How Can You Differentiate Your Firm?

As a professional service provider, how can you differentiate yourself from competitors who offer similar services to you?

Differentiating yourself from the numerous other providers that offer similar to identical services as you can be quite challenging. As an attorney, you can’t prove that you write better briefs, or as an accountant, you can’t claim you do better audits. Those claims would be virtually impossible to prove!

Common Differentiating Factors Firms Try To Use

Often, firms resort to the standard “we offer superior service” or “our firm has been in business for 75 years” but with everyone saying something along those lines, your statement doesn’t do much to separate you from the pack.

Others stress that they are technically superior, but many firms are catching up quickly. A recent book by Harvard professor, Nicholas Carr entitled Does IT Matter? recently addressed the question whether IT can deliver a sustained competitive advantage. A growing number of people think that IT is simply a framework. It’s your business processes that deliver the sustained advantage.

Focusing on your services such as bundling offerings together or adding freebies to increase value can drive prices down and make freebies the expected not the exception.

How To Differentiate Yourself Meaningfully

So how do you differentiate yourself? The answer is to focus on your core characteristics. No one is exactly like you, meaning no one has your unique set of characteristics, knowledge, and expertise. Your personal experiences and problem solving skills are the key to adding value to your customer experiences.

Now I don’t mean marketing yourself as the #1 attorney or accountant or realtor in your area. Don’t plaster your picture on your advertisements and only talk about how great you are. That’s not going to do you any good.

What will differentiate you, however, is how well you can apply your knowledge to help out your prospects and clients. How can you become more than their vendor – to partner with them and genuinely help them grow their business? Your own creativity and problem solving can lead to greater value by helping them solve their own challenging business issues. That’s what will create value.

In fact, a Legal Week article cites a study of in-house counsel in FTSE 100 companies:

From a list of 12 different service criteria, ‘understanding the client’s legal requirements in a commercial context’ came out as the most important. It was more important than ‘responsiveness’, ‘depth and breadth of expertise’ or even ‘price/ value for money’. It may have topped the importance ratings but when firms’ performance was measured, far from being in the top spot, it was only seventh equal.

“If you take the basic legal advice as read, then [the lawyer] needs to demonstrate greater commercial understanding of your business and where and how they can add value,” said one in-house counsel.

This finding isn’t unique to law firms but has been found consistently throughout all industries – clients want to work with business partners that can help them with their business. How can you, personally, add value to your client’s business?

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