5 Tips for Beating your Business Competitors
Business management consultant
1. - Do Some Sleuthing. - If you’re truly concerned about the competition licking at your heels, check their businesses out thoroughly yourself.
You need to experience what customers are experiencing there. See how their pricing or product mix or the overall encounter compares with your own. Certain other ways of spying on your competition can be helpful as well, as long as they’re all ethical and above-board.
2. - Form a “Club”. - Even if your business competition is primarily local, every now and then it’s a good idea to see how other companies in your industry, around the region or across the country, are doing things as well. You might even want to create an affiliation of geographically dispersed companies in your industry (therefore ensuring that they are non-competitive with one another) who could help one another immensely because they’re all in the same business and faced with basically the same challenges.
3. - Take Some Pre-emptive Steps. - If it’s not too late, ward off competition from the start by raising the barriers to entry in your niche. You might try to develop exclusive relationships with distributors of the hottest merchandise in your field, for example, which prevents competition from overlapping your product mix. Or issue a price guarantee that ensures your place is the last one a customer will visit before making a purchase decision.
4. - Re-energize your Customer Base. - It’s always going to be true that your best customers are the ones you have. Figure out every way possible to make them even better customers. That probably starts with having a database of information about them whether you deal with B2B purchasing agents or ordinary consumers and using it to the hilt. Contact them about new products or with reminders that they’re on your mind (and, implicitly, not on your competitors’). Continually look for opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell.
5. - Get Back to your Entrepreneurial Roots. - If you’re going through a period of self-doubt, sluggish sales, or some kind of paradigm-wrenching change in your startup business, scrape everything else away and get back to the bedrock of your business. Recall the spirit and creativity and enthusiasm that led you to startup in the first place, and then do whatever you can do to rekindle those attributes. Maybe it’s simply getting away from the business for a few days to escape your routine, recharge your batteries and get the entrepreneurial juices flowing again.
Source: Startupnation
Patty Block, President and Founder of The Block Group, established her company to advocate for women-owned businesses, helping them position their companies for strategic growth. Charting the course for impactful, sustainable, profitable businesses, the beacon is control: of your strategic direction, your money, your time, your staffing, and your ability to bring in business. The Block Group brings together the people, resources and ideas that build results.
Business management consultant.
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