Time to Stand Out!
I have just finished reading a new book Collapse of Distinction by Scott McKain. I think this is a valuable and practical read for those of you in Small Business or in Church Ministry.
Distinction for Small Business
Scott does an excellent job communicating his Four Cornerstones of Distinction. After exploring why distinction is vital to competitive success, McKain dedicates a chapter to each cornerstone and fleshes out it’s distinctive role.
For the small business owner, one of the core concepts that struck me was the challenge he throws out to examine “what happens when customers are in contact with you“? This takes you into a practical personal analysis of how you and your business interact with your customers.
“Every point of contact with your customer provides an opportunity for distinction” – page 119
This of course sounds so simplistic but most organizations rarely take time to do this assessment. The benefit is to step back for a minute from the day to day busyness and look at all the ways you and your customers interact and try pick a point or two where you can develop differentiation. He motivates the reader with some engaging case studies that show companies succeeding because they have applied this distinction principle with excellence. This will motivate you to do the same for your organization!
Distinction for Churches
Recently I have been defining marketing for my readers here at Marketing Integrity and one of the simple definitions for marketing is “telling your story”. Chapter seven builds out the Cornerstone of Communication where Scott challenges:
“You must customize your story to fit the audience segment you are attempting to attract“. – page 176
This is great marketing! Though not written to churches, the concepts can quite easily be extrapolated by church leaders to help their churches more effectively connect with their communities. Churches (in my opinion) have the best story (and message) on the planet to tell. So, you can learn about good story telling techniques from this chapter!
Customer Experience Focus – not Value-Added Selling
I have to share this…I loved the entire book but I was personally most pleasantly surprised with Chapter 8 – The Fourth Cornerstone: Customer Experience Focus. Why this chapter resonated with me is that in December I was given an assignment to read a book on Value-Added Selling – a book that was written in 1989 and that just agitated me from beginning to end. There was so much I disagreed with in that book – but I was having a hard time articulating to people what the appropriate alternative was to that author’s approach to “sales”. As I read Scott McKain’s “Ultimate Customer Experience“(TM) my heart leapt…Yes! This is it! This guy gets it! The answer is embedded in strategic differentiation not value-added manipulation.
Stand Out and Move Up
So, I would encourage you to invest in this resource. You will learn a lot that you can apply to your organization that will provide a solid competitive edge. Every organization, whether business or church, can benefit from laying these cornerstones so that your foundation is stronger and the impact of your product(s) or service(s) is more far reaching.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book under the Thomas Nelson Book Review Bloggers program. The terms require an honest review of the content and I have writtern this review with integrity and transparency.
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