Any competent military commander will tell you that it is usually better to be positioned on higher ground than your enemy because it is much harder to attack uphill and is easier to inflict pain upon your enemy from a higher position. This is just as true whether your competition is wearing combat fatigues or office attire. In the world of B2B marketing and sales, failure to grab the high ground won’t lead to your physical death but it can lead to the death of your company’s revenue plan, profit margin and aspirations.

So what does it mean to hold the high ground in a B2B marketing and sales context?  From a big picture perspective, it means that you hold the leadership position in the marketplace for whatever it is that you do. This does not mean that you have to be the Microsoft of the computer industry or the Toyota of the automobile industry (sorry GM). Most of the time, your high ground will be something a lot more specific and defensible. Every company has (or should have) it’s unique value proposition (see my blog post on this at http://bit.ly/4GTWaM) that is expressed in terms of a brand promise that is differentiated from every other company’s brand promise.

A successful brand promise is not some clever slogan that your marketing department dreams up but rather the foundation upon which your business is built. It impacts each department and every employee should know the brand promise and be able to explain it succinctly and compellingly.  If your people don’t feel and accept the brand promise in their guts and are not able to rationalize it logically, you will never sell it to the outside world.  The brand promise must have absolute believability and it must be based on a genuine marketplace need that will drive profitable revenue.  Developing a brand promise is a tough exercise and you may have several stops and starts.  But once you are able to articulate the brand promise internally and externally, and use it as the basis for every marketing initiative, selling becomes much easier and you will be able to close a larger percentage of deals.

At Fusion Marketing Partners, we are occasionally asked to carry out programs that are not based on a clearly defined and differentiated brand promise – in other words, to fight the competition from a position of weakness (the low ground).  I urge our clients to allow us to help them discover and articulate exactly how they are different and superior to everyone else in the marketplace.  Then we are fighting from a position of strength.  Then we are holding the high ground.

Carpe Occasio – “Seize the favorable moment.”