Burn The Playbook - B2B GTM Strategies with Marc Crosby

Strategy That Actually Works: Alex M H Smith on Unique Value

• Digital Rebels Consulting - Marc Crosby

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0:00 | 53:56

Strategy in business is simple: create unique value people can’t get anywhere else. Author and consultant Alex M H Smith breaks down “No Bullshit Strategy” so leaders stop chasing buzzwords and start making real choices.

What you’ll learn

  • What “strategy” means in business and why most teams get it wrong
  • How to define unique value vs. “better” or “best in class”
  • Innovation that counts: new vs. incremental “enhanced”
  • Agile where it belongs: execution, not direction
  • Differentiation in commodity markets that buyers notice
  • Why “customer centric” can mislead strategy, and where customers fit
  • Cascading the story so the whole org pulls in one direction
  • One practical move you can ship today

Chapters
00:00 Intro and setup
00:24 What strategy really is: unique value, not flabby plans
04:45 Value that counts and why it must be unique
09:36 Emotional vs. utilitarian value in B2B
14:40 What makes a company innovative
17:22 Agile vs. strategy: be agile in execution
23:43 Turning strategy into a clear company story
27:57 “Best in class” vs. being the only in class
30:31 Differentiation in commodity markets
36:09 The limits of “customer centric” strategy
41:21 Burn It or Build It: 10 hot topics
53:28 One actionable idea leaders can use now
54:10 Where to find Alex

Who this helps

  • Founders and CEOs who need a clear market position
  • Sales and marketing leaders stuck in feature fights
  • B2B teams in “commodity” categories
  • Operators who want a simple, durable direction

Guest

Host


business strategy, unique value, differentiation, innovation, agile execution, company story, alignment, B2B marketing, commodity markets, best in class myth, customer centric, Peter Drucker create a customer, Marc Crosby, Digital Rebels Consulting, Alex M H Smith, Basic Arts, No Bullshit Strategy


#BurnThePlaybook #Strategy #B2B #Leadership #Marketing #Differentiation


business strategy; unique value; differentiation; innovation vs enhancement; agile execution; alignment; company story; B2B marketing; commodity markets; best in class; customer centric myth; Peter Drucker create a customer; Marc Crosby; Digital Rebels Consulting; Alex M H Smith; Basic Arts; No Bullshit Strategy; Burn The Playbook


  • 1: Strategy = create unique value only you provide. #Strategy
  • 2: Stop “best in class.” Be the only in class buyers need. #B2B
  • 3: Innovation isn’t “better.” It’s new. Full stop. #Leadership
  • 4: Agile belongs in execution, not direction. #Operations
  • 5: Your strategy needs a story people remember. #Marketing


Views expressed are our own and do not represent any organizations

© 2025 Digital Rebels Consulting. All rights reserved.


Digital Rebels Consulting (00:01.147)
Welcome in. I'm Marc Crosby. This is Burn the Playbook. My special guest today is Alex M H Smith. Alex is the author of No Bullshit Strategy, writes an acclaimed newsletter, The Hidden Path, and founder of his consulting firm, Basic Arts. Welcome, Alex.

Alex (00:16.322)
Thanks a lot, mate. Good to be here.

Digital Rebels Consulting (00:19.148)
Happy to have you join the show. Tell us what basic arts is all about and what do you do.

Alex (00:24.206)
Well, I mean, guess the title of the book is a little bit of a giveaway. I am obviously a sort of strategy consultant, just like you might find in many a kind of buttoned up firm. But I guess the difference with what I do is that as the title of the book suggests, I believe that most stuff that passes for strategy, decision making, direction, differentiation, and so on in most businesses is not

actually really clear, coherent, well thought through, often actually completely non-existent in the first place. And so I try to help businesses and leaders make real strategic decisions that actually separate them from the competition, that actually make firm defined choices, not the kind of flabby made up choices that are often being passed off for leadership in most companies.

and ultimately find a position in the market which they can truly own all for themselves.

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:27.169)
Love that. do a little bit of similar work myself and my consulting firm. And I think in the spirit of the book, no bullshit strategy. I do have it here. I was thinking about, a lot of other terms that are used in business, that are also bullshit. They're nebulous. don't really have clear meaning, but we see these in pitch decks. see them on website, copy presentations, mission statements. And so in addition to, to strategy, I came up with nine other topics that we'll talk about.

or just, you know, business buzzwords, if you will. So I'm kind of burning my own playbook, so to speak, as far as the format of this episode. but those nine other words that I came up with in addition to strategy are value alignment, synergy, innovation, agile, best in class, differentiation, customer centric and AI powered. So those are things that we just typically hear, all over the place and end up meaning nothing since everyone is saying the same thing.

but let's start with strategy. so what does strategy mean and why is it bullshit?

