Is your DSI super?  Wait…let’s step back first.  A DSI is a Dominant Selling Idea – think of it as the modern day version of the Unique Selling Proposition (USP).  Basically it’s THE big idea inside a marketing brand – it’s the selling idea that establishes you as the #1 choice within your category and specialty.  You can learn all about the DSI concept from the book “Why Johnny Can’t Brand” by Bill Schley and Carl Nichols.

When they talk about a DSI, they’re not talking about marketing fluff and being super funny or creative (although that’s not excluded from a DSI).  A DSI is about having a simple (sentence or two) way to communicate the value you bring to your customers that makes you the top of your specialty and category. 

An example of DSIs? 

There are lots of car brands…cars are the category.  A specialty within the car category is safety.  What do you think of when you’re looking for a safe car?  Volvo established their Dominant Selling Idea a long time ago as the safest car brand – they pretty much own that specialty.  Here are some others:

M&Ms – the candy that melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

Enterprise Car Rental – “We’ll pick you up”!  (They created their own specialty of rental cars not at airports).

Halls – with ‘Vapor Action’ (lots of throat lozenges, but only one with ‘vapor action’)

The beauty of an effective Dominant Selling Idea is that it automatically makes you the top choice within your selected specialty (assuming you can live up to your claim).

The Test for a Super DSI

In Why Johnny Can’t Brand, the authors go through a lot of ideas and a process to help you figure out what your DSI should be.  It’s not easy…and not every business is going to be able to legitimately have a DSI, but here’s a test to help you figure out if you’re onto something.

Is your product or business idea:

1. Superlative

Are you as good or better than everyone else within your specialty?  Can you claim #1 in something?  Best in class within your boundaries? (i.e. best pizza in Kansas City).

2. Important

Does your differentiator – your DSI – address something that’s important for decision makers? You may sell cars that have top and bottom windshield wipers…but that’s not likely to sway many decisions.

3. Believable

Is it clear why we should believe your claims?  Do you have credible and important testimonials?  Does it logically follow that you would be good at this product or service? (Think about your favorite steak restaurant offering up an enchilada…probably not believable).

4. Memorable

Does your idea stand out from the crowd?  Does it link to an emotional feeling?  What would cause me to remember your idea if I looked at a dozen similar ideas within your category or specialty?

5. Tangible

This is where the rubber meets the road.  You might have created a great idea that establishes you as a believable #1 within your specialty in a memorable way, but if you don’t actually deliver on that promise you won’t last.  To have a Super DSI, it has to actually perform (and be more than just an idea on paper).

What I really like about the concept of having a DSI is that it’s not just clever marketing and it’s not just for big national players.  Any business or idea will benefit by positioning as a Dominant Selling Idea…and any business or idea will suffer without that positioning.

Think about the last time you told some friends about a great restaurant in your area.  Maybe you said something like; “They have the best fries…you’ve got try them!”  or “I was amazed at their service, I’ve never had an experience like that before!”.  That’s potentially their DSI…something they should build around.

Now think about how your customers describe your business…would they consistently isolate on your important strength?  Are you consistently positioning yourself as #1 in a specialty?

These are tough questions and they take a lot of time and soul searching to answer honestly, but if you can figure this out you will be successful.  A valid DSI can take you to new heights in your business.

What do you think about Dominant Selling Ideas?  Are you comfortable that you know what yours is?  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by aka Kath

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One of the things we work on with our clients and business owners is developing systems for their business.  It’s critical to build a systematic approach, figuring out the best way to do something and making sure it’s done that same way consistently…regardless of who’s doing the work.  Often the easiest way to rollout that kind of systematic thinking is to develop a checklist.

I just finished reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. It’s a great read and a lot more entertaining that I thought it would be.  Gawande is a medical doctor who decided to investigate the effectiveness of Checklists and how if they could be applied to the medical profession.

My experience with doctors is that they traditionally aren’t great writers or story tellers (although to be fair, I would much rather they be great doctors first…).  Having said that, Dr. Gawande writes in a way that makes it very easy to read, telling several stories to help illustrate his points.

He begins by clarifying the difference between errors of ignorance (when we don’t know enough) and errors of ineptitude (when we don’t use what we know properly) Then he leads you through the findings of his research he accumulated while writing the book.

He started with the aviation industry and Boeing…where they have championed the idea of effective checklists for over 75 years.  It’s not by accident the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 25 Million. If there is the potential for something to happen in the air, chances are pretty good there is a checklist nearby the pilots will be able to refer to.

