For small business owners it can often feel like an epic David versus Goliath style battle out there. No matter what industry you are in there are bound to be bigger players with bigger budgets trying to bully their way to your customers. Don’t worry, today is your chance to slay the giants. Winning against the odds isn’t about brute force or going head-to-head in price wars at all. So what’s the secret? Check out the following 7 ways to beat out your biggest competitors this year.
1. Master a Niche
You aren’t going to beat your competitors by taking them head on. They can price products lower than you, make more noise and carry out dirty campaigns to slander you on the web. Instead, focus your resources on taking down one niche and one market segment at a time. Can you position yourself as being faster, easier to deal with or the higher quality option?
2. Fool Your Competitors
The largest corporations spend millions each year researching, spying on you, gathering intelligence and planning their marketing far in advance. This is your opportunity to misinform them. Make them think you are going in one direction so that you can go in another while they waste money and you make it too expensive to compete against you in your real niche.
3. Use Their Budgets Against Them
Piggy back on their successes and oversights and use them against them. How? Try advertising in their YouTube videos and grabbing up the variations of their Internet domain names and toll free numbers they have failed to acquire. Better yet, use monitoring and back order services to grab them when they come up for renewal.
4. Reinvent Their Product
Whether it is ebooks, business leads or toothbrushes there comes a point when consumers expect to pay next to nothing and it can be incredibly difficult to make a profit. That day may have already come for your industry, if not it is on the way. So revolutionize your product or service and add more value. Using the above examples this could be creating multimedia ebooks which can sell for triple the price of others, offering qualified business appointments versus leads and selling them for hundreds of dollars versus a few cents.
5. Inject Your Salespeople with Rocket Fuel
For SMB’s it isn’t just a numbers game, every opportunity must be capitalized on. For salespeople to be effective they must believe in what they are selling and they have to harness a high level of motivation. This means that you must sell them on the fact that your product is the best out there and keep up their desire to close with performance based pay or incentives.
6. Customer Service
If there is one common trait that everyone hates about doing business with big companies it is the terrible customer service. This is your chance to shine and not just win new customers but create raving fans who market for you. Using outsourced staffing, Internet phone services and advanced call routing you can provide 24/7 live customer assistance for round the clock sales and support making your organization the number one choice in your market.
7. Capitalize on Your Speed & Flexibility
One of your biggest assets as a small business is speed and flexibility, so use it. Empower your employees to make decisions so that you can close deals faster and jump on the latest trends first. This includes tweaking your product bundles, adjusting for trending keywords and soaring ahead on new social platforms like Google+.
