How to Compete on Content
By Christopher Willis
StrategyThe Company realized that our "industry focus" differentiator was in fact a time savings for the customer IT shop, rather than a solution value for the financial services sales reps using the product. Designing an application specifically for an industry makes the time to implementation shorter, but the end result is not something a competitor couldn't claim as well.
Marketing and the Company's leadership team set out to speak with customers, partners, and our own sales team to find and document unique value. We discovered that the key to finding differentiation was to shift the Company's focus to the end user of our solution. We learned more about the customer's environment, their various lines of business, and then asked ourselves how to enhance the productivity of the financial services sales rep, already driven by real time pressure and now overtaxed with layoffs amid the sub-prime debacle.
Next the Company took an inventory of our advantages in features, services, and partnerships to define productivity value to end users that was defensible over the long term versus our competitors. The Company had true subject matter expertise, and we were accepted members of the financial services industry. Unlike horizontal technology competitors, the Company had, over the years, built strong relationships with complementary financial information providers. We saw that our ability to effectively integrate, and partner with, third party financial analysis content providers gave our customer's sales reps the right data from the right source to make trade and call decisions in real time.
