Step #3 On How To Win In Business

This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will share with you the final step on how to win in business. A series of actionable principles that you can apply to your business.

So just as a reminder, How to Win in Business. We’ve been doing a series on this based on this book by Jack Welch. Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric. In a 20 year period, he took them from a market value of about $20 billion to $410 billion dollars. An unbelievable growth in their value.

I just thought, you know, there’s some stuff for us to learn in our business. We may not have a $410 billion business but there’s some stuff we can learn.

So let’s have a look. The section today looks at “Your Competition”. Scary isn’t it, because sometimes we don’t like thinking about our competition, do we? But the fact is, we are in a competitive business whether you like it or not and therefore we might as well accept.

Well they are there, how do we handle them?

So “Your Competition”, the first part is around strategy because it’s the offer that you make to the marketplace that will determine how you sit against your competitors. So under the heading of Strategy, the first thing we’ve got there is, competitor strengths and weaknesses.

How do you stack up against your competitors? Who are your competitors? For most practices, unless you’re in Sydney’s CBD, in which case you’ve probably got maybe 50 dentists within a short distance from you.

But many other clients, if you’re slightly out of the CBD it’s probably the people within a five k radius, maybe in a one or two k radius. Who are they and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

And you can just sit down and think about those, because when you know what your competitors are doing that can help you guide your own activity.

The next thing to look at is Risks and the question that Jack Welch poses here is, he says, “What scares you?”. You notice this is kind of a bit uncomfortable, this one, isn’t it? We’re going to think about our competitors. We’re going to look at what scares us.

Well, put it this way. What are you going to do? Ignore what scares you? Ignore what the competitors are doing and then just hope that your competition doesn’t kill you? A much better way is actually to embrace that and go, well, what is it that scares me?

Because if you know what it is that scares you then obviously you can address that.

If what scares me is … it could be to do with services, it could be to do with pricing, there’s a range of different things. Once you know that, you quantify it then you can address it.

Alright. Winning Move. He calls it “Winning Move” and one really critical thing with Winning Move is, make customers sticky. Obviously not literally sticky but how do we get them to stick to your business?

What is it that they value that would mean that you don’t have to worry about these things that scare you but these are the things that keep them coming back.

So I hope that makes sense. Know your competition. Figure out what your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are. Figure out what scares you because then you can address that and then think about what it is that makes your customers sticky.

How about this for an outrageous concept. What if you were to survey your clients? Now, these days with email and there’s a system called SurveyMonkey, you could have an online survey. You could give away an iPad or something and ask your clients what do they value about you?

Because if you’ve got that information you can adjust your services and make them more sticky.

Hope you found that helpful. That’s Your Competition. That’s the end of this series on How to Win in Business. We’ll have something new next week.