Learning From Your Competition

You can and should better your business by learning from your competition. Most business owners visit the competition to see how they have done a certain thing and point out everything the competition has done wrong.

It is important to remember that it is only your opinion what the competition is doing wrong and how it contrasts with how you plan to do things.Additionally, if they are successful, they may be doing more things right than you give them credit for, or else they would have probably folded years ago.

Learning from your competition is also looking at what they are doing right, it is important to know that before you try to steal some of their market share.

Look for the little things that may seem insignificant but affect how their customers feel about the store. Cleanliness is one of the most common complaints from customers who often equate a dirty or messy unorganized store with lack of service as well as lack of quality in the products they sell.

One key area in all public outlets that can quickly bring a customer back or run them out the door is the cleanliness of any public restrooms. If you allow the restroom to go unattended, customers will have unmentionable opinions about how the business is run, and probably will only come back if it is absolutely necessary.

In many instances pricing is going to be fairly close and businesses rarely succeed and grow based solely on their pricing structure. Any customer you attract based only on the price of your products or services will be a customer lost when lower prices become available elsewhere.

Friendly, knowledgeable service is probably the most important selling point for any business. Letting the customer know all the good things about a product they are interested in may require you to actually look at the owner’s manual, but it can translate into a sale rather than an empty promise by the customer to stop in later.If you are hoping to have any impact on your market share you have to be willing to look objectively at another similar business as their customers see them.

The competition is very hard also with online businesses and it is important to know what marketing techniques they are using to make sales or how their website or blog looks, do they have a newsletter, are they showing up on search engines on which keywords and so on.Take some time to learn from your competition online, because they are learning from you as well.