- Hey there, Dan Martell here.
Serial entrepreneur, investor, creator of SaaS Academy.
In this video I'm gonna teach you how to differentiate,
separate, yourself from the competitors in the market so
that you can cut through all the noise and work with incredible
companies that want your solution.
And be sure to stay 'til the end where I share with you my Core
Target Framework to understand the three F's of figuring out
where to invest your time and energy from a marketing point of
view and in that video I share the perfect placement.
It's essentially how I'm able to run and scale companies
from a paid acquisition point of view.
Stay to the end, I'll share that with you.
(upbeat music)
So building a solution in a
competitive market is super hard.
I remember when we were building my company Flowtown we kinda
splintered out this tool called Timely that competed in the,
check this out, social media publishing space.
I mean that's probably the most reddest ocean.
This was like 2012 and there was so many companies in there.
We're talkin' TweetDeck and Hootsuite and CoTweet and all
these other ones and we thought we had this unique approach to
publishing content based on
the timing of when the tweet would go out.
So essentially we would analyze your social stream,
figure out when you had the most engagement,
and then you gave us the queue of content and we would decide
when it'd get published.
And that turned out to be an incredible product hook.
Now we got lucky because we figured that out early but had
we not figured it out, it was something we could've
backed into by really looking at the market
and figuring out how to differentiate our solution,
even those there's a ton of other ones.
My friend Laura did this with Edgar.
She's in the exact same space.
She's built a multimillion dollar SaaS business,
MeetEdgar.com, using the same concept of say,
"Okay, well there's a bunch of publishing tools
"but what are they missing?"
And for her it was repurposing old content.
'Kay, and then building the queue.
So we did it on time base.
She did it on repurposing and what you figure out is there's a
ton of different ways that you can differentiate yourself
against competitors and what I'm gonna share with you in this
video are the top five that I've discovered that might inspire
you to tweak a bit of your approach.
Number one is nail a niche.
Now some of you are scared because,
"Well, if I pick a niche that is so small then maybe
"there's not enough customers in it."
I agree but typically what happens is we try to boil the
ocean then we're not relevant to anybody.
One of my favorite examples is one of my coaching clients.
They have a gas engineering software.
Talk about super focused, in the UK that they are maniacally
focused on servicing that customer base.
Now, I always say until you get about 20 to 30% of the market
then you're not saturated and there's probably a big
opportunity to continue expanding.
Then what you want to do is go into the bowling pin strategy.
The first pin could be this specific customer segment.
So you nail that niche and then you go into the second
and third pins right behind it that could just
be a little tangential off of that.
But number one thing that you need to consider is can you nail
a niche to differentiate yourself from other
people in the market?
Number two, product hook.
At the end fo the day, there's this concept call drafting.
When you build a software product you could be building it
on top of somebody else's solution.
So what drafting is is figuring out
what's the hook in the market?
Maybe I build something that has the exact same feature set of my
competitors but what they don't have is integration.
So one of my favorite examples
is a company called Churn Buster.
And initially they built a churn solution,
an email campaign for kind of getting credit cards updated and
reducing churn on top of Stripe because they saw Stripe's growth
to build momentum in the market
around e-commerce transactions.
So they said, "Well, if they're growing so much,
"why don't we build a solution that's specific to Stripe?"
Now, they've added other integrations since then
but I just think that kind of product hook,
that toe hold in the market's gonna allow you to differentiate
and compete today and really get some initial traction.
Number three, be remarkable.
Seth Godin wrote an incredible book called "The Purple Cow" and
the whole premise is that be so
different or unique that you're remarkable. 'Kay?
That means that people remark about you.
That they talk about you.
That what you did was so unique that they want to
share it on social media, tell their friends about it,
tell their coworkers and say,
"You got to check out this company."
I remember I had a friend, Marty,
he approached me and he said, "Hey, you gotta call this
"plumbing company because of the way they answer their phone."
And when I called they said something like,
"I just hope you have an amazing day."
Or, "How can I help you have an amazing day?"
It sounds so trivial but it was interesting enough
for Marty to tell me about it.
Or my favorite story is Wufoo.
They were a form company in the software space.
They were bought by SurveyMonkey and one of the things that they
were committed to is just excellent customer service.
So every time somebody signed up for a paid account,
they would handwrite a thank you card,
a postcard and send it in the mail.
Now again, it might seem trivial but when's the last time you got
a hand written thank you card from your SaaS vendor that you
just signed upper as a customer.
Probably never.
So things like focusing on the customer experience,
focusing on the UI and the UX and just making sure that maybe
you have integrations but doing something
that makes you remarkable is one way
to differentiate against competitors.
Number four, positioning.
Understanding how you message yourself in a market and what
the customer thinks about your solution is so important.
Here's one of my favorite examples is ClickFunnel versus
LeadPages or every other landing page solution out there.
Most of those other tools look at their product
as a conversion application.
What Leadpages from my perception has done really well
is really position themselves as a opportunity for people to
generate revenue, for being a more excellent marketer,
from building this thing called funnels.
So they've taken a position around that topic
and really owned it.
I mean even to the fact that they have their
Funnel Hackers Live event every year.
Another company that's done this really well is HubSpot.
They took a position around inbound marketing.
Now, were there blog platforms before HubSpot?
100% but they didn't own the position in the market.
There's this new trend, this new thing called inbound marketing
and they were gonna be the platform for it so even within a
market you can change the narrative and the message and
the story around the solution that you offer to appeal in a
different approach or a different type of customer to
allow you to get a toe hold against your competitors.
Five, pricing.
When you think about product, most people take pricing and
think it as a separate thing.
When I think of pricing as part of a feature of a product or the
package that you're selling.
Just think about this.
If I say to you, "Hey, I've got this solution.
"It's $10." You have a certain perception of it.
You know how valuable you think that is for that price.
And if I say is that same solution but it's a $1000 a
month, you all of a sudden you're like,
"Whoa, wait a second," and you have a different perception so
pricing definitely allows you to position yourself differently
within a market, right? And that's why freemium exists.
But I'm not saying anyone is right.
I'm just offering it up as a potential.
I remember recently I was doing a call with one of my clients
and it was early days and we looked at their homepage
and I asked them, "Who do you serve?
"Who's your, you know, ideal customer?"
And then said, "Well, Fortune 500 companies."
And then I went to their website and on the marketing site in
their pricing page there was a $10 option.
What do you think that said to the Fortune 500 company?
So even pricing will be
a factor in a customer deciding on how
they think of you in the range of solutions
out there in the market.
Essentially you compared to all the other competitors and are
they gonna move forward with you
or will they feel negative about that decision?
Again, it can go both ways. It could be too cheap.
It could be too expensive.
Based on the position that you want to take to compete against
everybody else in the market.
So to recap how to differentiate your product from competitors,
number one, nail a niche.
Number two, product hook.
Number three, be remarkable.
Number four, positioning.
Number five, pricing.
So as I mentioned in the beginning of this video,
I want to share with you a training
called "The Core Target".
It's one that I teach at my Growth Stacking Summit and what
I go over in there is the three F's of really understanding
where to find your specific core customer and once you find them
in the center of those three F's is your perfect placement so
click the link below to get access to that free training
video and I'll see you on the other side.
And if you liked this video, be sure to click the like button.
Subscribe to my channel and if there's anybody else you think
that it could serve, feel free to share it with them directly.
As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
Point of view. Cool.