It can be hard to hear from budding entrepreneurs and small businesses with ambitious plans to scale, but not everyone is your customer. Differentiation it starts with finding your expertise and market, and then returning the value you provide. In this sense, standing out is a matter of bringing more of your authentic self and your society to the table – no less in an effort to be all things to all people.

The danger of the latter approach is getting lost in the crowd. By the time a company's product or service is benchmarked by the market, it has already become a commodity, meaning you can only compete on price.

Even established companies need to know when to move on if their expertise no longer aligns with their customers. Adobe displaced by a very successful business model offering its suite of graphic design applications for a subscription-based model. It was part of a broader strategy to adapt to evolving customer behavior patterns in a cloud-based environment. After a flood of early criticism, the later numbers are impressive: Adobe posted record revenue of 19.41 billion dollars in the financial year 2023 and now has over 33 million subscribers.

While Adobe's move may have initially been seen as risky, identifying the right customer for your business or being nimble enough to move with customer preferences is the best way to build and maintain a sustainable business model.

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Know your expertise to provide value

Cheat it until you make it is bad advice for new business leaders. Awareness is necessary to understand yourself unique value proposition and align it with what the customer actually needs. This allows you to then focus on maximizing that value. Promising expertise you have yet to possess usually happens when entrepreneurs are chasing the wrong customer—but the right customer doesn't have to be elusive.

Remember, it's one thing to invest resources to reach customers who can afford your offer, but another to make sure they'll pay for it. While this should be obvious, the rest is critical. Those same customers must see value in your product or service. The notion of value can be subjective, but that's exactly the point: The right customer is one who values ​​what you can offer because you've differentiated it from the competition and met a tangible need or want.

Compare that to the temptation to go after big-name accounts in B2B marketing—it can get blinding. Of course, it is still true that we must appeal customer needs, perhaps more than ever in a world that expects speed and convenience. But as a CEO, when I visit a client, I try to figure out how we're going to align our interests to give them value and benefit ourselves. Aligning interests is a win-win for both parties.

How to invest in sustainability

When there is a natural connection between what a business offers and what the customer needs, there is no sacrifice – only mutual benefit. Having a clear understanding of your expertise gives you the confidence to say, “I don't know,” when asked to go beyond its boundaries. This can save you a lot of unnecessary persuasion. A simple rule of thumb is if you have to follow up or convince customers, they probably aren't the customers for you.

Once you've aligned interests, reputation can become a form of marketing a business itself, and staying true to the core values ​​and expertise that got you there IS brand. Apple, for example, is known for its returns customers into evangelists. The tech giant avoids aggressively chasing customers by constantly adapting to their needs and in some cases, becoming self-destructive. They have built an identity by challenging the status quo.

So don't let the unique part of your value proposition get lost the moment the potential sales figures roll in. Stick to what you do well and believe that it can be repeated or developed after a solid foundation has been laid. Instead of telling customers what you think they want to hear, stay true to yourself and your authentic values ​​so that build credibility for a long time.

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Align, refine and double

When Amazon launched its first Turn on in 2007, it sold out within hours. Its genesis was Jeff Bezos identifying books as one of the five product categories with the greatest e-commerce potential. The online retail giant opened its flagship bookstore in 1995, so by the time it had developed an e-reader, it had already created an eager market.

The first Kindle was strange compared to the devices of the time, but Amazon has never wavered from its main purpose: to serve people who love reading. Now, the new-generation Kindles come with the X-ray feature, which allows readers to learn more about a character, topic, event, place, or any other term. Other features like vocabulary building flash cards show how Amazon has continued to innovate to create the best reader experience.

In other words, play to your strengths, but don't overplay your hand. The founder of outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, says the 50-year-old company has thrived for so long because does not follow infinite growth and is aware of the expectations of its customer base to model corporate responsibility. “Building the best product while doing the least amount of damage is at the heart of what we do,” he says.

Stop chasing, start building

of Patagonia”conscious capitalism“is a great example of how to align customer and business interests for long-term sustainability. It's not enough to have a unique value proposition — you also have to match customer needs and expectations.

Instead of seeing this relationship as one of chasing customers to drive endless growth, businesses should take a more collaborative approach. When interests are truly aligned, there is deep satisfaction and benefit in offering an offering that is authentically yours and truly needed.

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