16 things keeping SME owners awake - 5. I’m worried about my competitors.
Competitors. We love them, but as the old saying goes – I couldn’t eat a whole one. These people are both the bane of your life and the people who, if viewed constructively, show the way to your future success. You get to choose which.
Unless your business is really in a terminal state, you have something unique to offer the world. When it’s tough, you can lose sight of this when things start spinning out around you but keep at least part of your thinking focused on what makes you special and different and how to exploit that in the market.
Information is power and some of the most valuable information, or “market intelligence” is working out who your competitors are, where they overlap with you, where they are better than you, where you are better than them, who they do business with that you don’t and vice versa. Once you work out who and what they are, you can use that to modify your position to strengthen your unique offering.
Customers aren’t king necessarily, but they are what stands between you and the dole queue. Take this time to really dig in and get close to them so you deeply understand what a perfect customer experience would look like from their perspective. You may have some ideas but in the end, they’ll tell you what they want to see. They’re often just waiting around to be asked.
This comes up regularly, but continuous improvement needs to be a core part of BAU (business as usual). We’ve talked about it before. Don’t always be looking for the king hit solution for all ills. Sure, keep an eye out, but accept you may never find it. What is guaranteed is that small, incremental improvements can be found every minute of every day. Ironically, a quiet and simple continuous improvement programme can deliver all the benefits of the silver bullet at a fraction of the cost.
Related to continuous improvement is innovation and adaptation. Standing still is seldom the answer to anything except when you’re in very important moments of quiet reflection. Always be looking for what’s changing in the market and how you can adapt your current offering and approach to meet the shifting market, or find something innovative that will create a paradigm shift that puts you and your products/services in a new light with customers.
Business is all about relationships. Yes, products and services are at the core, but think about a situation where you and your competitor have products/services that are closely comparable. You’ve got two differentiator levers to pull. One is price but the other (much cheaper one) is a refreshed approach to customer relationships. If everything else is equal between you and a competitor, you can guarantee the customers will flock to the place where they have the strongest and most constructive relationships, including trust, generosity and empathy. Let that be you, not the other guy.
You may have it super clear in your own mind what differentiates you from your competitors. That’s because you’ve done your homework and know it intimately. On the other hand, you may not which means you need to get onto it. Importantly, your customers may not have a good picture about what makes you better than the other lot. Find the critical and valuable differences and craft them into simple messages that are easily digested and remembered by customers.
Price is almost always a consideration, but a race to the bottom is seldom a good idea. I’d urge you to stop thinking about price and start talking about value for money, or total cost of ownership. Yes you can buy what we sell for $250.00 from a competitor for $100.00 and they look pretty much the same and do pretty much the same thing. But, if you can demonstrate that your $250.00 thing will last for 5 years vs the other one with a life expectancy of 2 years and further that parts are always available for your thing while theirs takes up to four months to supply, you are now in a different conversation. Price v Value.
In the wild west, they used to circle the wagons when there was trouble looming. Everyone looked after their own interests by looking after others with similar interests. In that case, staying alive and not getting scalped. In this situation, find the complementary businesses to yours who would benefit as much as you would from taking a collaborative approach.
If you have a broad range and do a little bit of everything for everybody, try a niche tactic. Choose your most promising product/service and go hard and deep with showcasing it to a highly targeted audience, demonstrating that you aren’t just generalists. You actually have deep knowledge to share about specific things. This will help shift the customer view of you being a lightweight generalist and can bring a much deeper and more inquisitive approach from customers who appreciate deeper understanding and its public face – support.
If you’re feeling worried about competitors, embark on a wee journey of discovery. Not just what your competitors are doing, but what is over the horizon that could be a threat or an opportunity for you. The more you know, the better position you will be in to take educated responses to things as they occur.
Back to increased knowledge. Invest in team training and development. Consider carefully what would make the biggest difference for the individual in their role or for career progression and thereby extra value to the business. Don’t go down the track of giving everyone the same blancmange training. Laser focus on the individual. They will be better equipped to support your customers and they will deliver greater value by the motivation that comes from being recognised and treated as an individual.
There’s a small difference between customer experience and customer feedback. Focus on customer experience is the process of you designing an end-to-end experience that will please customers and make them more “sticky” Customer feedback is not the same. It is a deliberate outreach to customers to find out what they actually think about you. You can use it before and after a customer experience adjustment to show how the needle has moved. To make it as objective and data driven as possible, we use NPS (Net Promoter Score) to get uncluttered responses that can be used for continuous improvement.
Although it might go without saying, it shouldn’t in the circumstances. You need to maintain a degree of positivity. Look for the potential positives and highlight them when you find them. The truth is you might have to manufacture some positives from time to time. But key is keeping your team focused and confident about your collective ability to deal with whatever competitor threat might throw at you.
If at any stage you would like to reach out and talk in more detail about any or all these issues, or even ones that aren’t mentioned, please call me on +64 275 665 682, email me at john.luxton@regenerationhq.co.nz or book a time to talk, either face to face or by Zoom. Any call will be free, confidential and with no obligation to do anything else.