• Her test for a real differentiator: few or no competitors can claim it, it matters to the market, it is provable, and it fits in three to five words
• Why the answer is never found in a conference room — the interview and survey research that actually surfaces a differentiator your market will pay for
• A commoditized-industry example where the differentiator was built in 90 days and took competitors two years to copy
• Why a real differentiator has to make some part of the market uncomfortable — if it offends no one, it separates no one
• Undifferentiated firms are not just harder to sell, they are more expensive to market every month — Lori's data puts the penalty at roughly 4x customer acquisition cost
• Most founders are too close to their own firm to name the gap the market will pay for
• Differentiation is not a one-time exercise — treating it that way is why it erodes, and how to know your next three or four moves before a competitor catches up

Jeff Klaumann: Hey everybody, welcome to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. I’m Jeff Klaumann, I’m the president of Collective 54, and I’m your host. If you’re new to the show, here’s what we’re all about — helping you do three things: make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. Everything we record is built exclusively for boutique professional services firms. So if you’re in the expertise business, if you market, sell, and deliver expertise, this show is for you.

We have a great topic today, and it starts with a question most of us think we already answered. Ask a founder what makes their firm different, and a lot will land in the same place — our people, our service, the way we take care of our clients. My guest today stands in front of rooms of CEOs for a living, and she says at least half of those rooms say exactly that, which means it separates none of them. Her read is that the pro-serve industry is one of the worst offenders.

Nobody listening to the show needs convincing that differentiation matters to compete in the market. The problem is that most cannot name how they are truly differentiated, and the ones that do are often naming the same differentiation as their competitors. And here’s the part that should get your attention: she says the gap does not just leave you undifferentiated — you are paying for it every month, because the message that does not do the work leaves the budget to do it instead. And that’s our show.

To help us work through this, I have Lori Turner-Wilson with me. Lori is the founder and CEO of Red Rover Marketing. She started Red Rover in 2006, and she wrote the book The B2B Marketing Revolution. She’s a Collective 54 member, and we’ve had her on the show before. I have a great respect for Lori, and she does not deal in soft answers — which is exactly why we have her on the show today. So, Lori, I’ve given you a high-level overview. Welcome back. Why don’t you take a moment to tell people about what Red Rover does and the problem that your clients hire you to solve?

Lori Turner-Wilson: Hi, Jeff, so glad to be here, glad to be back. We are at Red Rover a national B2B marketing agency, and we’re one of the only in the U.S. to offer a true ROI guarantee to our clients — closed business guaranteed. I built the firm around the guarantee. It was out of frustration that when I was on the client side in the Fortune 500 world, I couldn’t find agencies that wanted to have any skin in the game. So I built what I couldn’t find, with the goal of solving today’s exact problem: how do you make a promise a stranger will believe before they’ve ever worked with you? That’s a huge component of delivering predictable, guaranteed marketing outcomes.

I’ve worked with more than 300 companies over 20 years — a lot of them professional services firms — and so this concept today comes from pattern, not from theory.

Jeff Klaumann: Fantastic. Well, Lori, you wrote a piece for our Insights newsletter called The Fireflies and the Floodlights, and that’s the piece that got me to reach out and say, hey, this is really interesting. Before we dive into differentiation, why don’t you tell us a little bit about that story and what it means to you?

Lori Turner-Wilson: It was a pretty remarkable moment for me, actually. We moved to the Gatlinburg, Tennessee area — the Smoky Mountains — a couple of years ago, and about a year in, we heard the story of the synchronous fireflies in our area. We’re one of just 5 or 6 places in the U.S. that has a week or two a year when the fireflies in certain regions will blink together, all at the same time, in sync.

It’s supposed to be a pretty magical experience, so we headed out to Roaring Fork, which is this beautiful trail through the national park. We went after dark, stayed a long time, and we saw ordinary fireflies blinking here or there all over the place. Eventually everybody was giving up and going home, and we ended up being the very last ones we could see in the park — the only headlights that still existed. We finally decided maybe we should head out, but on the way out, we made a couple of stops. The last stop was near this old cabin, an old homestead that’s still standing, near water. We could hear the water but couldn’t see it, and we know that the fireflies are attracted to the water, so we were hoping to get lucky there. We ended up turning off the vehicle, turning the lights off, getting out, and standing outside for what was a pretty ridiculous period of time to most reasonable people, because we were determined to have this experience.

And right when we had almost given up — we were whispering about giving up — the whole sky lit up in unison. It was thousands of fireflies blinking together. Everybody else had given up, but we stayed and had one of the most magical experiences I have ever had. I thought about that moment for days.

It occurred to me that there was a lesson in it, and the lesson is that fireflies all flashing on the same beat are gorgeous in the forest, but from a marketing perspective, it’s the kiss of death. It’s exactly what most firms do with their point of view. They blink in sync, so no one picks them out of the crowd — because they don’t want to alienate anyone — and then they wonder why no one picks them out of the crowd.