Alex (02:30.636)
Well, obviously it's kind of well known that strategy is something that people don't really understand or people have difficulty defining and so on and so forth. And it's actually pretty, there's actually kind of good reason for that. It's not just because people are stupid or haven't taken the trouble to learn, but it's because there's obviously a definition of strategy which exists.

in a sort of dictionary sense about strategy in the world at large, which could be a strategy as applied to anything in a political campaign, a war strategy for getting six pack abs, right? You could have a strategy for all sorts of things. And in that scenario, it's really just like the means by which you are going to achieve that goal. How are you gonna achieve that goal? And that's obviously an incredibly broad and imprecise and flabby definition because when you apply that to business,

It's like, it almost becomes a synonym for, well, just have a good idea. Just sort of, just kind of do the right thing. And it's like, that's not very helpful, is it? Because everyone's sort of trying to do the right thing, but you don't really have any sort of direction there as to what does a good effective strategy look like beyond just do something effective, which is like, yeah, cheers for that. That's really helpful. But when we think about not strategy as a whole, but just the domain of business,

we can actually narrow the definition a hell of a lot in a way that makes it much, much more usable and easy to talk about. And if we think about like, just what a business is, what every business is, all any business is, is it's a system that's designed to generate value and then exchange that value for other value, i.e. money, and that's really all there is to it. And this could apply to a kid selling

friendship bracelets out of a bedroom or it could apply to, you know, shell. It's the same game universally. And then we know because of that, that the way that any business succeeds fundamentally is to put more value out into the world. The more value you put out into the world, the more money people are gonna pay you. Again, quite simple. So we can start to see that really the focus of all strategy for all businesses.

Alex (04:45.897)
is just finding a way to maximise the value that the business produces and then which it can exchange for money. So already when we have this idea of like value maximisation and the strategy is like, how can we give more value to the world? That already narrows our thinking quite a lot. And there's one final step of narrowing, which is very, very important because this is where a lot of people kind of fall off the bandwagon.

which is that even if people understand that it's important to obviously produce value for the customer, for the market, which then people will pay for, what they normally miss is that this only counts if whatever the value is you're producing, you're the only one doing it. Because if you're doubling, tripling, quadrupling up on something that people can already get from other sources, then you aren't.

actually producing new value, you're actually trying to leech off an existing pool of value, if that makes sense. And that's what most businesses are doing. Most businesses, they think that they've got this cracked because they think like, well, you know, we, we sell socks, and we know that people want socks, therefore it's a good business to be in. And it's like, well, no, if it was that easy, that would be great. Unfortunately, the reason that isn't a good business is because there's loads of different places I can buy socks. So the value

it not only has to be obviously present, but it also has to be unique. So rounding it out then, when we understand that strategy is just the means by which you are gonna produce unique value, the means by which you're gonna give people something which they want, but they can't get from anyone else, then we know the game that we're playing, right? And I think that if you pin down 99 % of business owners and you ask them, all right, can you explain to me?

What exactly is it that your business gives people that they want and they can't get anywhere else? People don't have an answer for that because the truth is 99 % of businesses do not do that. And that is the fundamental reason why they have all these different sort of miscellaneous struggles with marketing struggle, with sales struggle, with alignment or any of the other sort of buzzwords. So yeah, we just need to narrow that definition. And then I think it becomes not easy, but quite simple.

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:46.163)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:56.179)
Hahaha.

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:06.771)
Gotcha. So, um, that is bringing us, guess brings us to the next one because you, um, uh, talked about value quite a bit. And I think that's, that's the problem is that, not, with what you said, but I think of how it's used in business, uh, because you typically hear business leaders say we add value for our customers are on the websites. We say, we're the most valuable X, Y, Z and the market or whatever it might be. But I think it's because it's an overused word that it tends to start to mean less and less.

Alex (07:11.521)
Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:34.406)
Especially, I guess, once we come to topic number three, which is alignment, the definition of a value for a business differs within an organization. Would you agree?

Alex (07:45.004)
Yeah, yeah, it does. mean, it is honestly it again, like strategy, it's another one that people can be forgiven for getting confused about because there is a there is a degree of complexity here. So the way that I would think about value is that it's obviously it's quite similar to that whole like people don't buy a drill, they buy a hole in a wall kind of thing. And so it's essentially about firstly, recognizing that the reason people buy from you

is because they want the maybe a more simple, more or less equivalent word is benefit. They want the benefit of whatever it is that you're selling. So you need to quickly recognise that like, you know, if you're BMW for sake of argument, people don't buy BMWs because what they want is a car. The car is just the kind of like the physical product and the delivery means. But the value might be the driving pleasure or the status or whatever it might be with that particular car.

So every company needs to recognise that there's a difference between the product it sells and the value that that product delivers. And it's the value that people pay for. is not the product that people pay for. Now, I think the reason where this gets caught, I people get that, but think where this gets very complicated for people is that the way that value can be delivered is really, really broad. So

Sometimes it can be incredibly clinical and utilitarian. know, like the value of a widget might be that it speeds up your production process 7 % or something. And that would be fine. And if there was a widget that did that, you would consider that, well, yeah, I'll have that. And that could be a good business. But then if we go to something like a Louis Vuitton handbag, the value is obviously much more kind of emotional and ephemeral and status driven. Now,

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:14.501)
Hmm.

Alex (09:36.376)
the widget that gives you 10 % quicker production speeds and the Louis Vuitton bag, these are actually, although they don't look like it, they're in the same bucket because they're both like miscellaneous products that deliver a desirable value to the customer. But where people struggle is that they can't get their head around the fact that sometimes value can be emotional and sometimes value can be utilitarian. And what that is for your business is fundamentally, it's always gonna depend.

So you have to be very sort of mentally adaptable and versatile to see how there are these different ways that your business can produce value. I think you said that, you you worked with a lot of companies in like the chemical industry. So like they're probably going to be like naturally burrowing down into extremely utilitarian ways of understanding the value that they deliver. And that may well be right. That might be the right thing to do, but you can't block off the possibility.

Digital Rebels Consulting (10:20.53)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (10:35.465)
there are other less obvious ways to deliver value. Maybe not quite like Louis Vuitton would, but getting closer to that universe than you might perhaps expect.

