While speaking to a client in a coaching session, we got talking about what makes up his product offerings. I asked him how his product offering compared to his competition?
He explained to me with great pride that his service was as good as his much larger competitors. He seemed a little surprised when I suggested that he needed to ignore what his competition was doing.
Don’t let your competitors define what your product looks like. You define it. When I was in charge of a training division for a global organization, the industry standard was to offer one week of basic training classes. When I asked why we taught the basic class in one week, the answer came back to me that everyone taught one week basic training classes. There was no reason other than it was what our competitor did, and so we fit the material we had into a one week time span.
The reality was that students found the course to contain too much info for one week. The week felt crammed and too full. Results were compromised because selling and scheduling a blocked off week was easier to do then change the scheduling and break from the status quo. We decided to change what we offered to give the student the best outcome. We changed focus to offer what we thought gave our prospects a better product and not worry about our competitors. Still today we offer extras to round out or product offering because it makes it better. You can either be a leader or a follower; but I can tell you, the view is much different from the front.
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