Keys to Success

So I want to give you a couple of keys to success,

First of all: you must be based in reality, sometimes entrepreneurs get a lot crazy and I don’t mind at your aspirations, I don’t mind that your positioning strategy is kinda where you wanna be, but you can’t be so far away from where you wanna be that’s untrue. I give you an example here, let’s say that your positioned in the high-end of the market, but you have a ton of service issues. That’s not gonna actually play well, the customers, as soon as they find that out, and work gets out, your positioning strategy is blown.

The other thing is, let’s say that your are a high-end in software solutions perhaps, but you really have one piece of the solution, again, customers are gonna find that out real quick. So make sure you that can be based in reality, and be a little bit aspirational as well, be clear and definitive, that is so important for the overall strategy, the costumer has to get your positioning strategy like that. You might have 5, 10, or 50 seconds to communicate it and that’s it. So make sure you are clear, and they can be clear as well.

Be trust to your product, don’t try to be something that the market says that you should be, or your investors are saying that you should be, make sure that you trust to the product that you created and position that, I want to make sure that you find your own niche and positioning, sure you wanna look at competition positioning, and other types of variables as well, but find your own niche, that’s what’s really gonna resonate with your customers at the end of the day. Also, be consistent, I think that’s really important to be consistent in all of your messaging, and don’t try to be everything to everyone, this is an entrepreneur problem over and over again.

Don’t position that so “Everybody can but my product, everybody is gonna love me, in fact, the more narrow you are, without being too narrow, but the more narrow you are in fact you are gonna identify with your costumers a lot more because they’re gonna know what you stand for. So, why don’t leave with a little story of positioning going wrong? and that company is unfortunately Sears, they were one of the largest retailers for 90 years, and then all of a sudden in 1991 Wallmart took over, and they became the number 1 retailer. Form there Sears struggle, they used to represent reliability and value in products. Their brands like Kenmore appliances and Craftsman tools, which I grew up with DieHard batteries.

They were considered the best at a good price, quality at a low price was their positioning for 90 years and the American public, they bought it and it worked but then all of a sudden they ran into this problem with Walmart, and they said let’s reposition. So it’s ears decided to do in order to compete with Walmart. What do they do? They went into soft goods? So in addition to all the their hard goods that they had they went and sold apparel and other types of merchandise in the soft goods area including buying Lands End buying Kmart. Unfortunately, the whole strategy didn’t work. The American Consumer was confused at what steers really represented.

They didn’t stand out any more customers were confused and guess what they stop going. And today Sears is on the serious Decline and probably I would predict isn’t going to be around in the future.