Digital Rebels Consulting (10:48.452)
I think emotional is interesting there because there you said the difference between emotional and utilitarian. You would think that in manufacturing, industrial manufacturing materials in the chemical business, it would just be more transactional. But I found after many, many years in sales is that there is an emotional component tied to a specific brand. And it depends within what industry, but whether they're well-known brands, because I see these statistics that come out as far as the.

the brands with the most value. And those are the ones that are highly recognizable. And so if you're not part of that, I guess, tier of well-known brands, then you're fighting to create brand awareness and kind of create that tie to a specific brand and the manufacturing business. Does that make sense? Cause I think we're all human at end of the day, whether it's B2C or B2B, you do, think internalize and, and, and think that one is better than the other for X, Y or Z. but your thoughts on that.

Alex (11:43.938)
Yeah, well, I what you make me think of as well, think this is another way that people get wrapped, they sort of get a bit tied up is that we really like to compartmentalize business. And we see there, for example, we think that there's a difference between, let's say, brand and product. And there is, but we need to recognize that the leverage of different businesses can come from kind of different places. So like,

There are some companies out there who are completely brand driven where they actually, there is no real meaningful, let's say physical or distribution or operational difference between them and their competitors. They are literally identical to their competitors in every way other than the most superficial, you know, design and narrative elements. Then on the flip side, there are companies out there

who have got what we might call sort of like, let's call that a soft strategic advantage, right? And then we've got companies out there that have a hard strategic advantage where like, you know, they literally physically do something that no other company can do and there's no, and it's completely black or white. Maybe they have a genuine monopoly. Maybe they're the only player in their market, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, again, what people don't appreciate because the inputs to these two forms of strategic advantage are so different.

They don't realize that they are kind of equal and a company can kind of do either one. And that, and again, it's difficult because the skillset involved in creating those two forms of strategic advantage is very, very different a lot of the time. But fundamentally, we need to treat them as one. At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is does this business have an advantage or does this business not have an advantage? Does it have leverage or does it not have leverage? And it's completely

it's completely, irrelevant whether that is driven in a soft way or a hard way, but a leader has to be very, very broad minded and adaptable to recognize that I will, I could do either of these things and it doesn't really matter. And I'm going to pick the right one. Cause most people you're either a marketing type person and you think it's all about brand or you're like an operational type person. And you think it's all about like that.

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:04.591)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (14:08.297)
And you can't do that. You have to have this like much more holistic approach to how the business is going to win.

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:18.689)
Agreed. I think, it makes me think about innovation, which is a little bit further down the list, but, it's another thing. I think that a lot of brands and people within a business, they, think they're innovative. They say they're innovative, but, what makes a company actually innovative and how do you be innovative when everyone is saying that they are.

Alex (14:40.493)
I mean, the first thing is that, is that does Brad Pitt run around telling everyone that he's handsome? No. So it would be redundant for him to do that. Well, if you run around telling everyone that you're innovative, there's, only know what, if a business says they're innovative, I only know one fact about that business. And that is they're not innovative because real innovative, real innovative business like.

Digital Rebels Consulting (15:02.575)
You

Alex (15:05.037)
When was the last time that I don't know, open AI described itself as being innovative? What is the other thing, you know? So like, the proof ultimately is in the pudding and the proof would be that you are creating new stuff. mean, forgive me for sort of like saying something so obvious, but actually in the real world, it isn't that obvious.

Innovation is about doing something new. And so all you have to be able to do is point to something in your business where you can say that is a new thing that we brought to the market that before we were doing that, that didn't exist. Again, very, very few companies are able to point to something like that. And what they'll normally point to is they'll point to something which isn't new, but they'll point to something which is in some way an incremental improvement on something that existed before.

So, I don't know, to use the car analogy, they'll say, like, you know, we're innovative because this car gets like 36 miles to the gallon as opposed to 32 miles to the gallon, which the competitor gets. Like that isn't innovation. That is not new. That is just enhanced. The big difference between new and enhanced. like, but this newness to me,

I would take it even a step further. I think that no business on the planet deserves to exist unless it brings something new to the table, unless it's innovative, because fundamentally, like I was saying before, if you by definition, if you don't bring something new to the table, then you're doing something that already existed before you turned up and the world didn't need you. You're just like a you're just a kind of gatecrasher at the party, you know, like the world doesn't need the 890 second

Digital Rebels Consulting (16:58.909)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (17:02.345)
ad agency, you we were we were quite happy with the first 891. Thank you very much. You're not bringing anything here. So in that respect, the core duty of any business is actually innovation, but only some businesses think of themselves as being innovative.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:22.051)
The next word that we have on the list is agile, which I think is once again overused, but I also think it relates back to strategy. So if we say that we're an agile company and we're customer centric and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, how often should we revise a strategy? so that we actually are agile. Is it something that's required? and little nuggets and overhauled strategy where we're being agile. what does that look like to you?

Alex (17:51.915)
Well, funnily enough, it's not actually something that I've come across an awful lot in the wild. I've never really had a client sort of bang onto me about being sort of agile. So, you you might have you might have a better perspective on this than me from from from where I'm sitting. It feels like it would often be I can't say I've seen this, like I say, but it feels like it would often be used as an excuse for number one.

incrementalism, just doing lots and lots of little bits of tinkering, but never actually making any big meaningful choices that really move the needle. And that would be bad. And number two, maybe possibly a sort of excuse for sort of flip flopping. And even if you did make meaningful choices, you think, all right, well, you know, we'll we'll do this for a year and then we'll change it and do something else for a year. So both

Both of these things are bad. The strategy is about the big directional move or choice of the business, which directs everything that the business does. It's not like a box of tricks, right? Here are the 32 changes we're gonna make to the business this year. And each one of those changes is perfectly good and perfectly defensible, but they don't ladder up to one particular thing.

