In this Issue

♟️    Underserved Markets
🏦    Capital Investments
👑    Visible Ownership

♟️  Underserved Markets

No one ever said business has to be fair. Every company is trying to find a strategy or competitive advantage to win.

When I look at my client successes over the past twenty years, there is a winning formula for a growth strategy:

1. Focus on an Underserved Market: Don’t compete head on. Grow your business in a well-defined niche that is marginally served by the market leaders.
2. Capital Investments to Scale: There is a belief that sales and marketing drive growth. That’s not true. Growth is driven by capital investments to serve and defend your niche.
3. Visibly Own the Niche: Brand positioning is not a strategy or an aspiration, it is the deliberate actions taken to assert the brand to “visibly own” the niche. The measure of success is the only way to compete with your business is to buy you.

Advanced sales and marketing systems — like you see in SaaS companies — is a sign that a company may have a positioning problem.

Here’s the thing: sales should be easy.

When your customers know your brand, like it, and trust it, they will seek your company out and choose it first. You will create organic demand, and the only challenge will be ramping up production to meet it.

To drive growth, the first step is to define and validate your growth markets: Who and where are the customers that will drive your next stage of growth?

This requires a Sales-First Strategy. As you identify potential niches in your market — either through product superiority, business capabilities, or industry expertise — prove it works.

Your customers will tell you what they want to buy. If you can’t sell it, don’t market or invest in it. Continue iterating until you find and validate a niche where you can achieve a dominant position with growth potential.

One Stat to Watch

42%

42% of small businesses experienced failure because there was no real market need for their product or service, according to CB Insights.

🏦  Capital Investments

As you validate your markets, double down on them. Once again, sales doesn’t drive growth. It serves it.

The 3 Ts of sales performance validate this concept:

• Territory: The market demand for your products and services.
• Timing: The market conditions and whether they’re growing, stable, or declining.
• Talent: Working with great salespeople creates traction, while working with weak talent is like driving on bald tires.

Sales performance is driven in that order. The number one indicator of sales performance is Territory, or market demand.

You can put a weak salesperson in a great territory, and they will be successful. But put a great salesperson in a terrible territory, and they will fail.

For business growth, the primary driver is capital investments.

You create scale by investing in the operational capacity of your business:

1. To better serve the unique needs of your customers while defending your niche.
2. To scale the capacity of your business to reach more customers to meet the market demand.

At Sticky Branding, we have several case studies of companies that have grown from $10 million to $30 million in sales within five to eight years without adding any additional salespeople. 

They grew by investing in ERP systems, inventory, capital equipment, implementing Lean and Six Sigma, and operational capacity to serve latent market demand.

When the market is there, invest in it to grow.

👑  Visible Ownership

If you don’t blow your own horn, nobody will.

One of the biggest shifts in my understanding of “Sticky Branding” and growing “Sticky Brands” is the true power of positioning.

Brand positioning is not a marketing or communications exercise. Positioning is the deliberate actions taken to assert the brand to “visibly own” the niche.

You will know it's working when both customers and competitors recognize your business as the market leader. The Holy Grail of this is that you become so dominant that the only way to compete with your business is to buy it.

This is becoming my new definition and aspiration for Sticky Branding.

To achieve niche dominance is anchored on three ingredients:

1. Customer Intimacy
2. Product / Service Superiority
3. Brand Visibility

When you get these ingredients just right, your business grows so well that it delights customers while driving away competitors.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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