I started this series with the premise that tightening your market focus in the face of flat sales is a better strategy than looking for more leads and a wider market. I hope you’ve convinced yourself as you’ve read these posts that you can in fact increase your sales with a tighter focus. I’m going to wrap up the discussion in this post by talking about your “unfair advantage” over your competition.

By tightening your focus, you’ve built what I call an “unfair advantage”:

• You thoroughly understand the value you bring to your prospect, the problem you are solving for your prospect, and the outcome you are providing to your prospect.
• You are able to help your prospect understand the value you are providing as you help him solve an important problem, and the outcome he will experience by working with you.
• Because of this you are sitting on the same side of the table as your prospect, acting as a trusted advisor rather than as an adversarial salesperson.
• You have differentiated yourself both with the value and outcome you are providing and by the way you are selling – you’re not pitching products, you’re providing valuable outcomes.

Now let’s talk about your outcomes – what you’re getting out of this tightening of focus.

• Your salespeople are more efficient, not wasting time on “never happen” deals.
• They’re also more effective, with much higher success rates on deals they are pursuing.
• That means both your revenues and margins are increasing as you close more deals with a lower cost of sales.
• You have more pricing flexibility because you can price based on value rather than cost.
• You have happier customers, more referrals, and life gets generally easier.

Thanks for staying with me over the past several posts – as always, I welcome your comments, arguments, and interest.

Be sure to check out my book, “Small Changes” for a more detailed presentation of the ideas in these blogs.