You need to have one particular decision that the business has made, which then all of those micro choices underneath, are all just like, they all add up to that one thing. So that's the only way that you're actually gonna really make strides in a market and open up sort of new market territory, which is what you're trying to do. So that is the first trap here. then, let's say that you did do real good

strategic decision about what this business is going to own in the market and you make whatever changes you need to do to innovate around that and kind of claim that market territory. Well, to actually really bed in to whatever the area is that you've decided to attack, that's going to take time. We can look at some companies, Nike, Red Bull or whatever, in the broadest strategic sense, they've barely changed.

Alex (20:17.932)
for like 50 years. Now, what I would add is that like executionally, they are always changing. They're kind of like the duck, know, sort of like steady on the surface, but like furiously paddling underneath. So as you go down the executional ladder to all the little points of detail, that's where you wanna be agile. You wanna be super agile, sort of executionally, but directionally.

unless you've made some huge error or there's some sort of seismic sort of shift occurs in your industry, you need to be playing the long game and you need to be like compounding on that market position that you are trying to own. So long story short, think I can...

Alex (21:06.514)
Agile for me is a word basically that applies to execution, but it doesn't really apply to strategy. How does that line up with what you've seen?

Digital Rebels Consulting (21:16.012)
Yeah, I think so. mean, at the end of the day, I think you have to know what your core capabilities are and back to one of the other words is make sure that your teams are aligned on what that core capability is. And maybe I think that that's where some companies do it right. And some people don't do it right. I'm like your analogy of a duck. I was kind of thinking of like a Mr. Potato head where it's like, you know, most of the, most of that toy, like 80 % of it is a potato and that really shouldn't change, but you can.

Alex (21:36.971)
Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (21:45.119)
make incremental changes to, you know, the hat, the arms and the eyes and things like that to adjust based on maybe current market conditions or maybe your customer or whatever that might be. But, I don't know. I just made that up.

Alex (21:57.249)
No, I like that. like that. And one way that I think about it as well is that like, think that strategy is a market play. Whereas a lot of people think about it as being a customer play. I don't believe it's a customer play. I believe it's a market play because the right strategic move is determined, speaking very basically.

about where there is space in the market. It is actually not determined by what the customer wants because what the customer wants either A, might be impossible to deliver or B, it might actually be very crowded space in the market. So just because the customer wants it, it doesn't fucking matter. Sorry, pardon me. It doesn't bloody not. And so strategy in the big sense is about navigating the market.

And then execution, that is where the customer comes into play. And to your point about the Mr. Potato Head, you could be, yes, absolutely on a micro level, you should be looking for all sorts of ways to please the customer and serve them better in terms of the little interactions within your sort of value chain, let's say. But at the macro level about what, where is this business going? What is this business about? What does this business own? Like the customer can't...

can't determine that and that is the bit which for me is not really agile at all.

Digital Rebels Consulting (23:22.133)
Gotcha. When you discuss strategy with companies and executive leadership, how do you cascade it or pull that through to the front lines so that once again, everybody's aligned, they're all singing to the same sheet of music. Is that something that you get involved in or do you leave that up to the business to do that themselves?

Alex (23:43.041)
Well, for a long time, I didn't get involved in it. And I then sort of determined that on the projects, I didn't get involved in it. I would say the success rate and by which I mean success in my terms, which is did they actually aggressively and cleanly execute the strategy? Sometimes they think they have, but they haven't, right? I would say that the success rate was 20%, maybe less. So I was like, hmm, well, yes, there's a real problem here. know, obviously you can't just

dump the idea on the company and then walk away and everything's going to be great. And over time, like through experience, I start to see more and more and more that the importance of the strategic idea diminishes and diminishes and diminishes and the importance of the internal communications and alignment, right, raises and raises and raises. And what I basically find is that you have to start on the principle that the employees of a company

90 % of them, probably more, fundamentally, they don't give a crap about the strategy and they don't give a crap about the company, right? And nor should they, they've got lives, they're not shareholders, why the hell should they care? Provided that you're gonna continue to employ them, like, you know, they just wanna get paid and have a life and that's quite right. And so you can't expect them to kind of get really engaged in the strategy process and really listen and really internalize it and all the rest of it. Some of your leaders, yes, might be a bit different,

It might be the odd person who's just kind of interested, but generally not. So what you kind of have to do is you have to create a really stylized, narrativized sort of story version of the strategy, which essentially gives people the basic information they need to know directionally, but no more, and makes it super exciting for them. So while, so I...

I create this thing now I call the company story, which is basically like you've done the strategy with the chief exec or whoever it is. And you know, this is like quite a kind of, you know, sort of, a sort of essay type document, basically, like not a lot of flair in it necessarily, you're saying, right, this is the read of the market. This is our hypothesis. This is what we're to do. Then you have to turn that into another version, which makes it sound like this kind of awesome mythic quest.

Alex (26:06.528)
that everyone would be like, wow, that's cool. And I want to be sort of involved in it. And that is the version that you take to the business and you can turn it into a super cool video and all this kind of stuff. And you know, we look at like, why do people to this day, people to this day, they still like to watch old grainy videos of Steve Jobs talking to Apple employees because he was someone who was very good at narrativizing strategy.

