6 Tips to Help Your Business Stay Ahead of the Competition

Published on: 25 May 2018 Last Updated on: 03 September 2024
Help Your Business

With the ever-growing technological advancements, the business landscape has been changing rapidly. Without a competitive advantage, it’s difficult to make meaningful profits that can fuel your business. It is therefore important to concentrate on your competitors and come up with easy to offer better products and services to the customers.

If you intend to outperform the competition, you must be willing to create a competitive advantage for your business. It’s one of the reasons why some ideas that seem average achieve outstanding success. Here, you’ll learn a few tips to give your business a boost and become better than the competition.

Balance your strengths and weaknesses :

Just because your competitors have developed a superior product that is offered at a lower market price doesn’t imply that you’ve lost the fight. The truth is that every company has a few weak points that you can exploit.

Your main goal is to find the weaknesses and ensure that your brand is performing better.  For instance, you can focus on offering extended guarantees or a better customer service to your clients. During your marketing campaigns and presentations, you should make sure that all your target audience understands the unique selling points and how they can benefit them.

Look for bigger clients :

When you win a bigger client, you can be sure that you’ll have better revenues as a result of increased business. This implies that you’ll have enough resources to run your marketing campaigns as well as recruiting top talent.

At times, it can be easier to deal with a big client since they have established systems. On the contrary, small clients tend to have more service problems and you need to dedicate more attention to them. Most importantly, working with a huge client will give you some leverage in terms of social proof when you intend to look for even bigger customers.

Focus on the fundamentals :

When your competitor introduces a brand new product in the market or develops an extravagant marketing strategy, it’s easy to panic. But when you take a closer look at the fundamental principles behind the offering, you’ll realize that most of the add-ons are just for showoff.

Unless your competitors are focusing on creating a customer base built on their burn rates, they aren’t doing anything that should scare you. Therefore, the hype they may have generated doesn’t reflect the true picture on the ground.

As such, the most important aspect is to consider what is adding value to the business as well as grow the bottom line.

Plan less and conduct lots of tests :

When you are running a small business, your main advantage is the mobility and flexibility. Instead of attempting to be perfect, focus on accomplishing more tasks that allow you to innovate. On the other hand, a bigger organization has a tendency to be sluggish when completing tasks. This can be attributed to the lengthy planning process that requires several authorizations.

Basically, numerous plans and forecasts are not always useful. At the end of the day, you end up testing few ideas since you’ll have invested lots of time in pre-action tasks. Successful business people understand that competitive markets are not easy to predict especially when you want to introduce a new service or product. As such, your best option is to take action and test the idea in the market.

When you invest in tests, you are bound to gain insight and improve your products. Most importantly, you’ll be able to focus on satisfying the market needs and compete more efficiently.

Outside advice is critical :

While it’s important to listen to the people working in your business, the truth is that they have dedicated most of their attention to executing the ideas. This means that it’s easy to be oblivious to market changes happening outside the organization. More often than not, prompt execution of planned tasks seems to be the most appropriate thing to do when you want to make progress.

Nevertheless, getting some insight from an outsider can be quite instrumental in getting an idea of what the clients expect. This input can guide you in adjusting your services and products as well as gain a unique competitive advantage.

Seek innovative ways to disrupt the market :

When you stick to the status quo, it’s likely that you won’t be able to come up with new things. Instead, be on the lookout for different methods of doing things by testing various approaches. In the long run, this makes your business prepared to take advantage of new and lucrative opportunities.

However, being innovative also means that you will need more funds to keep your business going. Unfortunately, cash flow problems are one of the issues plaguing the small business sector. But this doesn’t have to stop you.

The truth is that you can take advantage of small business loans from justrightloans.com and keep your finances in order. With financial products like business lines of credit, you can have access to funds whenever the need arises. In the end, you will be more prepared to compete with your rivals.

Conclusion :

In business, even the smallest competitive advantage can have a huge impact on the outcome. Therefore, your main responsibility is to find ways of becoming better than your competition. At least, this is a sure way of ensuring you stay in business for a long time.