Your unique point of view is just one form of differentiation. And like you said, I speak to more than 40 CEO groups a year, and they all know differentiation matters, but the lion’s share of them are not well differentiated at all. When I ask them why, I usually get some version of: it’s the fear of turning people off. What if we aren’t everything to everyone? It’s not knowing how to find their unique POV or their differentiator. Or often, they just haven’t slowed down enough — turned the lights out, stood in the darkness — to figure out what it is. And so I hope we can talk through some of that today.

Jeff Klaumann: Yeah, that’s fantastic. It had to be a magical experience, and you’re so incredibly spot-on as it relates to the marketplace. So, let’s say a founder agrees they genuinely cannot name what makes their firm different. Where does a real differentiator and a real point of view come from? Who inside the firm does the work, and how long does that take before it can truly be usable?

Lori Turner-Wilson: Well, let’s start with what it is — at least how I define it. Here’s my bar for differentiation, or a unique point of view. Few competitors can claim it, ideally none. It’s got to be bold, it’s got to be important to your market — and you don’t know that unless you ask your market. It has to break through the noise, and it has to be easily provable. Ideally in 3 to 5 words, you can say it and they instantaneously understand. Red Rover’s differentiation: ROI Guaranteed. Two words. Very easy to understand, very easy to prove — we back it with the guarantee. And it’s that last one, easily provable, that really trips up most companies.

But when it comes to developing a differentiator, you really need some outside support. I don’t think you can sit around a board table with your leadership team and brainstorm adjectives to describe your company and come up with the right gap in the market you could be filling — that underserved space that could be such a powerful form of distinction. Because as founders especially, and really anyone in leadership, we are wonderfully biased and beautifully subjective. And that’s the kiss of death when it comes to finding that unmet need in the market, finding that space that’s actually ownable by you.

The openings come from objective third-party research into what those customer needs are. There are two ways to do this: interviews and surveys — and I think you need both. Interviews are the qualitative side of the research, surveys are the quantitative side. You take what you learn from a dozen or so interviews with current, past, and prospective customers, and then you validate or invalidate that against the larger market in the form of a market study or market survey. That is the only way you will find these gaps and know definitively that the data supports it, that the market supports it, and you have a high probability of performance when you invest in that particular point of differentiation. It’s almost always hiding in the research, but we skip that step and go straight to solving before we know what we’re solving for.

Jeff Klaumann: Very well said, and I also think you’re just too close to it. As a founder, you have your own lens, when what you really need is the voice of the market, the voice of your clients. Until you really capture that, you have a hole in your approach, so you’re dead on.

One of the things you’ve brought up is that this isn’t a branding problem — it’s really a cost problem. That’s a line that’ll get any founder’s attention faster than anything else. So, how does a firm without a real differentiator end up paying more for its marketing?

Lori Turner-Wilson: This will probably seem logical, but I want to talk about what it actually means. A lack of differentiation comes at a far higher cost to acquire a customer. When you look at everything you spend on sales and marketing to bring in a new customer, what is that actual cost? In my team’s experience, across the 300 companies we’ve worked with, it is a 4X increase in marketing investment when you are not well differentiated. The reason is that it takes far more ad budget, impressions, and tactics being executed in the marketing space in order to get a prospect to pay attention, to consider having a conversation with your sales team, or to buy from you — because you just blend in with all the noise out there.

I tell CEOs in these workshops all the time: I wouldn’t commit to a single additional dollar of marketing investment if my team hasn’t figured out what our unique POV is and how we’ll be differentiated. Until that’s solved, I’m not spending any more money, because I know I’m paying 4X for it.

Jeff Klaumann: 100%. You end up casting this really wide net instead of being laser-focused on the right people, with the right messaging, with the right POV, with the right differentiation. So it all goes into it — I couldn’t agree more.

I’m sure plenty of firms you’ve worked with have a paragraph on their website that maybe they believe reads like a differentiator, but it’s not one. When you look at a firm’s content, how do you tell the difference? What’s the real test to identify a firm that has true differentiation?

Lori Turner-Wilson: Well, your competitive assessment tells you some of that — you need to understand how every competitor in your market is positioning themselves today, so we’re doing a competitive assessment to arrive at that. But the rest of it is: it has to make a group of people uncomfortable. And I know that’s hard to wrap your arms around, because we think we’re in business to make everyone comfortable around us. But if there isn’t a group of people that you are irritating with that message, then it’s not the right message.

My point of view as an example, with our firm: my industry is going to be very slow to change and to elevate until clients lead the way, get what they deserve out of their marketing investment, and require their marketing firms to have skin in the game and stand behind their projections. It is wildly unpopular with a large percentage of the population, but those that are a fit for us, it resonates with.

Here’s another example. We worked with a consulting company, and the point of view we landed on for them is: billing by the hour is broken and unethical. It punishes efficiency, it caps your value, and it’s against our moral fiber. We charge for the outcome instead, because we know that’s all you care about.

Jeff Klaumann: Yeah, there will definitely be people who are offended by that POV — but that’s the point. If you’re not offending somebody with your POV, it’s a little too watered down. It should be a bit controversial and make a few people uncomfortable. I love that. Well, let’s talk about another one of the firms you’ve walked through this with. Share what it sounded like before, what it sounds like now, what that POV is, and of course, what it did from an outcome standpoint — pipeline, budget, things like that.