What his book points out is that it isn’t that people don’t know what to do. It is that it’s almost impossible to be prepared on your own…to know what to do under any circumstance without a framework to refer to. He isn’t discounting anyone’s knowledge; it is having a guideline that keeps you from missing the obvious.

If you are a fan of Van Halen, you will learn the real reason that David Lee Roth requested all the brown M & M’s be removed from their candy dishes back stage. It had nothing to do with his ego. Another great story is Walmart’s ability to respond after Katrina flooded New Orleans.  Both stories driven by the power of using checklists in creative ways.

Building a checklist doesn’t have to be overly complex – here are the 3 high level steps:

Development => Drafting => Validation

A couple of the take-a-ways on building a checklist is to keep it simple and talk in the language of the people who will be reading it. He even provides a Checklist for Checklists to help guide you through the process.  Obviously he’s a pretty methodical thinker…but he’s also an interesting guy – check out this interview he did with Stephen Colbert to get a better feel for why he’s so interested in this topic (and why it makes sense for you as well).

Could you implement some checklists?

The challenge with implementing Checklist with professionals in any industry is that you risk insulting their intelligence because they feel they already know all “the stuff”. Why do they need a list? I guess, that may be a question to ask the 155 people of Flight 1549 who landed safely on the Hudson River on Jan. 14^th, 2009.

As you start the New Year are there areas in your business where using a simple Checklist could reduce the chance for errors?  If you need some help, don’t be afraid to ask. If you already use Checklists in your business, I would love to hear some success stories – share them below.

Happy New Year!

Chris Steinlage, Kansas City Business Coach.

Photo by The U.S. Army

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In his book ‘UnMarketing’ author Scott Stratten talks about a lot of things.  He talks a lot about twitter, about the essence of what marketing is today (versus 10 or 20 years ago), about the the criticality of engagement and a lot of interesting stories and anecdotes from his personal experiences.

It’s all good stuff, but it’s the discussion and examples of developing a Pull and Stay system that really made this a worthwhile book for me.  Pull and Stay refers to creating a system (or a series of systems) that will attract the right kind of prospective buyers to you and keep you front of them in an automated way.

It’s the opposite of the Spray and Pray approach – which is exactly what most business owners do when they send out all sorts of unrequested interruptions into the marketplace and hope hard that someone sees the right message, at the right time, resonates with that message and is in a position to buy!  Not a recipe for long term success!

Here are some other highlights from the book:

The main theme of the book is that business owners need to stop trying to market and just start engaging…with their existing clients, prospective and potential partners.  Be a real person and make an effort to build real relationships…sadly that’s kind of a revolutionary message.

For starters – Scott is an engaging kind of guy! Which actually both helps to prove his point and disprove it at the same time.  He lives his message and when you read the book (or especially if you listen to the audio book – I did both) he comes across as the kind of guy you’d just enjoy hanging out with.  It would be really easy to engage with a guy like Scott and clearly that’s serving him well from a business perspective.

Unfortunately many people aren’t like Scott and don’t have the natural ability to quickly and easily build relationships and engage with people.  The concepts he uses definitely work for him, but they may not work as well for the less socially skilled business owner.

It’s all about engaging

Having said that – Scott is recommending the right approach, especially for business owners.  His central message that business owners need to stop marketing and start engaging with their audience is right in line with what Seth Godin has been saying for years:

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t”.   – Seth Godin

And although the concept of permission based marketing isn’t new, the practice isn’t that widespread.  Those who practice it are in the minority and there’s clearly a need for most business owners to understand there is a better way to reach their prospective clients…and that is to build a real relationship with them, talk to them, be authentic, be transparent and engage. 

This is the one area where small business owners have a huge advantage over their corporate counterparts.  A small business owner can easily be a real person, which is what it takes to engage.  A big company generally finds that very hard to do.

Everything is Marketing

Another key point he makes early in the book is the idea that everything you do ties back to marketing.  How your phone is answered is marketing, what your store or location looks like is marketing…the way you respond to questions or requests…also marketing. 

Basically everything that you or your employees do influences customers and potential customers either towards your business or away from it – and with that in mind you have to look at ALL of those potential touch points and optimize them to be a positive experience if you want to excel at attracting and engaging business.

Twitter and other tactics

Scott is a huge fan of Twitter and he’s learned to use it to great effect as an engagement and marketing tool for his own business.  He makes a strong case for how Twitter can work effectively and if you’re looking to learn how it can be used to help you market or engage, this is definitely the book for you.

