Give Your Business the Competitive Edge It Needs with These Tips

March 8, 2017


In a sense, business is all about competition. Even if you don’t feel very much like you need to focus on your competition, the truth is that you are competing with others at all times, and it is in your interest to try and ensure that you end up on top. Giving your business the competitive edge is something that you will need to learn to do well if you want to succeed in the long run, so it is well worth taking a look at the following points. Here, we are going to look at some of the major things that can help in giving your business the edge in its practices. Follow these guidelines, and you really can’t go far wrong.

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Filed Under: Management Tagged With:

How can Small Businesses Leverage Free Technology to Gain Competitive Edge

August 8, 2015

Smartphone
In the age of Amazon and Walmart – the behemoths that can sell their products at cut-throat prices by leveraging their scale and technology – do small businesses stand any chance to survive? Those who are old enough to remember know that small businesses were the mainstay of American business landscape before large department stores and grocery chains drove many of them out of business. Those small businesses simply could not compete with them on price.

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Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: ,

3 Must Follow Strategies for Small Business to Compete Globally

December 9, 2014

Competition
If you’re looking to compete in today’s competitive global marketplace, your business is going to need a wide range of strategies to help it achieve success. When we live in a world where 4 out of 5 new small businesses fail, it’s essential that if you run a small business, you do everything you can to maximise the chances of success, and that means implementing strategies that will help you to beat your global competition.

So what does that mean? Well, in this post we’ll run down three of the best strategies to help you give your company a strong global presence.

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Filed Under: Management Tagged With:

Do You Know Who Your Competitors Are?

March 20, 2014

Do you know who your competitors are
It’s a very simple question. Let’s say you own and operate a restaurant that serves pizza and pasta at a busy corner of high traffic downtown area. Who do you think you are competing with? Is it another restaurant that also serves Italian food within ½ a mile of your restaurant? How about the McDonald’s across the street? Now, take it one step further. How about the store that sells ready-to-eat meals that people can take home when they don’t have time to cook? A relatively simple sounding question can open up multiple possibilities when you think hard. Taking a simplistic view of the competition can hurt your business in the short-term and put you out of business in the long-term.

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Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: ,

Do not Take these 5 Actions when New Competitor Moves to your Neighborhood

June 16, 2012


The scenario may look familiar to many small business owners. You are doing a brisk business with loyal customer base. The sales are growing steadily. You are making decent profit. The same holds true for other competitors in the neighborhood. The existing customers in the town are divided between your and other businesses. In short, equilibrium has been established amongst existing businesses.
And then, a new competitor decides to get a piece of the action. Suddenly, everything changes. The new competitor tries to grab customers with lower price and increased marketing. The existing ones try to hold onto their customers. Employees will leave for bigger opportunities. It’s as if someone threw a stone in the calm waters causing ripples everywhere in the neighborhood.
The initial reaction for many existing business owners may be to counter the new competitor with force right away to ensure these ripples do not cause significant damage to your boat. However, this may be a mistake. The best strategy may be to watch and plan for the future before taking radical steps. In particular, it is important NOT to do the following right away.
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Use Scarcity Tactics to Increase Sales

April 14, 2012


What is the best way to get rid of products that are not selling well? You can reduce the price to generate more demand. But there is a way better way to manage it. It is known as scarcity principle and it works by making customers believe that the item will not be available if they wait longer. The technique works because of human psychology that makes people want something more when they are told they cannot have it. Fear of losing out on something can be a powerful motivator.
You don’t have to use this principle to sell only slow moving items. You can incorporate it in the normal marketing practice to increase the sales of regular products. If you look around you will notice that many businesses are already using this principle in various forms. QVC always shows how many items are left when promoting their products on television. The last few items are always sold very quickly. When a sales person tells us that the item is out of stock, but he can probably find it at another store your reaction will always be to order it so as not to miss out from that store too.
There are several approaches you can take to implement this scarcity principle in practice as shown below:
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing, Sales Tagged With: ,

Factors that Influence Pricing

April 10, 2012


Pricing is both an art as well as science as we discussed in earlier post on Ten Commandments of pricing. There is no one right way to determine the price of products or services you are selling. To a large extent, the price is based on the value customers perceive to get from the product and what they are willing to pay for it.
The law of pricing says that you should charge each customer the exact amount he/she is willing to pay for it for maximum profit. This is how auction system works. You let each customers announce how much he wants to pay and pick the highest bid. While it would be ideal to determine the price in this fashion, in practice it becomes a challenge to sell your products this way. That’s why it is necessary for business owners to come up with an advertised price and augment it with other ways such as coupons to attract more customers.
So what factors do you need to consider when pricing your products and services?
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Filed Under: Customers, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Why is it More Fun to be Apple than Dell?

March 24, 2012


Here is a hint… It has to do with pricing power… And that can lead to lot of fun things.
Pricing products or services is a very complicated decision. And yet, it is probably the most important decision small business owners need make. Charge too little for your products and you will leave money on the table. Charge too much and you will lose customers and sales. You have to strike a perfect balance between the two ends of the spectrum to come up with the price that your customers will be willing to pay for and enable you to make money. No wonder pricing is considered both and art and science.
Many small business owners hold myth that they can attract more customers and increase their sales simply by reducing the price. Nothing could be further from truth. The move may work initially, but it will put you in trouble at the end. We will explain why in a minute.
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Filed Under: Customers, Strategy Tagged With: ,

What Business are you Really in?

January 28, 2012


“What business are you in?” This is one of my favorite questions to ask when we meet with small business owners and entrepreneurs. On surface this appears to be a very simple question. If you are a pizza business owner, of course you are in the business of selling pizza or food. But, think about it in terms of what value are you bringing to your customers rather than what you are selling. Are your customers really craving for pizza or are they looking for the convenience of no cooking and pizza happens to be one of the choices? Are they ordering pizza to feed bunch of kids at a birthday party? Are they looking to satisfy their hunger after late night partying without having to drive to your store? As you can see, how you look at your business can have a significant impact on how you run your business. In fact, it can determine the success or failure of your business down the road.
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Filed Under: Buyers, Customers, Marketing Tagged With: , ,

How do You know if your Business Idea will Succeed

January 24, 2012


Majority of small businesses fail in the first three years. As remarkable as this statistic is, it doesn’t stop number of aspiring entrepreneurs from pursuing their dream of owning a business. They think about their idea as the best thing since sliced bread was invented and are convinced that there is a huge untapped market out there that nobody as cracked. They have run their idea by close confidants and got their endorsement. Uncle Bob likes their product and Aunt Ann can’t wait to get her hand on it. There is only one problem. It is still an idea in your head!!!

So how do you go past this “pie in the sky” idea stage and make it a reality? Even more important, how do you know that this idea will succeed and will not leave you with agony and angst when it’s all over?
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Filed Under: Buyers, Finance, Management Tagged With: , , ,