100 days self-employed - and the question of positioning?
from Michael Pertek at
In the second part of the blog series, I talked about a lack of courage and sluggish processes in times of skills shortages and obstacles in the digital transformation. Today's final part is about marketing, USP and the pain of missing out on the most important things due to clear positioning.
Nothing works without USP and differentiation!
Yes, unfortunately, the old marketing wisdom in the age of constant comparability and the associated interchangeability, speed and the emergence of new start-ups and the generally almost inflationary use of every conceivable buzzword on website and service portfolio description, a USP is absolutely essential. But what constitutes this USP? What do potential target customers really need? Who are the potential target customers? Does everything labelled Digital Transformation Strategy Consultant also contain what the customer expects - and above all needs? Why should and must we limit ourselves at all?
This is what diselva really needs to work on now. What makes us unique and valuable for the customer? I like to quote Jürg Schwarzenbach, who gave us the following advice: "As long as you can't answer the question of why I should be sad when diselva dies, you still have a long way to go - no matter how good you are!"
The answer to this question is not so easy to formulate. We find ourselves super valuable, exciting, inspiring and think that we do pretty much everything better than our competitors, market competitors, rivals and partners. Unfortunately, at first only we and our friends and family think so. The market doesn't always recognise this - which is a shame, but also a good thing. It forces us to look at ourselves, the status quo, our skills and the actual customer needs - because quite honestly, we do the whole exercise to fulfil these sufficiently - even if we have a lot of fun doing it.
We never tire of expanding our capabilities and sharpening our USP. It's good to have a capable and critical advisory board with Bernd Schopp, Jürg Stuker and Armando Schär. The direction is clear: know-how, reputation, quality, experience, consulting expertise in digital topics and proximity to the customer are the big plus points of our team.
The result: "We lead B2B companies with B2C challenges from industry and retail in the digital transformation of their sales into a successful future" could be a clear target perspective - but the concern remains that this does not sufficiently recognise and fulfil specific customer needs.
What about all the other skills, experience and resulting project opportunities? Will they be denied forever? Will we no longer do website projects? Does the market understand that it's about commerce, CRM, integration and applications? What about our SCRUM masters, project managers and technical architects? It will be a Herculean task to consistently pursue the positioning and not starve on the way to achieving this goal. That's why we should say "We can do everything else too, but we can do it better than anyone else" ... but more about that in another article.
"Nice words alone are not enough". This quote from day 1 from the interview with "Der Ostschweiz" has the same meaning and urgency on day 101. So it seems that after 100 days, we're not done yet and we're not finished. So we will carry on! With joy, zest for action and our customers.
Thank you
Perhaps the most important thing for me as a person at the very end: thank you to the founding team - it was the right decision to found diselva with you. As was to be feared, some things happened far too slowly and others too quickly. It was too slow to get into sustainable and stable project constellations and become productive quickly - the time that passed week after week with customer appointments, partner meetings and countless encounters was too fast. It was the right decision without any ifs and buts and I would do it again at any time! Thank you to those around me who ride this rollercoaster every day and who never stop laughing, asking questions, supporting and feeling the tingling in my stomach.
