By Jamie Turner with The 60 Second Marketer

In this article, you will learn: 20 questions you should ask in order to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

One of the most important things you can do as a company is to figure out what makes you different from your competitors. By drilling down deep and asking yourself these 20 questions, you can help define what makes you different and why that would be important to your customers.

1. What are we at present?

2. What do we want to become in two to five years?

3. What is our greatest opportunity in the next two years?

4. Why is that such a great opportunity?

5. What would we need beyond our company’s current strengths/positioning/products to seize the opportunity described above?

6. What is our greatest threat?

7. Are these threats that we can control? If so, what should we do to control them?

8. What do we do better than anybody else?

9. When we win, why do we win?

10. How does our customer benefit from what we sell?

11. What are the top three reasons customers have bought our products or services?

12. What are the typical objections to a sale? In other words, when we don’t gain a new customer, what is the reason given?

13. What percentage of next year’s revenue is expected from new vs. existing customers?

14. Going forward, what are the essential attributes of our target customer? (Industry segment, size of organisation/corporation, demographics, job position, motivators, internal and external influencers, buying habits, key message points, factors in buying decisions, associations, publications, trade shows.)

15. Who are our key competitors?

16. What type of work do we most enjoy?

17. Who is our competition targeting?

18. How do we wish to be viewed in relation to our competition?

19. What is the typical sales cycle?

20. What values, personality, and attitude do we want to project?

To do this properly, you should grab your seven top executives for a “10 to 2″ meeting (a meeting that runs from 10am through to 2pm and includes a lunch). You’ll be surprised at the amount of healthy debate a meeting like this can uncover.

Remember, success in business isn’t just about strategy, it’s about execution. You can talk about differentiators all you want, but if you don’t put your findings into action, you’ll have wasted your time.
Good luck!
Jamie Turner lives in Atlanta, Georgia and helps run The 60 Second Marketer. He has spent more than 25 years helping corporations such as AT&T, Cartoon Network, CNN, Motorola and The Coca-Cola Company grow their sales and revenue.