I was asked recently how to successfully sell value in a commodity business.  When your product or service is virtually identical to what is available elsewhere, how do you create differentiation, preference, value and market share acceleration?

It’s not easy, but there are ways.  Here are five to start:

Service:  How well you treat your customers can make a big difference, especially if you want to be a premium-priced commodity seller.  Customers who don’t value service will always buy on price, and if you want to be the low-cost leader, that’s fine too.  But if you want to sell value with a commodity, provide excellent, remarkable service at every level and every interaction with your customers and prospects.

Trust:  What’s your reputation?  What are you known for?  Do customers trust you, and why?  Know what your customers value, and establish a tight bond between those values and the trust you create and strengthen in the way you do business, every day.

The Little Things:  There are countless ways to do little, remarkable things for your customers.  Unexpected things that make you stand out, thoughtful gestures that show you’re different, and that you care.  Real estate agents who bring new buyers a pizza or sandwiches on moving day, that’s special.  Auto dealerships that offer free car wash service for life.  Things like that can be huge for differentiation and preference, not to mention word-of-mouth for your business to new prospective customers.

A Consultative Approach to Selling:  Are you just selling the commodity, or are you providing additional value in the sale?  Are you teaching customers more about the industry they work in, the environment in which they need that commodity.  Are you helping them be more successful in the process of buying?  Provide that kind of value-added service as part of the sale, and you’re creating immediate value & differentiation.

Results:  A commodity market doesn’t necessarily mean that every option is the same, and will deliver the same results.  How are you able to transcend what you’re selling, and deliver differentiation and value in how that commodity impacts your customers?  Is the end-result better through you?  How?  And how effectively can you communicate that results-based differentiation?  Let your happy customers tell that story for you.  Use their enthusiasm and success in the market to drive preference and value.

In any business, your most effective, leveraged marketing is via your existing customers.   Of course, the best marketing is a fantastic product.  If they love what you do, they’ll naturally want more, and are more likely to tell their friends.

But even happy customers often need a nudge or reminder to do one or both of these things.  In the nonprofit world specifically, there are several easy things organizations can do to accelerate visibility, satisfaction, frequency and referrals from existing donors.  Here are a few:

Thank you notes:  Most nonprofits sent the obligatory donation receipt, usually coupled with another request for money.  That’s fine, but what if you separated the two?  What if the thank you note was hand-written – by a member of the staff, or even by someone who was personally & directly impacted by the donation?  Imagine what impact that would have.  Not at all unreasonable to ask everyone on staff to spend just 10-15 minutes a day writing thank-you notes to donors. 

Success stories:  Donors may like your organization or cause, but they’d really like to hear what you’ve specifically done with the money.  Where did it go?  What effort did it support?  Whose life did it help change?  You can tell that story in your thank you note, or it could come directly from a recipient of that support from your organization.  What if, for example, a recipient of your support recorded a quick thank you video explaining what they received and what impact it had.  That video would be on your Web site, in newsletters, shared via your social media channels, etc.

Facebook fan pages:  Most nonprofits have these by now.  But how are you using it?  What information are you sharing?  Too often, these pages feature information about new donor campaigns, upcoming events, and other operational and donation-specific detail.  Interesting, but not nearly as powerful and actionable as examples of your work in the field.  Stories of success.  Focusing on the impact and end-result of the organization’s efforts.  It’s this information that motivates others, encourages your current donors to involve their friends in a cause that’s delivering results.

Sponsor for the year:  Assign each donor to a specific program, or funding recipient, or whatever makes sense for your organization and cause.  Throughout the year, send updates on progress.  What’s happening in their lives, how it’s being affected month to month by the organization’s work and the donor’s specific participation.  Help your donors feel like they have a relationship not just with you, but with the people they’re impacting. 

Sharing with their communities:  You’d think that people would automatically share what they’re passionate about with others.  But unless prompted, most people don’t do it.  It’s not that they don’t want to – they’re just incredibly busy with everything else in their lives.  After sharing the above information and inspiration with your current donors, encourage them to spread the word.  Give them link and pre-written content for various sharing channels – Facebook, Twitter, email.  Make it one-click easy for them to engage their community and share their passion, energy and satisfaction for what you’re doing to help others.

You can’t control your prospect’s budget.  You can’t control their recent reorg.  You can’t control what your competitor is going to say, or do, or offer.

You can’t control the economy, or the weather, or your prospect’s busy schedule.