He also does a nice job of breaking down additional tactics and ideas – especially those focused on displaying expertise and raising awareness.  These kinds of tactics are especially effective for service industry businesses, but they can work for other businesses as well.  He covers writing (blogging, articles, etc.), videos, speaking and newsletters with examples and suggestions across the board.

Overall review – give it a read!

Every business owner would get a lot of value out of UnMarketing – the section on pull and stay ideas to attract potential clients and stay in front of them is easily worth the price of admission alone.  But there’s a lot more here.  Scott covers a lot of great marketing ideas that could apply to all businesses.  And…just as important, he’s engaging and entertaining.  It’s a fun business book to read.

My complaints are fairly small – there was some wandering around in terms of ideas and how things were organized.  There was also a lot of focus on social media (and especially Twitter).  It’s there for a reason – social media is the best way to engage with people today because the tools can give you scale and capabilities you can’t get elsewhere but his message was most compelling when talking about the underlying ideas of engagement rather than the technology…not a huge complaint, just an observation.

All in all – I recommend UnMarketing.  You’ll enjoy it, you’ll learn some things and most importantly you’ll refocus on engaging with clients and potential clients.

Have you read UnMarketing?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

photo by mccun934

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Imagine a large elephant and a relatively small rider, making their way through the jungle.  Now imagine the elephant sees something they’re interested in and heads that direction…at that point, the rider is literally carried away, even if that’s not where they wanted to go!

That’s a key premise in Switch (How to change when change is hard) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  As the title suggests, this is a book about effecting change…within yourself, your family or your business and it’s full of great stories and a lot of practical ideas.

What’s the deal with the elephant and the rider?  They’re part of an analogy originally developed by Jonathan Haidt – author of The Happiness Hypothesis.  The elephant represents your emotional side and the rider is the analytical / rational part of you.  Think about it this way – it’s mid afternoon, you’re kind of hungry and you know there’s a leftover doughnut laying on a plate in the other room.  Rationally you know you don’t need to doughnut, they’re fried rings of death!  However you also know they taste great and emotionally that doughnut would make you feel really good.  For most people, the elephant is going to win that battle fairly quickly and you are going to eat that doughnut!

That’s what really cool about Switch – they give you a practical framework to not only understand why we act the way we do, but also tools that can help you do something about it.

There are actually 3 components to the framework they use to describe why people do what they do:

The Rider:

The rider is all about rational analysis, logic and the long term view of things.  Unfortunately the Rider is pretty small compared to the Elephant and wears out fairly quickly.  In other words, pure rational willpower can work…but only for a little while…eventually you’re going to get tired of fighting and end up going where the elephant wants to go!

The Elephant:

The elephant is all about emotion and the here and now, instant gratification.  It represents the subconscious part of you, which means it’s the elephant that will try to stick with habits you’ve already got in place…the elephant doesn’t like change and tends to build up a lot of momentum.  However it’s the elephant and the emotional response that also motivates you to do a lot of things that you rationally might not want to do.

The Path:

Finally, the 3rd component of the model is the path.  The path represents the environment…let’s say you really love a particular ice cream that’s only sold at your local ice cream store…in fact you’re addicted to it.  You’d like to stop eating it, but you find yourself stopping at the store every few days because the elephant loves ice cream!  Now imagine that the store closes…goes out of business.  Your habit, your addiction to the ice cream would be broken, not because the rider finally won the argument, but because the environment changed.  There was no more ice cream on the path!  Sometimes you can force a change just by switching up the environment.

Using the framework listed above, the authors then go through more than a dozen examples of how people have made important changes by focusing on different aspects of the framework.  The examples range from a technique that’s used to help people learn to develop a habit of cleaning up – the 5 minute Room Rescue (minimizing change so the elephant doesn’t get scared away) to changing the company culture at Rackspace to one of Fanatical Support (changing the environment to force personal service).

Additional examples talk about changes ranging from individual changes of habits all the way up to major changes in government policies!   But what’s really valuable is the analysis on each example that explains the approach used to make these changes and how it fits into the framework of the Rider, Elephant and Path. 

This is one of those rare business books that’s interesting and really practical in terms of teaching you a process you can use to figure out how to make the changes you need in your business (or your life).

If you’re looking for a great business book to read…or if you’ve got some things you’d like to change in your life or your business (and honestly, who doesn’t?) then you need to check out Switch!  Highly Recommended!

