Nurture: How to Make Care Your Competitive Advantage
When you’re running your own practice or business, you’re naturally going to be concerned about your competitive advantage. This is your ability to stay ahead of your competition – both now and in the future.
Typically we think about competitive advantage as things like expert skills, innovation, logistics, strong brand awareness, or proprietary technology. But care – or nurture – can truly set you apart, and above, the competition.
Nurture: How to Make Care Your Competitive Advantage
Companies and individuals develop a competitive edge when they can utilize attributes that allow them to outperform their competitors. Nurture – or the care you show your customers and clients – can be an incredible advantage. Here’s how:
Reduce outreach resources
Too often our focus in business is on getting new customers. But quite often, customers we could be working with are right under our noses. We just haven’t taken the time to review our current customer list to see who could use more help, and what we can do to be proactive in looking after them.
But when we nurture our customers, we look after them and find ways to help them. And by doing that, we keep our current customers and reduce the amount of money and time spent on finding new customers.
This becomes an excellent competitive advantage because increasing customer retention rates by 5% has been shown to increase profits by a huge 25% to 95%. And it’s a huge revenue boost. In fact, those you already work with will typically spend 50% more than any other client.
Proactive positioning
Leaders – regardless of the industry – work to bring out the best in their people. They care whether those clients are achieving the goals that they want to achieve.
So whether it’s retail or consulting at the core of human potential, people want to feel like they’re achieving growth and becoming better every day. And when you help your customers to do that through real care, you position yourself as a leader in their minds.
Loyal clients
When you nurture and care for your clients, they feel that you really want to help them. This engenders loyalty to you for a long time, if not, for life.
Again, this plays directly into your competitive advantage because loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase from you again, and four times more likely to refer a friend or colleague to you as well. On the other hand, if you don’t nurture your clients and your customers, then either somebody else will be or they will be very price-driven. This means their loyalty will simply be in the most competitively priced.
How to Create a Culture of Care
There are three things that can really help you create a sense of care and nurturing in your business and drive your competitive advantage.
1. Mindset
The first one is the mindset. When you’re creating a sense of care and nurture in your practice, your mindset needs to be one of ‘attention out’ rather than ‘attention in’. You have to ensure that your focus is always on your customer – and not on yourself, your own needs, or your own ego.
It’s about valuing care as your north star. When you do this, you will drive your customer advantage. In fact, companies with an outward-facing, customer-service-driven mindset have revenue that’s 4% to 8% higher than other businesses in their industry.
2. Generosity
The second one is generosity, and in this case we’re referring to generously providing value to your clients. Most of the clients I work with are premium providers. But while they are typically more expensive, they are also known as being generous. They give great value to their clients by making sure that they’re getting the support, advice, information, time and other resources that they need.
This is important for competitive advantage because businesses that lead in customer experience outperform their competitors by over 80%. And customer-centric companies are 58% more profitable than those that aren’t.
3. Systems
The third one is systems because a person on their own can’t do it all. You need systems and tools in place to ensure that every team member is cultivating that same behavior in your business. In this way, you’re able to extrapolate the care you have for all your clients on all their touchpoints.
It’s important to remember that care is not always a natural default for people, and this may apply to those on your team. It can be learned, but you have to have the systems in place to ensure they understand how to do it.
Bringing it together
When I think of mindset, generosity, and systems working to build nurture in a practice, I immediately think of Alena Bennett. Alena has had a practice for a number of years and is an active member of our Women with Influence community. In her practice, she’s very clear on exactly who she works with, who she leads, and who she cares for – and that’s CFOs.
To do this work, she has a mindset of creating a CFO of the Future. She’s created diagnostics and is very focused on helping her customers achieve their potential. She’s generous in the resources and tools that she gives them. She provides them with advice. She gives them one-on-one coaching time. Annually, she publishes her CFO Insights Report, and she has the systems and tools in place because she can’t just do it by herself. She really focuses on being able to make sure that her team can support her in the vision for her culture of nurturing her customers.
Like Alena, to make care as your competitive advantage, you need mindset, generosity, and systems working together. The result of these three elements is that your care will feel congruent. It’ll feel aligned and authentic and real to the customer, and not just put on for show.
This will position your business as ‘world-class’ and your customers to gravitate to you because you are connected and they feel really valued. Even more importantly, they’re going to stay with you for a long time, if not forever.
Of course, care is not necessarily easy. As Seth Godin says “Care. Care more than you need to, more often than expected, more completely than the other guy.”
By putting in the time, energy, and importantly, systems, you can ensure this happens for you and your customers, and retain your competitive advantage.
