How Templates Wreck Revenue Growth & Profit

To this day, it was one of the best ideas I had ever heard.

In the midst of a weekly consulting session with an elite mid-market senior leadership team, the topic was sameness, the business disease that’s reached epidemic proportions – and the primary reason why sales organizations exist.  (The higher the customer demand quotient, the less there is a need for traditional sales and marketing.)

A young, bright rising executive sought proof of sameness, and suggested we pull website home pages of the firm’s top 10 competitors.  Once company names were removed, the comparison was stunning.  The leadership team not only had a hard time discerning between any of the businesses pasted on the wall, the team also struggled to determine which was their home page.

Rising star then said, “This is interesting, right?  Even though all of these companies claim to be different from one another, including us, the various web design firms chose to present the information with pre-determined templates, causing many to look alike.  No wonder our customers don’t see a clear choice.”

The exercise continued, with the group exploring the sameness dilemma within key tabs, including About Us and Why Choose (company name).  The consensus was that a complete, customized refresh was necessary to reflect the firm’s newly minted unprecedented value proposition.

As I’m sure you’d agree, it’s almost impossible to let people know how you will matter to them – and show how much you care – when you appear like everyone else, courtesy of templates.  A pattern is often created in the name of efficiency, but when efficiency supersedes all-important customer messaging and overall brand, the P&L will and does suffer.

Consider the importance of your new hires.  Are you really going to trust a bot, one that scans keywords within resumes, to cull the highest character, best culture fit candidates?

If you want to have fun, consider making a list of how many templates are currently forced upon you by providers across a plethora of partners (web design; banking; HR; email platforms; branding; etc.), then loosely calculate how much sameness is eating away at your bottom line.

NOTE:  If you’d like to learn more about how care-ful customization can make your P&L shine, please refer to Chapters 13, 14 and 16 in Clean Slate, now available on Amazon.