How do you know that you create significant and unique value for your clients?
Two things come to mind:
- Your clients achieve tangible results at speed, and
- Other people start to copy you!
Now, if you bring an uncommon wisdom to the marketplace that truly impacts your clients’ circumstances, I suspect that you’re experiencing both of those things.
This brings up an issue that I like to call The DILUTION EFFECT.
In any market, there are people that bring new ideas and innovation to the marketplace … and then there are those that try to emulate those innovations in their own product offerings. It’s just the way the world works.
When people try to copy you, it means you’re worth copying!
The problem is that for every solution offered to a client there are three levels of value:
- The obvious value – this is usually the activity, the system, the software, the approach … and so on.
- The impact value – another way to think about this is to view it as the tangible and observable results the client actually experiences.
- The unexpected value – this is the transformational, timeless and deeply profound value that can only be delivered by the deep insights and intuition of a sage … the originator of the idea.
When your solution is copied it should be seen as a compliment, BUT the clients of that copied version of your unique genius will typically get a diluted experience and set of results, because others can only copy what can be seen or measured.
Others can’t copy your hidden genius, that you bring out at exactly the right time in exactly the right way for your customers to give them that real edge of success that you deliver.
We have this same challenge of dilution with our own work when others copy our work. As one of our more well-known clients told us, “Now that I have experienced first hand what you do, I can look at someone else’s models and INSTANTLY see if they’ve worked with you!”