Digital Rebels Consulting (26:31.049)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (26:31.808)
this is the fundamental job to narrativise the strategy in a way where the people who are working for the organisation think, number one, they get it instantly. You tell it to them once, they remember it forever, so that's quite difficult. And then they're actually pumped by it because you present it to them in a way that makes it sound quite ambitious and mischievous and kind of counter-cultural and they can feel good about themselves and they can feel good, wow, I'm working for a company that's really doing something like quite cool. Like, know, I mean,

It's an unfair example, but the people who work for SpaceX, let's say, they are prepared to be treated like absolute dirt because damn it, isn't it cool to be working for SpaceX and we're gonna put people on Mars and isn't this amazing, right? Now, I appreciate that most companies aren't doing something as cool as that, but you need to be doing what you can to generate that level of clarity and excitement. And this really is like, we all know how, well, I like to think,

We all know how to do an exciting ad for customers, but you've also got to do an ad for the team as well. The team has got to be treated with just the same level of care, creativity, and kid gloves as your customers do. But of course, the two stories are different.

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:45.737)
Sure, certainly. The next topic that we have is best in class, which I think is another just overused term and then kind of just tends to mean nothing. But what does that mean to you?

Alex (27:57.085)
Well, unfortunately, it does mean something and I think it actually means something very bad because one of the core strategy principles, remember what I was saying before about like, if the value you're producing isn't unique, then you're just doubling up, you shouldn't even be in the game. Well, best in class, better or best, this is a synonym for the same.

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:02.281)
Ha

Alex (28:20.588)
Because if you say that X is better than Y, what you're saying is X is the same as Y, but in some respect, a little bit more. Take our word for it. Now, this is a profoundly ineffective way of doing strategy because the market, doesn't really notice better if two companies are basically offering the same thing.

The one that normally wins that battle is the one that's more famous, the one with better relationships, or the one that's got more money to spend on marketing. Now you might say, but I'm best in class. It's like, that is completely impotent. if someone, it's a stupid example, but if someone releases a new cola that they say is best in class, which many people have tried to before, by the way, many people have said Coca-Cola is rubbish cola, I'm gonna release a really good cola. God knows how many companies have tried that stupid idea.

Everyone what maybe some of them moderately successful, but basically they all failed because ultimately well if I want a cola I'll go for the one that I've heard of and etc etc So that sort of shows the impotence of the best-in-class mindset The goal is not to be best-in-class The goal is to be the only one in the class and if that's the case It doesn't even matter if you're good or bad if people want that thing You are the only game in town. They have to come shopping from you. Frankly, you could actually be quite bad. You could be quite rubbish

and it almost wouldn't really matter. mean, it doesn't apply now, but for a long time, like in the glory days of Tesla, for example, there was a lot of things that weren't very good about Tesla cars, some terrible build quality, stuff like that. Did that hurt them? Not an iota, because at end of the day, if I wanted what Tesla are selling, who else am I gonna go to? I can't go to anyone. So I would much rather be worst in class, but at least be the only one doing it than I would be the best in class.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:14.289)
So if you're a, guess, kind of along those lines, as far as differentiation, what does that look like in commodity markets where everyone is doing the same thing and competitive markets? how do you line up differentiation against your competition? so you're not just simply saying the same thing that everybody else is.

Alex (30:31.914)
Yeah, so I mean, this is the battle that probably, I don't know, 70 % of businesses have, I would say. Now, the first thing that I think is important to think about with differentiation is that this is a huge point, subtle point people don't think about. Differentiation is not about being different in some way. Differentiation is about providing different value. So look, if I come up with a whole new

way of making a sausage, but the end result is a sausage. Why does the customer care how I made that sausage? Because at the end of the day, it's still a sausage. So it's like, I think, wow, I'm so different. I made this sausage in this crazy way. But if the end thing is a sausage, it won't give me any market advantage. So you've got to make sure that the differentiation you're focusing on is the differentiation of value, not differentiation of process or something like that. Now, of course, differentiated process will often produce differentiated value.

But you've just got to make sure that that's the case because a lot of the time people say, we're different because I don't know, we manufacture all of our stuff in the United States. I don't know, I'm making this up. And it's like, well, that's all very nice, but if the customer doesn't care about that, then it's all by the bike. You have to find a way of explaining why that would actually produce new value for them.

Then you've also got to recognize that, and this is the second place, I think, where these differentiated competitors, undifferentiated commodified competitors would fall down, is that in whatever category you're operating in, there are certain forms of value that are just priced in, that are just like expected from people in that category. So if I'm a marketing agency, for sake of argument, it is expected that I will help you do good marketing and that I will help you sell your product. So...

