How many times have you heard it ingrained in the sales pitch…People, Process, and Technology (PPT)…Best in Class (BIC)…wash, rinse, repeat…blah, blah, blah.

Breaking through the noise, and differentiating your value proposition in a saturated marketplace to a prospect is less about talking points you've modeled around the features and benefits of your product/service, and more about commercial solutions your product/service provides that ease your buyers pain.

Create differentiation with innovative solutions that deliver a clear and tangible business value.

Understanding your Ideal Customer

Your ideal customer may evolve over time based upon the maturity of your business, and where you want to position your business in your space. The first step to better understanding your ideal customer, is to decide how you will define them -- is it by revenue, margin, profit, or volume, lifetime value, cost of customer acquisition or average order value. Once you have decided, develop a firmographic profile using market research and real customer data, identify like pain points they experience, and then explore how your commercial value proposition provides them a solution. The next step is to build personas for each buyer using market research and real customer data including demographics, buying behavior pattern, motivations and goals. Interview your best customers to confirm that your solutions and messaging resonate with them, and will be attractive to others.

Focus on Superior Customer Experience (make it easy to do business)

Its no longer acceptable to create the best customer experience in your own industry, you have to provide the best customer experience ever. Whether is the Apple/Amazon/Chik-fil-A experience, that is what you need to strive to deliver. The experience building begins way before you know your prospect, and definitely before they engage a sales person; it extends through their conversion to customer, implementation and execution. Make them an advocate for your brand, and watch how they influence your other prospects.

Be Innovative

Digital transformation is occurring at breakneck speed. Irrespective of your industry, you will want to find and implement technology that will make your business more efficient and effective in scaling. You don't need to be on the bleeding edge, but especially with your customer interface and business analytics/intelligence, use technology to provide a better customer experience than your competitors.

Be Known as the Expert in Your Field

Your prospects are going to be far more likely to engage your organization if you build a solid reputation in your field. Become a recognized expert. When your prospects have a problem to be solved, ensure your content (articles, blogs, e-books, whitepapers, case studies) finds its way to to their eyes and ears. This means that you need to go where they are, so understand how to reach them.

Be Authentic, Transparent, and Trustworthy

Create a business model based on your values, one that reflects who you as an organization, and individuals are. Be authentic in your marketing. Especially in your social feeds, let your customers get a flavor for who you really are and what makes your team click.

Be transparent in what you do and why. This might mean having a conversation about price drivers and margin calculators, or even how you rank yourself against your closest competitors and their performance in the market. Hint: transparency is not claiming to be first in everything.

Build trust. I was recently engaged in come conversations with a team at Salesforce.com, and I was consistently amazed at how each person I was speaking with, irrespective of their role, position, division, etc. knew where my team was in the buying process, and without hesitation recommended us to counterparts in their organization rather than place their own selves on a pedestal to take credit for the sale. The first listed #SalesforceOhana core value? Trust.