Beat Competition by Focusing on a Non-Core Benefit of Your Services

When Nokia decided to enter the cell phone market, they envisioned that cell phones would become as much of an accessory as a communications device. To live up to this vision, Nokia designed a swappable faceplate so consumers could change the color of the phone to match the clothes they were wearing, without having to buy multiple phones. The rest is history: Nokia became the world's #1 manufacturer of cell phones leaving the original inventor Motorola in the dust.

When Dell began manufacturing PCs, many companies were already producing fast, reliable, and reasonably priced machines. Rather than competing on the dimensions of processor speed, RAM size, or price, Dell made a bet on a unique sales channel. By allowing consumers to order PCs from an a la carte menu over the phone or on the web, the company put people in full control of what they were getting. A windfall of revenue followed, and Michael Dell became one of the richest men in America.

The examples above illustrate how companies can differentiate themselves from competition by focusing on a non-core benefit of their product. This post is about how this principle can be applied to a professional services business. Keep in mind that the techniques I am offering here do not replace, but compliment the core benefits you bring to the table: integrity, professional skills, and the ability to deliver on time and on budget.

Non-core Benefit #1: Promotion

Position yourself as a vehicle to deliver your clients a promotion. When talking to them, move beyond the corporate goals and ask them how the project can benefit their personal career. Learn about commitments they made to the management. Help them define what their personal success will look like and build your solution around this definition. Once you win the business, always keep that personal success in sight and continue to prove that you are on track to achieving it.

Non-core Benefit #2: Thought Leadership

Provide your clients with free ideas. As you work on the project, set aside a day to bring together your best experts, brief them on the situation the client is in, and have a brainstorming session to come up with ideas that might help the client achieve their strategic goals. Pick 1 or 2 ideas, work them into a solution, and then invite the client to a free seminar or presentation and share with them what you came up with. Naturally, you may miss the target, but if you hit the mark, guess who’ll be doing the work to implement your ideas? Either way, the client will be pleasantly surprised, and you’ll gain a reputation of a thought leader – a position that allows consultancies to charge premium rates.

Non-core Benefit #3: Manage Up

If your client has to report to their boss on the progress of the project, ask them how they communicate the status. If the vehicle is a PowerPoint deck, take the time to put together a few slides that the client can plug right into their deck without making any significant changes. If it is a written report, write up the section about your project. Make it easy, make it look good and read well, and you will draw the attention of the client’s boss and will entice the client to talk to the peers about what a wonderful vendor you are.

Non-core Benefit #4: Celebrate the Client’s Success

Throw a party for the client when the project is completed. Help the client feel that it is a true celebration of their success, but don’t go overboard. Keep things light; make jokes at your own expense; ask the client to give small awards to your team members (you buy the awards!). Put together a funny completion certificate that the client will be inclined on hang on the wall of their office. Invite the boss. Invite the peers. Have everybody in the room wish they were the client.

The Power of Opposing Forces

Every day, you get hundreds, if not thousands of chances to observe the amazing power of opposing forces. Just look up at the sky tonight and find the Moon. The centrifugal force is trying the throw it off the orbit, while the force of gravity is pulling it towards the Earth. The delicate balance of those forces is what keeps the Moon in place. If one of those forces weakens, we will either lose our satellite or witness its spectacular crash-landing in someone's back yard.

The same metaphor applies to software development. The Product Manager pushes hard to get more requirements implemented sooner. The development team pushes back on the requirements and asks for more time. I would postulate that the project is healthy when these opposing forces are in equilibrium.

The responsbility to maintain the equilibrium lies on the shoulders of both parties. While the Product Manager should obviously refrain from making wildly unrealistic asks of the development team, making too few asks will cause the project and product to lose momentum and stagnate. Too many asks, and the team will eventually burn out causing a loss of resources and product quality. On the other side of the fence, the development team can't obviously say no to every single request from the Product Manager, but they shouldn't be agreeing to everything either. Through the process of carefully evaluating the requirements against available bandwidth and timeline, the team should push back to negotiate a realistic scope and a realistic timeline for the project. A failure to do that will again lead to a burnout and a loss of quality.

The Scrum methodology provides a reliable mechanism to keep these opposing forces in check. On a Scrum project, the Product Manager is not allowed to change requirements in the middle of a sprint. The development team is expected to commit to a set of functionality they can deliver within a sprint. Keeping sprints short (2-4 weeks) allows the team to tune up their estimates from sprint to sprint, thus ensuring that the team's ability to meet the committments improves as the project progresses.

Scrum may be new for some people, and the fact that requirements won't be locked until the end of the project may be very unnerving to Product Managers (or clients) experienced in the traditional Waterfall methodology. Therefore, educating them on how the Scrum methodology works is a key factor to the success of a Scrum project.