You don't need to say any of that because it's like you wouldn't even be in the industry. It's like selling a car by saying this car will get you from point A to point B. You've got to price in everything. And where you got to focus on is like, okay, we've got to price in everything. What additional or new thing, which is not expected in this category, are we also bringing to the table? So if we think about like the chemical companies, for example, like, I don't really understand that industry. So I don't really know like,

Alex (32:57.78)
what they're offering, but I can kind of imagine the basic sort of levers of competition there that exist. You you're gonna have like price and you're gonna have like the efficacy of the chemicals and customer service, all this type of stuff. So all of this stuff is sort of priced in. And then you just need to think about like, in addition to that, or perhaps instead of that, what else are we going to bring to

table. So I mean, I was speaking to this guy just yesterday, he was actually, I guess that was why I had the marketing thing on mine, because he had a sort of like a marketing agency, and he has a different way of doing things. But the way that he tried to sell it is that like, well, because I do things this way, that way, that way, it's gonna mean that you're going to do better marketing. And I'm like, what I was like, well, who cares about that? Because everyone's trying to do the best marketing that they can, you're better marketing that better marketing, you got a different way of making the sausage, but you still got sausage. I was like, what actually is interesting about what you're doing?

is that it actually produces a very, very transparent, what's the word, a very, very transparent kind of trail of breadcrumbs between marketing activity and the results. It's the sort of transparency that a CFO would really value, because obviously a lot of marketing is perceived as, it's just like throw money into the wind, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, smoke and mirror.

all a bit bullshitty. And I was like, what you're putting forward here is not a form of marketing that necessarily works better. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, I don't care. What you're putting forward here is a form of marketing, which is much, much more transparent and much, much more useful and appealing to the money men of a business than other forms of marketing. That is the, we accept that you're gonna sell product, whatever, who cares?

but that is the new differentiated thing that you're bringing to the market. So that is the lever for your business. So I take these like chemical companies, for example, and I'm like, you see, you don't have to actually do something that's that big if it is sort of like in addition to all the stuff they expect, but then you can say, here's something you didn't expect. You change the conversation with the customer and suddenly you're in a territory where the competitors have got absolutely nothing to say. So,

Alex (35:23.648)
So yeah, you see how like, you've got to like, you've got to kind of like go through that process. So you're really not just kind of falling back into the best in class.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:37.829)
Yeah, because I think if you're just trying to differentiate for the sake of differentiating, your competitors are probably doing the same thing. And I think you have to identify opportunity, and certain places, whether it's the next topic is customer centric. So, and I think like, what does that mean? And I, and I think like what you're trying to say and tell me if I'm wrong is think of problems that need to be solved that they probably haven't thought of themselves and then try to marry up a solution to solve that problem.

that your competitors are not doing, if that makes sense.

Alex (36:09.909)
Yeah, basically, yeah. I think like it's a business should obviously be customer centric. It's hard to argue with that, operationally day to day, like the business should be thinking about its customers, of course. But the strategy process is not customer centric in my view. The customer is actually the last link in the chain. Because sort of like I said before, what you were looking for above all else is new opportunity, innovation.

bring new form of value to the market. Now, I could tell you one way that you are not gonna do that is by paying huge amounts of attention to the customer because firstly, most industries are quite mature now. There'll be exceptions, but most industries are quite mature. All of the players in that industry have been rabidly listening to the customer for like decades. They kind of figured out in a sense what there is to figure out. You're not about to find this like,

this sort of this golden thimble in the haystack. Like if you're asking the same question that all of your competitors are asking, you're gonna get the same answer. So that's it's just not a very fruitful way of thinking about the problem. The fruitful way of thinking about the problem is to start by focusing on difference. In what ways are we already different? In what ways could we be different? In what ways could we contradict the norms of this market?

This is all stuff that's not existing on a customer level. This is all stuff that's existing on an industry level where you're just looking at the landscape, looking at what your competitors are doing. You're looking at like, just like, it doesn't have to be good idea at all. It's just like, I don't care if it's good idea. Just tell me what would really be new that we could do. And it would truly be new and weird and different. And at first these answers are going to, these things are not going to be very necessarily very good ideas. You're like, well, that's stupid. But then you ask the second question, which is,

how or under what circumstances or for who could this actually be useful? In what way could we imagine this providing value? And sometimes you have to make a little leap there, but you'll be surprised that you're actually like, hmm, this seemingly stupid idea, this would actually be quite good in such and such a circumstance. And you see, that's where you're then linking it to the customer. But then what you end up with is you end up with

Alex (38:33.055)
producing a form of value that the customer was never asking for, but when they see it, they want it. Like the example that, the very extreme example of this is Liquid Death, who've obviously been really successful with their sort of heavy metal water. Now I ask you, like, did this solve a customer problem? No. Were any customers asking for this? No. It's completely out of thin air, stupid idea. But when people see it, do they want it? Yes.

So that shows that it was not a customer centric sort of like ideation process. I think it's Peter Drucker who has this quote that I never understood. I always thought it was a really stupid quote until I got it, which was he said, the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Like, what does that mean? Like, what a stupid comment. Of course, the purpose of business is to a customer. What like a stupid tautology? But no, because it is actually very subtle, because what people think that means is they think the purpose of the business is to get a customer or to

find a customer. He didn't say that. He said create a customer. What create a customer means is it means you create a customer that did not exist before. So before you put your thing out there into the world, there were no customers for this thing because this thing did not exist. So it's like, if I'm like, know, if I, if I try to create a new fast food joint and

I try to win customers from McDonald's. That's not creating a customer. That's just like sort of stealing a customer or clawing a customer. Like what I have to do is actually like, I'm not taking necessarily anything from McDonald's maybe. I have to be like generating the customer that never existed in the first place. The example that someone gave me in an email, which I thought was a nice example was that like before Disneyland existed, like, you know, there were no customers for what Disney is selling.

Disney as a corporation has created more customers than any other company in history, because if Disney didn't exist, there wouldn't be another Disney, I don't think. I think that just nobody would have ever done what Disney did in the first place. like, know, in that very truest sense, they created not just a customer, they created an entire industry and market completely out of thin air.

