Are you missing the incredible value of your ‘hidden IP’?

If you’re in professional services such as consulting, project management etc, or you sell a commodity product, it can be tough to differentiate. 

You most likely often end up talking about “excellent customer service”, or “knowing the industry” or “deep experience” … all of which might be true, but all of which is almost certainly true of your competitors as well. In fact, none of you would be in business if you didn’t have these! 

Such claims do nothing to help a prospect choose you; you’re just another option and you might end up resorting to price reductions to win deals. 

Not good. But this is how most engineering services firms work.  

As business strategists, we face this regularly with our clients. 

Bottling IP so you can use it to sell 

The secret is to uncover differentiation, and the good news is we often find it hiding in plain sight. To start our search, we focus on clients’ operational delivery. 

Businesses spend years refining their operations, and almost never do things the same way as competitors.  Yet they rarely see this as a ‘proprietary methodology’, but rather it’s ‘just the way we do things’.  

As a result they don’t harness this IP in the way they sell to prospects, guide their teams or set benchmarks for operational performance. 

That’s taking a massive investment for granted and overlooking massive potential! 

Package methodology right, and it can give you a powerful competitive edge.

Here are a couple of recent examples.  

Seed Engineering: Predictably Smooth Projects 

Seed Engineering operates in the crowded project-management services space, but take a rather unusual approach to it. However, they’d never found a way to explain how they are different, let alone represent their difference in their brand, sales process and with their team.  

At its heart, this was about a calm, human-centric approach, the opposite of most project managers’ styles. Talking to their customers confirmed this was their key strength so we zeroed in on it. 

We helped them articulate the methodology into a core operational philosophy and named it  ‘Predictably Smooth Projects’ or PSP, around which we wove selling copy.  

‘Evolving from our values, PSP has become our stand against the cost of poor project management. It’s how we deliver complex projects, without the chaos, waste and human cost that often accompany them’.

Then, we built their new brand identity around the idea, using imagery inspired by zen gravel gardens and rock stacks as a visual metaphor and extending this into a subtle but confident brand look of muted colours.

When their new website was launched, all this was woven into a sales-heavy marketing program built around thought-leadership content and Account Based Marketing. 

Seed created and completely owns the ‘calm project management’ positioning and stands out clearly from the hordes of me-too competitors. 

BHF Technologies; Adaptive Intelligence 

Industrial processors can buy filters from myriad suppliers. They are genuinely commodity items. 

However, if you have the know-how to design them into clever, integrated systems as BHF Technologies does, the actual filters are just the start. Used intelligently, they can make a huge difference to processing efficiency and even the quality of the processed end-product.  And that means increased profitability. 

To elevate BHF above its competitors, we started by creating a tagline, ‘Performance Filtration,’ suggesting a new benchmark for their industry; suddenly everybody else’s filters are just filters. But ours increase performance. 

Then, we branded their collaborative approach to systems development ‘Adaptive Intelligence,’ which we summarised in a simple graphic. 

“I’ve been trying to capture the essence of BHF for 23 years. This has done it”

Wayne Shub, CEO 

Having helped uncover their unique strengths, we redesigned the entire brand across all touchpoints, producing a large volume of technical materials and a complex website. 

Now, we’ll admit that, to some degree, this is about neatly packaging operational processes, but one eternal truth of selling is that the way ideas are packaged and presented makes all the difference to their appeal.  

The reality is, if you can’t articulate your IP, it has no real value.

As well as turbo-charging your sales and marketing, methodology-based IP that’s baked into operations also adds real value to the business, independent of the personnel or even client roster. And if you ever plan to sell it, that’ll be very significant.  

Practical experience across many businesses has shown it takes ‘outside eyes’ to identify and package the potential that’s hiding in plain sight.  

If you’d like help to bottle your ‘secret sauce’, why not get in touch for a discussion.