Lori Turner-Wilson: Yeah. This one is not a pro-serve example, but it comes to mind and it’s a great example of a highly commoditized industry where it’s difficult to find a unique differentiator. This was an HVAC equipment and supply company distributing HVAC equipment to commercial HVAC shops across the country. The very first thing they said to us was: yes, we ship it fast — that’s all they care about at the end of the day — and our people treat our customers well. And they knew that’s not a point of differentiation, and they were convinced it couldn’t be found in their category.

So we did the competitive assessment, and sure enough, every competitor was saying the exact same thing. Then we talked to the market — their current, lost, and prospective customers — and we found a nugget that was really powerful: these HVAC shops are small mom-and-pops for the most part, and they can’t afford to invest in training their people the way they’d like to. If there were a supply house that had video training for every part and piece of equipment they sold — that their HVAC techs could pull up and use on-site during an installation — that would be enormously powerful for them. In 90 days, we created all of that YouTube content, and in 90 days they owned a point of differentiation. And it took their industry 2 years to even begin to replicate it.

So one of my beliefs in this space is: you need to not only know what your differentiation is today, but what your next 3 or 4 or 5 moves are. And generally speaking — you asked about results — in any of these companies where we’ve really gotten them into that true space of differentiation, we have seen significantly larger pipeline volume and velocity, more engagement with their content, more conversions. Their cost to acquire a customer is coming down significantly, sometimes 50%. But they’re spending more on marketing because the ROI is there. That’s consistent across any company where we can get them into that lane. And getting them into that lane is usually the only barrier — the comfort level of the leadership team around standing out, upsetting a certain percentage of the market, and being bold and different.

Jeff Klaumann: There’s something you said in there that I want to pull on for a second — that you need to have your next couple of differentiators figured out. I think oftentimes people think this is a one-and-done approach, so I agree wholeheartedly with you. Let’s talk about why that is so critical.

Lori Turner-Wilson: Yeah. Especially in a business that’s very commoditized, most of the differentiators you’re going to land on are going to be easy to replicate. They’re either perceived differentiators that you’re branding around, or very easy-to-replicate differentiators. If you’re really doing this well, once a quarter you’re having your leadership team run another competitive assessment on the brand positioning of every competitor in your market or markets. You already know what the next 3 or 4 moves are going to be, so that by the time anyone starts to catch up with you, you’re moving on to the next differentiator. That doesn’t mean your core product and service needs to change — it’s just the way you talk about it. It’s that unique point of view, that unique differentiation, and that’s how you stay ahead of the competition.

But we do tend to look at it like: we founded this company with this differentiator, this is going to be our differentiator forever, and it feels like we’re abandoning our values when we walk away from it. In reality, we’re just adapting to the market.

Jeff Klaumann: Well said. Couldn’t agree more. So, what can a founder do to gut check whether they actually have a differentiator?

Lori Turner-Wilson: Number one, I think you start from the research. I always believe that this is not expensive research to conduct, and the payoff is exponential. But even once you’ve gone through that research process, the exact language you use needs to be tested. After you’ve done those initial interviews and surveys, a pulse check survey — or at least another dozen interviews with current, lost, and prospective customers — to run a variety of positioning statements past them for impact is important. I would not do focus groups, because you get groupthink in focus groups. You want individual conversations.

And again, you cannot conduct these from inside the company, especially founders. Our customers tell us what we want to hear. They don’t want to hurt our feelings, they want to agree with us, they want to be congenial. You are not going to get the unbridled feedback that you want and deserve with this initiative unless you have somebody on the outside do this for you. It can be a research firm — that’s the best move. If you can’t cost-justify that, swap with another pro-serve firm in a different category. Have them do your calls, you do their calls. Somebody on the outside who has no skin in the game has a much higher likelihood of capturing genuine feedback.

And then once you land on a positioning statement, you need to be split testing that in the market. Maybe there are 5 different ways to say it, and you want to split test all of those across the market. Your digital marketing efforts can allow you to split test each of those, see how the market is actually responding, watch performance of those ads and campaigns over time, and be ready to pivot when you start to see performance drop off.

Jeff Klaumann: Outstanding. Lori, one more before we wrap. You wrote a book on this argument. What is it called, and who should pick it up?

Lori Turner-Wilson: Yeah, it’s called The B2B Marketing Revolution: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes, and there is actually a chapter in there — chapter 5 — on how to own an opening in the brand landscape. It’s the whole how-to: how to conduct this research, how to do the competitive assessment, how to actually pull this together and test it against the market. The whole framework is in the book.

Jeff Klaumann: Fantastic. Lori, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s great to have you on the show again. Members, Lori will be joining us for the private member Q&A session, and of course you can ask your questions directly of her.

And then two calls to action before we wrap. First, if you’re not a member and you want to keep the conversation going, head over to Collective54.com and start a conversation with our AI agent. Second, our founder Greg Alexander has a new book coming out. It is called The AI Native Boutique Firm: How Founders Build More Valuable Firms When Services Become Software. It is available for pre-order on Amazon now, so check it out. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I wish you the best of luck as you grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.

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