Read Also :

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

View all posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related

Call Center Industry

Top 4 Creative Team Building Ideas for a Call Center Industry This 2020

Call Center employees are into a most demanding job as they represent the human face of a specific brand or organization while delivering one of the best excellent customer services. Given the intense rhythm of a call center and sometimes isolated nature of an agent's work, team building in a call center industry is considered to be the most essential thing of motivating the employees, enhancing their sense of camaraderie, and sharing their learning driving their productivity. Given here are the five major ideas and strategies for bringing out the team spirit in a call center through team-building activity. 4 Creative Team Building Ideas for a Call Center Industry: 1. Role Play: Roleplay generally shows the customer service representatives that they could rely on their team members for advice and feedback, giving them an opportunity to ask questions about how they could handle calls in a better manner, allowing employees to walk away from the session with some tips that could apply while receiving calls. Have employees act out scripts one with a customer calling placing an order, and the other disgruntled customer who has not received an order yet. Have your employee being acted as a customer while the other as the customer representative and then switching their roles again. 2. Gamification: Gamification is one of the most popular trends in the call center industry posing a variety of benefits such as healthy competition, optimizing the training of all the call center employees, and employee motivation to succeed. Call center industry representatives would here compete with each other in order to reach specified goals like achieving first call resolution or signing into new accounts. Gamification is here likely being used to train and assess the agents in a fun yet meaningful way. Agents would share one of the best practices with their friends and employees while being motivated to achieve their best for every business activity they have been doing. 3. Hosting a holiday drive: During a holiday season have your employees work as a team to collect items for a charity drive. To begin collecting from toys and all the non-perishable foods in order to winter the clothing and blankets. So plan to donate to one or the other several households or to a non-profit organization. Call center to begin to be fulfilled, as they give the community back with the things they need, and continue to feel proud that they along with their fellow co-worker making a difference. Once the drive ends to reinforce the idea of working as a team in order to achieve the goals relating the ideas to provide one of the best services over the phone. 4. Shared Learning: Agents would continue to feel like a team where their ideas are heard and exchanged among the team members. And in addition to meeting the above best practices, call centers could here make a step further encouraging the employees to read books together in a book club format attending a webinar that is related to their business, or taking classes with the continuous post-activity decision on internal social networks exchanging ideas and take away. To conclude Call center organizations are typically a force behind the success of customer service and sales, so it does become critical enough to foster a team spirit through call center team building that would recognize the individual potential while establishing their common goals and best practices. Through the team building activities, the employee would here tend to feel more motivated enough to do their best while learning and meeting their professional goals. Read Also: Five Things Every Great Leader Should Know 7 Startup Essentials Entrepreneurs Should Know About 5 Steps To Accelerate The Growth Of Your Startup Why Your Business Needs Call Center Tracking How Business Leadership Plays An Important Role In Business Success?

READ MOREDetails
Productive Home Office

8 Tried and Tested Secrets of a Productive Home Office

Whether you are an entrepreneur or you run your own business from home, or you are simply doing your office work,  offices in the home are more than just a simple working space. Not only it gives you the freedom to work with ease, but it’s also a place where your work productivity depends upon. You can also transform your garage into your Productive home office. You can use the garage space for your office creation. If you are in a home and want space to not affect your productivity, here are some of the tips to help you: Different Tips You Can Follow For Creating Productive Home office   There are different tips and tricks you can apply for creating your Productive home office. In this article, you will get the complete details of it. Try to follow some key tips that can work well in your favor. Do not make your choices in grey as it can defame your dreams. Do not make things more complicated for yourself. 1. Be A Mouse Find a nook and start working. Be it a corner of your room, or the divided study, find the space that makes you feel comfortable while working.  Also, make sure that the place doesn’t amalgamate with noisy rooms. Busy rooms make the worst space to work, so find a distraction-free space where you can focus. 2. Declutter Space Although it's obvious to see extra pens and papers swimming on your desk, they can detract from your work and can hamper your productivity. Let your space think so that you can work peacefully. Allot different space to everything with your working device only on the table. 3. Segregated Log House If you have kids at home who constantly keep you nagging between your work, you surely need an individual workspace. While a study would be fine, kids can invade that too. However, you can construct a small log home to work in peace. You can even go for a log cabin kit if you don’t wish to build a complete house. 4. Green Can Help Make your workspace look appealing by bringing some outdoors into your space. A plant on the desk or floor is the perfect way to add a fresh feel to space. This will also give you a break from the screen when needed and will look pleasing to the eyes. You can add a small cactus or a succulent if you are not a fan of huge planters and pots. 5. Comfort Is Important Don’t create such an environment as you are napping, but you can incorporate something comfortable to relax during breaks. Since it’s hard to be focused by constantly straining to see screens, good and comfortable seating will prevent your fatigue and will increase productivity. Invest in a good office chair or a couch. If you are tired of seating too long, have a standing table in one corner. Things like small cushions, anti-glare screens and more can up your comfort level allowing you to stay focused during work. 6. Lighting Maximize work by incorporating good lighting to boost energy and also to reduce eye strain. If possible, increase natural light and let the fresh air come in. If it's impossible to bring natural light, use bright white bulbs to make the room look brighter. 7. Color Color can make a huge difference to your productivity, so use it smartly. While soft hues can give you soothing effects, yellow hues aim to increase creativity and induce a feeling of relaxation. So choose the colors that suit your personality and bring them into your productive home office. You can also add colors through accent wall painting or can paint the entire space. 8. Scents Also Work The key to staying active all day is a nice smelling room, and that means incorporating scents. You can use peppermint to add freshness and to energize the space. Also, peppermint can help you concentrate on your work.  If peppermint is not your smell, use citrus scents to de-stress and to uplift mood. Diffused candles and essential oil diffusers are also a great way to make your scented game strong and your room refreshing. Well, it’s no secret that the office environment plays a major role in your product. However, the above tips can also help you to create a productive home office. Final Take Away Hence, these are some of the factors that you have to take care of while you want to build your own productive home office space that is essential for your business. Try to make things work well in your favor as it is one of the crucial aspects for your business to encounter at your end. Work well in all the aspects that can help you to achieve your business objectives in the right way and in a short span of time. Read Also : 8 Ways You Can Improve Safety In A Workplace Exploring A Full-Time Remote Working Opportunity The Best Pro Tips For Setting Up An Awesome Home Office

