Let’s talk about the importance of knowing the competition.

Why is it important to understand or know more about your competitors? Well, because your customers are wondering. Your customers are asking you questions quite often about how are you better and different from the competition. As we all know, it’s pretty hard to actually compare yourself and differentiate if we don’t really know what the competition is doing.

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So, it’s critical to know what do you do well. What do they do well? How do you stand apart? You may now be wondering “ How exactly do I learn more about the competition?” I’m going to share with you a quick tip.
What I encourage you to do is to do an online search for companies in your space. If you’re a real estate agent, you would type in “real estate” and then your city. If you’re in financial services, you would type in financial services or insurance and your city. Or perhaps something more in niche. Something you specialize in. If you’re in IT, ICT, Infocomm Technology, you may type in tech companies and then your city. And then just see who shows up.

You may already know who your top 3 competitors are because you’re probably bidding against them all the time. So then just visit their websites. Research their web pages. See what do they do well. What do they, maybe, not do so well? What’s their pricing strategy? What are their packages, promotions, their products or services?
Learn everything you can about the competition and then compare them with what you’re doing. So at least you’ll be able to know what are your points of differentiation. Hence, when you’re speaking with customers, you could speak very confidently and clearly about that.

One final tip here around talking to customers about competitors. From time to time, your customers will ask you, “Hey, how are you better or different than that guy down the street?” You want to try to be respectful. We never talk bad about the competition because, honestly, it only makes us look bad. And to be quite frank, if they’ve actually dealt with that company before and we start talking badly about them, it kind of sends a subconscious message to our customer that they made a bad choice, and we never want to do that.

So, we don’t really talk about the competition. We only focus on what we do and what we do best. Try to keep the focus squarely on you, your company, and how you can help your customers.

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