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:54.786)
Well said. like that. Uh, I don't think I heard that Peter Drucker quote, but now at least I have a better perspective of what that means in this sense. Um, let's pivot over to our rapid fire segment called burn it or build it. I'm going to ask you 10 hot topics. Uh, you tell me burning a build it and maybe a brief reason why I'm going to pull our last overused word, um, AI powered to start this off since everything today is AI powered, burn it or build it.

Alex (41:21.419)
Burn it, burn it. mean, unfortunately, very rapidly, we got to the point where I don't make the rules, but I'm sure that you felt this for yourself. I certainly feel that when people are selling things to me, the second that somebody says something is AI powered, I interpret that as being low quality. It doesn't mean it's low quality, but I sort of interpret that as being a kind of, this must be shit is my kind of reaction, which is very unfair.

but that's just the gut reaction. So it's not to say that you shouldn't have things be AI powered, but it is to say that if you think that that's gonna like get people to buy it, I think that it's the opposite. So yeah, in that respect, burn it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:02.977)
agreed. Burn it. Number two, mission statements.

Alex (42:09.154)
Oh, I'm gonna say grudgingly build it. all depends on what you mean by a mission statement, of course, but remember when I was saying to you before how you need to have the dumbed down, sexed up version of the strategy for the team. Now in my book, that then starts to overlap with the mission statement. So if that's how you're doing your mission statement, and if that's what you're using it for, you've got to have it.

But I appreciate that a lot of mission statements, I don't know what they're doing, but they're doing other random things.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:41.813)
Yeah, I think mission statements, at least for me, it's just one of those things where it was set at a point in time and it has been forgotten about for decades. so unless you're a founder led company, that might mean something, but if you're a hundred years old, you may have had a mission statement at some point in time and everyone's forgotten about it. So from my perspective, it's somewhere in between, but at least revisit it from time to time as part of your strategy development and what our purpose is for creating a customer. Number three, SWOT analysis.

Alex (43:00.864)
It is.

Alex (43:13.195)
I mean, I've never done a SWOT analysis in my entire life, so I will say burn it. But are there people out there who get a lot of value from a SWOT analysis? Well, my God, it survives somehow. you know, if it doesn't hurt anyone, then I say fill your boots and go for it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (43:35.681)
you

Well, I think it helps to have, think some sort of framework to understand where you stand in a landscape. I don't know. There's a lot of frameworks I think that are out there that probably should be burned. Hence the name burn the plan book. let's think of a, new SWOT analysis, framework. don't know. Number four, account based marketing.

Alex (43:58.601)
I don't know what that means.

Digital Rebels Consulting (44:01.023)
Yeah, so you have a strategy for marketing that's specific to a customer customer base. You might iterate on that depending on the solutions and the challenges that they're facing. If you don't have an opinion on it, we can just burn that question.

Alex (44:15.143)
I if you're saying, I do, I I think it's in the interest of time, it's probably best to burn the question. But the way that I'm imagining what you're saying is it sounds, it sounds like it's fine.

Digital Rebels Consulting (44:27.497)
Okay, we'll build that. Number five, multi-threading and enterprise sales.

Alex (44:33.407)
I also don't know what multi-threading is, I've never heard that, period.

Digital Rebels Consulting (44:36.961)
So multi-threading from a sales perspective, instead of just, you know, engaging with one person, let's just say, a sales person engaging with the procurement person. also want to engage with an R and D engineer. I also want to engage with a CEFO. You know, I want to make sure that I'm, you know, landing and expanding at least my strategy to connect and understand and develop a strategy for a customer base. That's not just based on one person's opinion. So multi-threading could be touch points here and there.

just to make sure that we're connecting with multiple people in an organization in order to penetrate and make sure that we're offering and creating the best solutions for partnerships.

Alex (45:11.477)
Build it sounds pretty good to me. I mean, I'm not an expert salesperson, so I need to learn this type of thing myself.

Digital Rebels Consulting (45:18.963)
Gotcha. Number six, competitive battle cards.

Alex (45:26.091)
Digital Rebels Consulting (45:26.185)
This would be more or less as far as creating a, you know, customer specific objections and challenges and things of that nature. So, you know, salespeople and marketing people are prepared at least to understand what your competitors are doing, understand what the objections would be, what the responses and things of that nature, far as just acutely, preparing everybody, maybe over preparing.

Alex (45:47.274)
No, sounds great. Sounds great to me. Again, you know, it's if you actually had your strategy down pat, these things would to an extent write themselves. So as always, the value is determined by the quality of the information that goes into it rather than the thing itself.

Digital Rebels Consulting (46:11.039)
Gotcha. From my perspective of these battle cards, that's not something that most salespeople are armed with as far as just marketing, providing them the rules of the game, so to speak, the landscape, a cheat sheet, a quick reference card, something like that. And that might help them win more deals. Number seven, 60 slide pitch decks.

Alex (46:35.179)
Now I'm definitely inclined to say burn it. I mean, I don't have any slides at all speaking for myself. That being said, mean, I guess it's, I'll say burn it, but with caveats, because I'm sure that there are some industries where certain hoop jumping just needs to be done. had a client in, a software client, they were selling in a lot of the time to IT teams and it's like, you you,

You can talk all the strategy you like, but at the end of the day, the IT person in the client business is going to start asking annoying, overly detailed technical questions and you can't just say to them, that doesn't matter. You've got to play the game. So yes, burn with caveats.

Digital Rebels Consulting (47:21.471)
Got you. Number eight, gated content.

