15 Ways to Position Yourself
May 8, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under Business
Today’s guest article is from Jay Abraham, Author of The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business From Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times. Jay offers some outstanding insight into how to help you stick out as a manager, a leader, and as an individual. You can use these tips in your life, your work, and your business. I hope you find them helpful!
Marketing is further discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, but right now I’ll share with you fifteen points that I developed with my friend and partner, the brilliant Internet marketer Rich Schefren. * These points are personality building blocks that will help you position yourself, your company, and/or your product as a preeminent persona in your marketplace – poised to stand head and shoulders above the competition. Think of them as grist for the mill.
1. Attach the suffix “In your service” to everything you do for your clients. You are their trusted advisor for life.
2. Don’t be afraid to say what your competition won’t. In any transaction, tell your client, “Here’s what you’re not being told.”
3. Don’t hesitate to extol your own achievements and value — but do it in the context of the benefit it brings to the client. Practice at it, do it with humility and humanity, and make it heartfelt and graceful, not overbearing.
4. List your flaws. Your clients are human, and so are you. So acknowledge it. Doing so makes you real and honest in their eyes.
5. Cultivate the habit of looking at each relationship as a long-term investment you’re making in the marketplace. It’s not a one night stand. It’s a total attitude shift.
6. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and play to the former. The task is simple, but most people don’t do it; they get caught up trying to improve their weaknesses. No leverage there.
7. Control your risk. But always point out the overlooked risks and dangers your marketplace is exposed to, and help your clients reduce or eliminate them.
8. Use as much research and data as you can to make your point, prove your advantage, and demonstrate your performance. Just be sure to summarize, compare, interpret, and analyze this information so that people can appreciate and act on it.
9. Challenge status quo thinking with a sharper, fresher perspective, a better strategy, or a clearer game plan for your market to follow.
10. Continually add to your brand equity by doing more, caring more, contributing more.
11. Form alliances and advisory boards. (We’ll talk about nurturing strategic relationships in Chapter 10.)
12. Use endorsements and testimonials properly and often. You can garner these from buyers, community influences, and press articles.
13. Hire the best. Pay them richly. But pay them mostly on performance.
14. If you’re invisible, you can’t become the go-to source. Make yourself, your product, or your company known. Do it impactfully. Do it with the right people. Make the impact worth the effort.
15. Learn to project the image of true success — long before you’ve fully achieved it. It’s only a matter of time before it will occur.
These fifteen points serve as the ideal reminder that you have to view changes in the granular sense. “Change” — that all-encompassing, poetic, sweeping notion — is not going to cut it. You need tangible, actionable steps to follow. So instead of focusing on change, focus on changes.
An added benefit of changes (in the plural) is that they will increase your business’s success with speed and efficacy. As an analogy, let’s say you decide to improve the performance of your car by adding a turbo charger and changing the wheels, which you assume will give you more power and more speed, respectively. In actuality, however, the combined benefit of both improvements would be exponential, because faster tires combined with more power equals even more speed. Implementing multiple enhancements is how I’ve helped businesses achieve such great results so rapidly.
*I drew heavily from Rick’s material in the writing of this book, and I want to acknowledge him for the original research he performed, the outstanding analysis he developed, and the writing that developed from all of his hard work.
The above is an excerpt from the book The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business From Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times by Jay Abraham. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy. Copyright © 2009 Jay Abraham, author of The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business From Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times
About the author: Jay Abraham, author of The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business From Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times, is founder and CEO of Abraham Group, Inc., in Los Angeles, California and has spent the last twenty-five years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom lines for over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries worldwide. Jay has won high praise as a marketing genius in USA Today, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, OTC Stock Journal, National Underwriter, Entrepreneur, Success, Inc., and many other publications. Jay’s clients range from business royalty to small business owners, many of whom acknowledge that his efforts and ideas have led to an increase in profits ranging into the millions of dollars. He lives in Los Angeles. You can learn more about Jay Abraham at http://www.abraham.com
Great article and solid advice, Phil.
But, I have to say this is sooo not what I was expecting based on the article’s title. :)
Thanks Mark! You go ahead and write the article you were thinking of. It fits better with your audience than mine :)
Great piece! Here one little tidbit regarding e-mails … Every communications from a manager to an employee is a opportunity to install optimism.
The same can be used with clients.
Regarding #9 “Challenge status quo thinking” – This can be perceived as ‘rocking the boat’ and in some organizations this is not acceptable and actually discouraged among their employees. It is my belief that those organizations who discourage out-of-the-box thinking are also ‘command and control’ top-down type of organizations.