A few years ago, I wrote here about the Flower Model—the tool we developed at Relative Advantage to help every salesperson know exactly what they’re offering, and allow the customer to connect with them from the right place for them.
Since then, we’ve worked with dozens more businesses and learned something important: the model isn’t just for telemarketers. It’s a working tool that every business owner needs—to understand what their offer truly is, and to stop selling the same thing to everyone in the same way.
A Quick Reminder: What Exactly Is the Flower Model?
Imagine a flower with your business at its center, and from each petal emerges a different advantage you offer: professionalism, personal service, price, availability, experience, service. The idea is simple yet powerful—every customer connects from a different angle. Someone who values professionalism will connect through the professionalism petal. Someone looking for personal service will connect from there. Your job is to identify which petal the customer in front of you wants to enter through—not to push them toward the petal that’s convenient for you.
How to Build Your Own Flower, Step by Step
- Step 1 – Mapping: Write down all the advantages of your business—even those that seem obvious to you.
- Step 2 – Filtering: Keep only the five to six core advantages that truly differentiate you.
- Step 3 – Adaptation: For each advantage, write one sentence that illustrates it in the customer’s language, not yours.
- Step 4 – Practice: Practice identifying, within the first thirty seconds of the conversation, which petal the customer connects with.
- Step 5 – Update: The flower is a living document. Update it every few months based on what actually works in the field.
Why This Creates Repeatable Success, Not Luck
One-time success happens when you accidentally found the right angle with one customer. Repeatable success happens when you have a method you can replicate, again and again, with every new customer. The Flower Model is exactly that method: it takes what looks like the “gut feeling” of a successful salesperson and turns it into a process that can be taught, measured, and replicated across your entire team.
That’s precisely the meaning of “Relative Advantage”—not guessing what will work, but knowing exactly what your advantage is with each customer, and using it consciously. If you haven’t built your own flower yet, now is the time to start.
