Best Business Blog

1.    What’s the saying? Keep your friends close and your enemies’ even closer still? How about becoming one of their customers and that way you can steal their best ideas.

2.    Snooping – Your rivals love to brag about deals done, new ideas that have worked, they put press releases out.  All this can be found on their website, on forums and through press releases put on line.  Try doing a search on their name and see which business forums they belong to and then you can go and see what exactly they are saying.  Set up Google and Yahoo alerts with their company name and you will be forewarned when anything appears on the internet about them.

3.    Poach their staff.

4.    To stop them poaching your staff though, reward your troops, give them perks and incentives, make them feel part of the set up, that will then stop them moving to your competition.

5.    Reward your customers too, after all they are the fickle ones that will move at the offer of free goods or points towards goods, reward systems do work and do maintain customer loyalty.

6.    Be a copycat.  Take their best selling goods and sell them cheaper.

7.    This is a dirty one that does often happen – sabotage them.  Booking appointments and not turning up, having them running all over the place tracing new customers who don’t exist, and of course your answer is to think about how they can do this to you, and putting systems in place to make sure it won’t work in your Company.

8.    Undercut them.  John Lewis plc has a reputation built on ‘never knowingly being undersold’.

9.    Form an alliance with a company whose product enhances your own.  Bounce off each other sales wise and cross promote each others products.

10.    Flaunt your ethics, being holier than thou irritates your rivals and woos customers.

11.    The good old, get ‘em drunk scenario whilst you are sober.  Loose mouths talk and brag.

12.    And if you can’t beat them – sometimes it’s good to talk!!