Why Accelerating Deliverables is the Key in Today’s Market

A banana reminded me that time is getting more expensive.

I was hungry in between two meetings and ended up buying a banana at a convenience store on route. It cost me $2.50. The exact same banana at a regular supermarket costs $0.80. Why was I prepared to pay over 3 times more for the dictionary definition of a commodity? Answer: Speed.

Everyone’s in a hurry, time is getting more expensive which is why speed is the ultimate differentiator.  In every industry commoditization risk increases with increased competition. However, if you focus on delivering a comparable or better outcome but much faster you’ll be able to carve a profitable and defensible niche in a margin starved commodity market.

The SEO industry is a classic example of a commoditized market. Everyone talks about SEO the same way. I know because I used to be on the other side of the table as a head of search at Telstra dealing with multiple agencies, listening to endless recommendations and how it will take at least 6 months to get uncertain results.

This experience inspired me to start Area Ten which is committed to accelerating results in what is considered a sluggish industry. We focused on being able to start driving outcomes in 6 weeks, not 6 months which has helped build and sustain our competitive advantage for over a decade.

If you feel what you’re bringing to market is becoming drowned out by the competition. The one area of innovation I recommend you focus on is asking yourself “How can I deliver the same outcome but faster for my customer”

At Area Ten we have an internal Customer Benefit Acceleration process for all our offerings which centers around answering the following key questions:

1) What is the core outcome that our customer is looking for e.g. SEO agencies keep wasting time talking about rankings when what a customer really wants is more traffic that drives more transactions

2) Use 80/20 to take out all the activities that have minimal to no impact on achieving the core outcome. With SEO, following a decade of constant experimentation we found that there’s actually a critical 5% of input that produces over 80% of the outcome. Traditionally SEO agencies provide excessively large recommendation documents, 90% of which is just busy work that justifies the retainer but delivers negligible outcome

3) Break down each core activity into a highly refined process that we call a recipe. If the recipe is developed well enough it can be completely systemised into a technology platform that delivers the most scalable form of acceleration.

Every business has a customer benefit delivery mechanism that consists of a sequence of steps. Imagine you had 7 steps and improved each step by just 10%. Thanks to compounding these individual 10% improvements will result in an almost doubling in overall performance.

What if you could deliver your customer benefits twice as fast? How would that change the game for you?