Is competition a necessary component for success for a start-up?
A start-up needs to check the competitors; if not, there is no other way to learn about your business. Selecting a competitor must be from the same industry and in the same area where your business exists.
These are the reasons to check a competitor.
- Quality of the product
- Customer services
- Customers
- Suppliers
- Marketing activities
- Product pricing
- Customer loyalty systems.
- The personality of the CEO
- Annual report if that is a limited company.
When you check, you will learn more about your business- how to run your business successfully to get more customers. Also, easy to find your target audience following your competitors’ methods. But I must insist on never copying them in anything because you might fall into severe problems and then lose your business.
Let me explain each item you will investigate your competitor’s business.
Quality of the product
You must compare the quality of the products as it will help to achieve more customers if the quality of your product is better than there is; that is also called competitive advantage. If the rate is low, ensure the standard of the product is higher than the competitors; otherwise, they will never be able to grow the business.
Customer services
You must develop a better service than your competitors to drag the customer to your business; service means paying great attention to your customers, paying attention to their needs, and showing integrity for the customer to like you and your business.
Customers
Finding out the customers of your competitor helps you because you can easily find your target customers. Besides, create a customer persona to decide who might become interested in your business. So, it makes it easy for you to get more customers for your business.
Suppliers
Finding suppliers is also helpful when checking competitors’ suppliers; otherwise, finding the wrong supplier can harm your business. Late deliveries, not keeping up with an agreed arrangement, issues with the quality of the products, or problems with the refunds, and you might face huge issues like that if you make a mistake in selecting the supplier.
Marketing activities
It will help when searching the competitors to find the right way to market your product, which allows you to save yourself from the wrong way of promoting the products. If you use improper methods, there will be short sales and unnecessary testing costs to find the right ways to promote your products. But ensure that they refrain from copying the competitors’ methods and can make innovations and use their methods so that they might get more sales.
Product pricing
Pricing products is one of the crucial tasks to avoid many disappointments in business. However, only compare other businesses’ pricing because they might need to correct their pricing structure. The business owner does the calculations taking into all the costs involved in the production and the profit expected in the product sales. If the price is high, it will have few sales; if it is low, there could be more sales, but there might need to be more profitable.
Customer loyalty systems.
A business must show loyalty to customers to develop trust in the industry; therefore, the customers will not quickly move away from you and begin to depend on you for everything they need.
The personality of the CEO
The CEO is the main person who represents a business; therefore, she must have an excellent personality and sound knowledge of dealing with customers’ needs when in the company. Say a customer walks in with complaints about the services CEO will be the person who should attend to the customer to resolve the issues, so everything depends on the customer service that provides; if not, they will leave as quickly as possible.
Annual report if that is a limited company.
It is easy to learn a lot from a company’s annual reports as it has all the necessary information that could help a start-up learn new things from a competitor’s report.