READ MOREDetails
KFC documentary

KF Documentary: Tips For Small Business To Learn From KFC’s Brand Turnaround

It wasn’t that long ago that reports about KFC’s sales falling were drawing a rather dismal picture for the brand. And yet today, it’s standing strong as ever, proudly taking the title of the second most popular fast-food chain on the planet. Today in this KFC documentary, we will look into the strategies KFC used to regain its position. The turnaround this brand managed to accomplish in a handful of years is rather miraculous in the world of business, and many can learn from its example. Some of the techniques used by KFC in its road back to the top can be adapted for small businesses that are working their way up their own niches. KFC Documentary: Brand Revival After KFC fall to the ground and fail to satisfy their customers with their product in 2013, they decided to connect with the customers on the emotional levels and started marketing business once again. This time they took the help of the digital platform to reach out wider bandwidth of audiences. 1. Make Advertisements Branded And Fun Ads are annoying, and people skip them, right? Well, KFC managed to create a series of ads that people were really looking forward to watching. Each was an entertaining clip featuring ‘Colonel Sanders’ in some new interesting role. Colonel, the founder and greatest asset of KFC, is the embodiment of the brand today. On the contrary, the company is immortalizing him by turning him from a real-life showman and marketing genius into a fictional hero who has his own fan club. There are even books about his rise to the brand icon role now. A small business will not be able to launch a multimillion campaign with fancy ads, but you can create a character that will give a personality to your brand. Choose something or someone that your target audience will be able to relate to. Your goal is to make your marketing seem less like self-promotion and more like a friend or idol offering advice. 2. Make Your Customer Feedback Count One thing that KFC has always been focused on was delivering a top-quality customer experience. One of the main methods the brand uses to achieve that is directly asking for feedback and actually using it. All you need to do in order to share your opinion and be heard is to fill up the KFC survey. Have you ever done this yourself? Did it help improve the service or address any issue you had? Did you feel like you can contribute to the betterment of your favorite fast-food restaurant by taking that survey? Considering how smoothly the KFC customer service runs, the answers to those questions are most likely ‘yes’. And that is what a small business owner should learn from KFC. You need to establish a way for your customers to provide feedback (a customer satisfaction survey is a good start). Then, you need to pay attention to that feedback and follow up on it immediately. Today you can find or develop specialized solutions that will process this information to make this easier. That’s why the survey format is optimal for small companies that cannot hire a full-time call center service. KFC Documentary: Final Thoughts Of course, there was more to KFC’s triumph, like leveraging humor as well as extensive work in local market research and launching dozens of localized projects, like traditional menu changes. However, as a small business owner, you need to start with things that can bring tangible results right away. Read Also: Basic Small Business Tips for Noobs Who Want to Start a Venture in 2020 Cost-Effective Custom Mobile Accessories Packaging for your Small Business How To Empower Your Small Business through Digital Marketing? How To Sell A Small Business Without A Broker

READ MOREDetails