risky choice? You could offer a full money-back guarantee to alleviate any fear of making a bad economic decision or of poor performance. However, even if they get their money back, sometimes there’s opportunity costs in making the wrong decision (lost time, lost resources, damaged reputation, etc.). And plus nobody likes to be wrong.
You could introduce them to your current customers and hope their loyalty for your brand somehow rubs off. But it’s always easy to roll out your biggest fans, and even the worst brands have at least a few fans.
You could position yourself this way: not choosing us would be the worst possible decision you could make. As we just said, nobody likes to be wrong or look stupid. So maybe you could pull out all the proof of how you are the smart choice, the logical choice, the automatic choice for so many people in their situation, that it would be foolish for the customer to consider anything else. Thus they would choose you by process of elimination.
That sounds all fine and dandy, but it’s also very tricky, because this customer has an attachment to Choices 1 and 2, and tearing them down might offend the customer and make them defend the other choices, making your position even more difficult.
Or you could change the rules so you and Choices 1 and 2 aren’t even on the same playing field. Changing the rules means you are playing the game in a fundamentally different way. Everyone else competes on price; you compete on speed. Everyone else sells through distributors; you sell direct-to-consumer. Everyone else offers 26 different product varieties; you specialize in three and have an obsessive dedication to improving these three every day. See where I’m going with this. Changing the rules isn’t easy, but it may be the only way you stop being a choice and become the only option.
