The Gauntlet
Competition is fierce and growing. The dynamic market and internet access to abundant information ensures that no technical advantage is sustained for long.
To keep pace with the market, competing companies react to one another by offering comparable solutions while struggling to differentiate themselves. Often this results in declining prices and margins.
Monitoring your competitors is essential, but it tends to make a business more reactive than proactive, which can complicate goal achievement and cause you to miss growth opportunities.
A more proactive strategy is to monitor the market through your customers’ eyes. While every business must pursue new customers, many high-growth companies focus on increasing activity with their key customers as the more productive growth strategy. Of course, any additional business is dependent on the value it creates for the customer.
Enduring customer relationships are fueled by an accountability to continually create value for your most loyal customers, while earning you acceptable margins. Accomplishing this compels you to stimulate creativity and innovation, while challenging your business assumptions and status quo. In the process, you compete more against yourself than against any competitor to produce the necessary additional value. But a stronger competitive advantage and more sustainable customer relationships are the outcomes.
Challenging your business to continually compete against yourself is a proven growth strategy that will create value for you and your customers.
How are you challenging your business to create value?