But you can control how many prospects you talk to.  You can control how well you address their specific needs and pain points in the presentation.  You can control the timing, the frequency, the efficacy of your communication with prospects.

You can’t control the timeline your buyers follow, but you can control the sense of urgency and scarcity communicated to that same prospect.

You can control your sales process, and how well you set expectations and committed next steps both for yourself and from your customers.

Whether you’re in a marketing or a sales role, there’s plenty you can’t control.  Don’t fall into the trap of using those things as an excuse or crutch.   Focus on what you can control, and manage those opportunities actively to get the results you want.

How do you prove something that hasn't happened yet?

That's the challenge facing innovative ideas inside many companies.  Innovation, by definition, is a leap into the unknown.  But for organizations that increasingly look to past history/results and data to determine future steps, quantifying the likely success and/or risk with an innovative idea can be tricky.

Or, as Roger Martin and Jennifer Riel put it in their recent Business Week column, "Innovation is killed with the two deadlies words in business: Prove it."

They continue:

"We use existing information to understand the issue at play.  But for breakthroughs, there is no rule or pool of past data to provide certainty.  So when a CEO demands evidence that an idea will succeed, he is driving innovation away."

Martin and Reil ultimately recommend innovators use pieces of past history, results, research and logic to stitch together a case for innovation based not on direct past evidence, but clues to a likely outcome.  They call it abductive logic, the logic of what could be.  It's still a leap, but for organizations dedicated to innovation, it's necessary.  The full Business Week column is worth a read, but their parting shot is particularly good:

"Asking what could be true - and jumping into the unknown - is critical to innovation.  Nurturing the ideas that result, rather than killing them, can be the tricky part.  But once a company clears this hurdle, it can leverage its efforts to produce the proof that leaders depend on to make commitments - and turn the future into fact."

I’m constantly blown away by the brilliant, innovative ideas around us.  It’s a shame that so very few of those ideas see the light of day.

Brilliant people with innovative ideas are everywhere, but most of their ideas get caught in one of three traps:

Fear/Risk:  Innovative ideas are inherently risky.  They buck trends, go against the status quo.  The risk of failure is quite high.  It’s why most people keep their day jobs and merely dream about their ideas vs. taking action on them.  Oftentimes this is born out of income risk.  I can’t quit my day job to give this a shot – if it fails, my income and family suffers.  Or it could be the risk of ruining your reputation.  Try something innovative at work, and if it fails that may damage your success record.  Or your promotion.  Or raise. This is why so many great ideas, innovations and start-ups are born in a recession.  Individuals with great ideas lose their secure jobs, so the risk of starting or trying something totally different goes down significantly. 

Rejection:  Because innovative ideas aren't what people expect, they get rejected easily.  If you raise an innovative idea in a big company, it's likely to get squashed.  If you run a new idea by someone who's embedded in the status quo, they won't understand what you're saying.  Worse, they'll tell you it will never work.  Innovators get rejected - a lot - but for many would-be innovators, that rejection is too much to overcome.  Either they can't move forward in their existing organization, or become convinced that the nay-sayers are right.  That's a travesty.

Bandwidth:  Who has time for new ideas anyway?  You woke up this morning with too much to do as it is - current projects, current deadlines, current initiatives.  We then go home to family, kids, chores and a thousand things pulling at our time.  Innovations usually start in someone's spare time, but finding that time can itself be a significant challenge.  If you get laid off, and suddenly have a plethora of time, the bandwidth limiter is eliminated.  But for the rest of us, finding time to triage and pursue our new ideas can often ben an insurmountable challenge.

For every entrepeneur, no matter how confident or determined, these hurdles exist.  For the majority of individuals with great ideas, these hurdles can in fact be crippling.

But there are equal but opposite attributes that successful innovators have that anyone can learn and/or adopt.  These include courage, tenacity, passion, organization and thick skin.  But perhaps most important is conviction.  Conviction that you're onto something, that you're right, conviction that it doesn’t matter if others can't see it, if it's risky, or if it takes a few extra hours in the evening and weekends to tinker with it.

There are innovators within all of us.  Everyone has these amazing ideas - be they recurring or fleeting - that can create massive change, efficiency and betterment in the world around us - at a micro and macro level, and everywhere in between. 

Perhaps part of the solution isn't to convert innovators into entrepreneurs, but to create a better channel of innovative ideas into the hands of those with the time, courage and tenacity to make them happen.  Make the idea exchange easy, but with all the right attribution and financial rewards available to the originator.

Your neighbor has an idea that could change the world, but isn't doing anything about it.  How do we change that?