Stop competing with your competition & start competing with yourself.

When I first started in Sales, I was told to keep a close eye on my competition, watch what they are doing & find out who their clients are. The reasons made sense, you can learn who is who in your market, find out who their clients are & monitor the activity. So I did, I read their adverts, monitored their social media output & kept an eye on their movements by pulling leads and gathering info. All very valid activities to a point, and while these things did help me figure out who was who in the zoo, they didn’t necessarily help me get any better at what I did. I was spending so much time looking over the fence at the neighbours garden, I was forgetting to water my own. 

What if your competition isn’t actually that good? What if your benchmark on quality is mediocre & you don’t know it. Most people spend their time trying to beat their competition, doing the same things they do while professing their version is better. From a client perspective it’s all much of a muchness, they don’t see it like you do. Even if you are better than your neighbour, if you are saying & doing the same sorts of things as them it’s going to be really hard for a client to differentiate between the two, or three or four etc. 

Now, of course there are going to be similarities in your industry, if you sell carpet & so does your competition, you can’t really get away from that fact. But you can change how you go about it, your message, your approach, your delivery, the way you do what you do, question yourself how can I make this better. If you compete against your own standards rather than the industry standards you can push yourself further. If you are already number one, then you have no choice but compete against yourself and try beat your personal best, because if you rest on your laurels the competition will sneak up behind you and overtake you without you even realising it.

It’s actually fun to see how far you can go, you’ll be surprised. Once you start achieving things you didn’t think you could, your confidence grows & you start wondering if you could take it up a notch, then another & another, before long you get a thirst for it & it becomes like a game. All that time and energy you used to spend watching what your competition did, is now spent improving what you do, then everyone starts watching you. I’m not saying ignore your competition completely, just flip the percentage so you get more air time than they do.