What is marketing? First, it’s about understanding deeply the needs and wants of your customers and providing them with greater value. You must clearly identify the demand in the marketplace. At a minimum, most businesses can improve significantly in this area. However, the real power and leverage of marketing comes from the next level of influence, communicating convincingly your unique and superior value proposition.

Marketing is about communicating with and educating your customers, prospects, and referral sources why it’s in their best interest to do business with your company. It is about educating the right target audience on the unique and superior advantages, benefits, value, and results you can provide and sharing the credible evidence/reasons that support and back-up such promises. In short, marketing is about educating your target market on the advantages of doing business with you and the reasons why they should trust you to deliver on your promises.

Instead of impacting one prospect at a time (i.e. direct selling), marketing allows you to communicate with, educate, and influence many buyers at once. In a sense, marketing is a one-to-many selling system. Marketing allows you to target and influence large groups of customers, prospects, alliances, referral sources, reporters, etc. in a single action.

Bottom line, to be successful at winning new customers/clients, you need to be perceived as being different, special, better. You cannot afford to be viewed as a commodity. Commodity companies are paid commodity prices/fees. There is tremendous power and profits in being perceived as unique, different, better.

Spend time researching and establishing your company’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP). What is your most powerful, compelling benefit/advantage? What is the big, overt advantage of your product/service? Why do customers continue to do business with you? What major frustrations do you remove from their lives? Once you define your USP, broadcast it like mad in your sales presentations, in your brochures, in your direct mail, on your website, in your telephone answering methods, in your advertisements, in your news releases, etc.

Do not let your USP simply be “quality, service, and price”. This says nothing different and has no emotional power. It sounds trite and comes across as “blah, blah, blah” to your prospective customers. Instead, clearly delineate your differences and performance guarantees. Instead of being a mere marketing consultant, be a marketing partner that guarantees revenue results (pay-for-performance) or the client doesn’t pay. Now that is different and understandable. FedEx’s earlier USP was “when it positively, absolutely needs to be there overnight”.

After interacting with business owners over the years, we have learned with absolute clarity that your goal as a business owner should be to design a company that is distinct from you and quite candidly, works in your absence. You should create a separate cash flow entity, not merely a job for yourself. It should pay you a healthy salary plus a return on your investment of money, time and effort. You should build equity! You should build wealth! Bottom line, your role should be to shape, manage and grow this independent and enduring asset – your business.

Your enterprise should function without you, not because of you. I know this sounds bizarre, but hear me out. While you can be the brains behind the enterprise, you should not be like Hercules trying to hold up the entire weight of the company! You will be crushed!

Your business should work harder so you don’t have to. You should be able to make money every day without having to work every day. You should invest more brain equity and leadership equity and much less sweat equity into your company. Your business should be a product of your brain, not your brawn.

You should strive to build a business that does not enslave you and does not rely on your being present every minute of every day doing all the thinking, deciding, worrying, and working. You must adopt a new way of thinking and acting.