Know your enemy - 5 Tips to help you stay ahead of your competitors

A sure-fire way to win business is to give your prospective customers exactly what they're looking for at the right price. This is easy if your product or service is unique and there are no competitors in your space, but how do you maximise incoming business when other businesses which do exactly what you do are circling like sharks?

Leading business management and sales training experts Maguire Training can help businesses to make the most of every sales opportunity courtesy of their excellent course Maximising Incoming Business. Delegates will learn the essential skills of handling incoming calls and enquiries from prospective customers, how to recognise the potential opportunity that each contact offers and will gain the skills and techniques which enable them to create demand for their products and services and use gentle bargaining and persuasion to close a sale.

Firstly, however, any business has to attract the interest of new customers and this can be challenging in a marketplace which contains numerous competitors. Understanding how your competitors tick and what attracts their customers to them is the key to beating them at their own game and steering prospective customers away from them and towards your business. Here, Maguire Training gives you five useful ways in which you can rate your competitors, see how they stack up against you, monitor their activities and stay one step ahead of them.

1. List your competitors and rank their performance in relation to yours

Create a simple league table in which you and your competitors are ranked in order of their performance against criteria which are important to you such as annual sales turnover, size of customer base, popularity of products, positive/negative reviews etc. This should give you a reasonable idea of your company?s standing in the marketplace, who is ahead of you and who is behind.

2. Compare your competitors websites to your own

Imagine that you're a new customer who is looking to buy your particular product or service. Which website sells it to you the best? Yours or a competitor's? It?s said that you have up to 10 seconds to capture a reader's attention with your website; if they don't see what they are looking for immediately they're going to look elsewhere. Note any features of your competitor's websites which might benefit your own but don't directly copy them adapt and improve them.

3. Find out what your competitors are claiming makes them unique?

Could your competitors? unique selling points be the deciding factor in the battle for new customers? Whether they're claiming better prices, more or different product features, a market-leading warranty or returns policy, you should endeavour to offer a USP that really is unique and better, thus differentiating you from the competition and making you more attractive to potential buyers.

4. Check out your competition on social media

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are fertile grounds for cultivating new customers as positive (and negative!) word-of-mouth can spread globally very quickly, immediately boosting a company's popularity. Keeping a regular eye on your competitors social networking activities will give you an insight into the ways in which they interact with customers and how they use these platforms to market themselves effectively. If your business doesn't have an online social networking presence, it might be time to begin one.

5. Do it to them, before they do it to you

The aim of your endeavours is to attract customers away from your competitors and towards your business. Simultaneously you should foster and maintain sound relationships with your existing customers, giving them no reason to suddenly switch allegiance to a competitor. Regular communications to check how well your customers feel you are serving them should give you an indication of any areas of the business in which you might improve.

Maguire Training offers many outstanding courses and modules which can help businesses to attract, delight and retain customers. As well as presenting these in a formal training environment, Maguire Training also offers courses such as Maximising Incoming Business in a convenient online training format. Accessed via Maguire Training's innovative and versatile mobile and E-learning platform, online modules allow delegates to obtain essential and valuable business skills at a time, location and pace that suits them best.