Alex (47:33.109)
Burn it. I mean, unless that's that, unless you're like, you know, the New York Times and that's literally like your business model. But if it's like content, like, you know.

Digital Rebels Consulting (47:44.169)
Give me your email address in order to get the white paper before you can proceed. I need some information from you, whether something like that.

Alex (47:50.028)
Oh, well actually no, well that's funny. No, okay, well no, actually no, I wasn't imagining, I wasn't picturing it that way. No, but I mean, for a lead magnet and stuff, all right, no, fine, I take it back, build it. Yeah, if we're including lead magnets in that, then yeah, that's like, I mean, I do it, so I would be a hypocrite otherwise.

Digital Rebels Consulting (48:06.067)
Gotcha. Number nine, AI generated content.

Alex (48:09.227)
Yeah, definitely, definitely burn it. guess there are some, I mean, obviously, sometimes it works. And I guess there are some occasions where it might be a good thing or they aren't immediately jumping to mind for me now. So I think that this is...

Alex (48:32.585)
I'm going to avoid going on a rant about this, but just to say, because this is actually the newsletter I've got for next week, is that what a lot of people out there do not understand, very basic supply and demand rule, is that when something becomes cheap and easy, it also simultaneously loses value. like, there was a time when content was very...

valuable even just like two, three years ago. And if you were able to produce good content, then that was useful to a business, useful to me. Now, if we are out of that world, that doesn't mean that all of, we haven't democratized the value of content. All we've done is just rendered content valueless. So like, this doesn't, and this applies to loads of things. Like it's just a universal rule. If you can now do this thing easily and cheaply, there's no point in doing it.

The world unfortunately runs on things that are rare and difficult have value, things that are easy and cheap don't. So the reason to not do AI generated content, even if the content is amazing, the matter of content is amazing. The thing is, is that like the field of content in general will be, it will be, is, has been whatever, completely burned down. So you're gonna have to move on to a different form of marketing anyway. So who cares?

Digital Rebels Consulting (49:56.892)
Yeah, makes sense. It goes back to like a starter session on AI powered everything. So it's just, I'll be coming come monetize and garbage. So you need to pivot away from that. Most likely number 10 net promoter scores.

Alex (50:10.931)
Never really use it, but seems to me build it. mean, I, yeah, I mean, yeah, seems like a good idea to me. Can't, I can't see any reason to burn that. What do you think? Do you disagree?

Digital Rebels Consulting (50:15.015)
customer surveys.

Digital Rebels Consulting (50:24.933)
I say burn it. I don't find the value of most surveys. I think you're just going to get more negative comments back for just people that are angry as opposed to singing your praises. mean, typically not promoter scores. Would you likely recommend my services to somebody else or a friend? the people, most people probably aren't going to answer those questions anyway, cause everyone hates surveys. So for me, it's a burn it.

Alex (50:45.335)
All right, fine. You convinced me. You convinced me. I'm on your phone.

Digital Rebels Consulting (50:51.069)
You get the final word in your book. You say it's not about one big idea. It's about lots of little ones. So let's give a sales and marketing executives one actionable idea that they can implement today in order to help them improve their go-to-market strategy or just do business better.

Alex (51:07.507)
let's pick a good one that we haven't talked about.

this is the first one that springs to mind.

Alex (51:22.123)
What I think is really important is that every business offers one thing, one macro form of value. And then what they do is they then apply that value to multiple different customer groups for whom it means something different. Now, I just wanted to, that sounds like it's, I'm not saying anything, but like just compare that to what you see with most businesses. They do one of two things.

either the business offers something very narrow and specific to one particular target type of customer, and that's all they do. And they're kind of boxed into that narrow lane and they're putting all their eggs in one basket or, all businesses think, right, well, we don't want to put all our bags in one basket. We want to like offer. We want to serve lots of different types of customers. So we're going to come up with different offers for each one of them. And, know, we're almost going to be a different company, different company for these different types of customers. Both of these are like ineffective because that that

the middle way is the company needs to own one space in the market. It needs to be about one thing, but that one thing needs to be applicable in lots of ways. So let's take simple example, IKEA. Everybody knows what IKEA does. IKEA does one thing. They basically do cheap designer furniture, right? And there isn't really anything or anything other than that. But that has an application to students.

That has an application to people furnishing offices. That has an application to young families who've just bought their first house. And all of these people, they get a different form of value out of the same core offer. So what I'm trying to say is to appeal to, you can appeal to loads of different customers and deliver loads of different forms of value with one single offer. And that is the way that you build scale.

and memorability and power with any brand. And yet in B2B in particular, I never see people doing this. always take the, we're to be a hundred different companies for a hundred different customers kind of approach. Which yeah, anyway, that's my, that's my brand.

Digital Rebels Consulting (53:28.771)
Love it. And where can people find more about basic arts in Alex Smith?

Alex (53:32.651)
Well, if you want some lovely gated content, well, ungated content, you can go to my YouTube, Alex M.H. Smith. You can go to my LinkedIn, where I'm pumping stuff out every single day, Alex M.H. Smith. But then I also put a bunch of resources, my book, and then a sort of a free no bullshit strategy toolkit with a whole bunch of like tools and exercises you can use.

on my website at basicarts.org forward slash welcome. So there's loads of goodies there and that's just one of them you can check.

Digital Rebels Consulting (54:10.863)
Very nice. Thank you for joining the show. was a pleasure having you on.

Alex (54:14.452)
Cheers mate, that was fun.

Digital Rebels Consulting (54:16.133)
Cheers.


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