These are four questions you should be asking yourself when comparing your products and services to that of your competitors:
1: What is it that we do that our competitors also do?
2: What is it that we do that makes us come out better than our competitors?
3: What are we doing to make sure we stay better than our competitors?
No, you don’t ask yourself what the competitor is doing better than you. In most cases, when you look at a category where you are trailing behind the completion, you look to see what they are doing and then scramble your forces in an effort to attempt to out do them. It is extremely difficult to beat the established leader at their own game.
I call this living by an “Advantage: Us” standard. When you know your strengths, you have the advantage of working to ensure they continue to be your strengths. This viewpoint may seem a little short sided, but an “Advantage: Us” playbook will easily push back any pretenders to your throne in the eye of the customer. Just make sure you really are better than your competition for the reasons you are stating.
That doesn’t get you off the hook for the areas where you are at a disadvantage. You must acknowledge your company’s shortcoming and make note of areas where you are trailing the competition. But don’t get overly stressed. Unless your company is at the brink of going under, you will continue to get much better results by knowing why you are the leader in your field, and by doing what you can to ensure you stay that way. Just deal with the areas where you are lagging behind the competition by working hard to grow and improve, until you find yourself on par, or even better, than your competition. Then you ask yourself questions number 2 or 3 for that area.
Until then, your forth question is:
4: What else is left for us to do?Labels: Advantage: US, business, customer service, employees, expectation, goal, jobs, management |