Have you read Switch?  What did you think?  Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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The holy grail of business is coming up with a competitive advantage that can’t be reasonably matched by your competitors.  If you can pull it off, you essentially don’t have competitors.  When you think of creating competitive advantage, you typically think of innovation, maybe technology, barriers of entry of some sort, maybe even some sort of geographic advantage (think oil fields).

However there is another way to develop a competitive advantage and although he doesn’t expressly lay it out that way, that’s what Guy Kawasaki’s latest book Enchantment (The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions) made me think about.  (Full Disclosure:  I received a free review copy of the book – thanks Guy!).

Quick – think about the coolest restaurant you’ve ever been to.  Maybe it’s an elaborately themed place in Vegas…or that hole in the wall diner where everyone knows your name and just fits you.  Or maybe it’s the place that got everything right and you walked out feeling like you had more than a meal, you had an experience.

That’s what Kawasaki means when he talks about Enchantment!  It’s about creating a genuine feeling of delight in your customers and prospective customers.

An obvious example of Enchantment is the response and feeling that Apple generates among their many fans.  Apple is used as an example a lot in the book – partly because that’s where Guy Kawasaki really got his start – as an evangelist for the Apple Macintosh, but it’s also used a lot because Apple does a great job enchanting people. 

This is a technology company who has inspired millions of fans to eagerly wait in lines to grab the latest expensive gadget (in fact the iPad 2 is already hard to find).  If that’s not a competitive advantage, then I don’t know what is.  Sure some of that stems from Apples technology and design prowess, but I would argue that most of that excitement comes from Apple living out their core values and purposely doing everything they can to enchant their target audience.  They create and delight fans!

So what’s in the book?

Overall Enchantment is an easy read – it has a lot of stories and examples and Kawasaki’s style is light but still packs a punch in terms of ideas and things you should be doing.  In fact there are a lot of ideas that business owners should pay attention to, including things like: The importance of baking a bigger pie, leveraging social proof consistently, how to use Social Media for business and how to enchant your employees (so they can enchant your customers) just to name a few.

The overall approach of the book is a ‘how-to’ manual for making your cause, your big idea, your business enchanting.  A lot of the book ties into ideas on how to Influence people (and in fact Robert Cialdini – the author of the bestselling book Influence) is referenced many times.  However it’s a practical approach – the ideas are based on psychological principles, but a lot of it is a refreshing common sense way of looking at things.

There are several prerequisites to being enchanting.  First of all you have to have a great product / service or the whole game is off (average isn’t going to enchant).  From there you need to be likable and you need to be trustworthy.  The book gives you ideas on how to build those traits into your business and how you build the other ongoing processes you need to continually charm your customers.

From there he also goes into practical examples of Push (twitter, e-mail, etc.) and Pull (blogs, websites, Facebook, etc.) marketing ideas.  At the end of the day, every company and cause is different so there’s really not a step by step, one right answer approach to building an enchanting company, but there are a lot of ideas here to get you moving in the right direction and get you thinking.

Why is this important?

Every entrepreneur dreams of thrilling their customers who get more than they expect and then feel compelled to go tell a dozen people about the cool thing they just experienced.  Unfortunately the reality is that most businesses are unremarkable at best and repulsive at worst (kind of the opposite of enchanting).

If you take some time to think about why over 50% of businesses fail within the first 5 years, a big driver is because they haven’t figured out how to be remarkable in a positive way.

The good news is that if you can start building the infrastructure that cultivates Enchantment you can quickly build a real competitive advantage that allows you to charge a premium, even if your product or service is essentially the same as your competitors.  When people really like you, when they trust you and when you deliver consistently beyond their expectations (that you carefully set)…then you’ve built something worth talking about and something that will enchant!

Want to get a better feel for where you stand with Enchanting in your business?  Here’s a link for an Enchantment Assessment.

Personal Example

We ran into a good example of Enchantment recently – the picture at the top of this post is from a recent spring break trip we took in Phoenix.  One of the highlights for the family was a balloon ride.  It was a great experience (very cool if you’ve never been up).   We really enjoyed it…not because of the balloon or the technology or even the skill of the pilot, what the family really remembered was how great the crew members were.  At every turn they went out of their way to be friendly, welcoming and to make the whole thing fun.  I don’t know if they did it on purpose, but they were using many of the principles recommended in Enchantment to make it a special trip.  Maybe all of the other balloon operators do the same thing, but if you’re in Phoenix and want a great experience, I recommend the guys from Rainbow Ryders.  They were great! 

Have you read Enchantment yet?  Could you build that into your business?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

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