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How to beat your competitors by creating a winning Competitive Advantage In this article, we ask how to beat your competitors by creating a winning Competitive Advantage, and we offer ten ways to be better than the competition. 1. Understand Your Core Expertise Finding out what your business does is not as straightforward as it sounds. Yes, you may sell widgets, but is that what your customers think you sell? They are buying a solution to their problem. So start thinking about the problems you solve. Once you have found your real expertise, focus on it. Understand all that can be known about your product or service. Study the market and look at your competitors. Look at businesses in other similar market sectors. You need to understand your particular products and services better than anyone else. A word of warning, though. You may know everything you need to know about your industry. But always keep an open mind to developments and new ways of doing things. What is Competitive Intelligence? Competitive intelligence is the finding, sorting and critical analysis of information. To make sense of what’s happening and why. Predict what’s going to happen and give the options to help you control the outcome. Competitive intelligence offers certainty, competitive advantage, insight, growth & security. 2. What does your business castle stand for? Understand what your business stands for is a fundamental question. If you don’t know the answer, you’re going to have difficulty telling your customers. And just as importantly, differentiating yourself from the competition. If you don’t know, you can expect they won’t know either. So they will treat you and your competitors as a commodity. 3. Train your team well It isn’t enough just to know what your business does. Your teams need to understand as well. You need to be constantly training, informing and improving. Everyone in your team needs to be consistently getting better. And focused on the competitive environment. Exploiting your strengths and competitive advantage. 4. Improve everything you do To beat your competitor, you must improve in everything you do: Challenge your team to improve every single day. Create the mindset that nothing is ever sufficient and everything can be improved. Improve how you process customer documentation, your customer communications, website, training, distribution and data. Track your competitive environment Look at how your core competency can be improved by everyone little by little every day. 5. Learn how to sell Learning how to sell seems a little obvious. And it’s soo much more than just bringing in sales executives armed with a virtual telephone book. Selling doesn’t mean pushing products. There’s an art to sales. And few people actually understand. Sales is significantly more complex than most believe, and a team is an even more difficult task. And the most important thing to know about sales is that it is not sales. It’s business development. Its relationship development….. People don’t know what they don’t know People don’t buy from your company. They buy from you People don’t like being pressured by salespeople So get your sales teams to be business relationship developers. Get to know your customers. Become friends without crossing the line of customer and supplier relationships. 6. Give outstanding customer service Customer service is the easiest thing to get wrong and get right. Excellent Customer service needs to be at the core of everything you do. Most of the problems and Competitive Advantage occurs with communication. Try to talk to customers as much as possible, be very helpful and if there is a problem, sort it quickly. Many of your competitors tell the world that they are excellent at customer service. Very few will be able to prove it. But you won’t know that unless you look for yourself. See how they do things and how they treat customers. Fantastic customer service is more than just words on a mission statement. It’s about spreading the attitude across your entire business. And is the lifeblood to what you stand for. 7. Focus on the flag Your flag, your brand isn’t just a logo and website. It’s about what you do. Who you are as people and what you stand for. And how you portray your message to the world. These messages, attitudes, and tone of voice need to be consistent across platforms. From answering the phone to website messaging. Aim to be consistent with social media messages. 8. Protect your moat You will have competitors who sell the same stuff as you. Do the same things as you and are as good, if not better at it, as you. That’s the truth. To beat the competition. And create a tremendous Competitive Advantage, you need to work out what you can offer. What differentiates you from other companies in your industry. Been seen as a specialist will help scale and create an even more successful business. You will find it easier to keep your current customers. Get yourself to tradeshows. Meet suppliers and look for new products and services to bring to the market. However, bear in mind the next item. 9. You can’t help everyone It’s essential to remain focused on your core competency. It’s easy to get sidetracked with new things. And change your business model to take the new stuff into account. After all, more services or saying something different will bring in more customers? Yes? Erm… rarely. Your message can get diluted. The market confused about what you do? With customers asking what are you doing now. We, too, have been guilty of this in the past. 10. Never stop learning and looking If you look for knowledge and certainty, you’ll be one step ahead of your competition. Many of your competitors are lazy. They do what they have always done and rarely look out of their window at their competitors. They don’t need to. They know what they are doing already. Nothing to worry about there. They have staff who do a job and see training as an expense, or worse, get a guru in to motivate them. Competitor Analysis and Competitive Intelligence is a strategic competition weapon. Use it as such. Conclusion to how to beat your competitors by creating a winning Competitive Advantage. This article asked how to beat your competitors by creating a winning Competitive Advantage. We offer ten ways to be better than the competition. But whatever you do, don’t just copy your competition. It means knowing more about how they work and being better than them. Get to the situation where your competitors try to copy you as you are the shining light in your market.
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Competitive intelligence, Market Analysis, Competitor Analysis, Corporate Investigations, Commercial Intelligence, Market Intelligence, Competitor Res,
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