Differentiating in Professional Services

Are you having a hard time writing a tagline?  I’m a BIG fan of taglines, because they give you an extra few words to describe your company and what you do.  But if you read the taglines of many professional service firms, they begin to all sound alike:

• We believe in quality (or service or honesty)
• Your trusted advisor
• Your one-stop stop
• When experience counts

When you’re boiling down your entire company’s experience, it IS truly hard to pick just 3-5 words.  Believe me.  The trick is to pick the one thing that matters most to your company and try to distill it down to it’s essence.  Do you provide – Speed? Convenience?  Security?  Safety?  Start with ONE word that best defines you, and build from there. Then to support your tagline, you need to build out your marketing story.  Tell HOW your tagline defines your differentiation.  If your “people make the difference” tell me how! Is it because they’re smart?  Do you have a story that showcases how smart they are?  Do you have a testimonial or case study where someone else will tell me how smart they are? Do they all have Ph.D.s from highly-regarded universities?  Give your buyers proof. When we’re buyers of professional services, we know there’s a difference between companies.  That’s why some hairdressers, dentists, doctors and accountants are backed up for months, and others take walk-in appointments.  When we’re sellers of professional services, we need to be able to articulate how we’re different than our competitors - and that begins with HAVING a difference.   If you don’t have a way to differentiate and dominate, you’ll be stuck competing on price.  And that’s a problem, because there’s always someone willing to lower their prices, and go out of business faster than you. 

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