Losing Business to Your Competitors?
Losing business to your competitors can be very frustrating. But rather than getting annoyed, looking within yourself is the best use of your time.
Analyse why you’re losing business to them. What the competitors are doing right, and how you can start to be competitive again.
Why have you lost the business?
Understand why your client or prospect decided to work with your competitor. A quick conversation is better than none at all. It will provide you will many insights to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Rather than talk, it would be best if you listened to the answers they are offering. Don’t disagree and defend your position with counter-arguments. Listen to see if you can improve your pitch and subsequent activities. Are you saying the right things to a prospect?
If you have more than one conversation with other clients, then look for trends and patterns. To enable you to improve.
Win-Loss
Introduce a Win-Loss analysis into the mix to get even more out of this exercise. That way, you get consistent feedback from those who chose you or went elsewhere.
Win-loss analysis is a comprehensive, systematic and ongoing analysis. It looks at why you won and lost deals. Win/Loss delivers powerful insight to transform your organisation. Making it into a sales machine. This list gives you a basic understanding of the required actions needed to perform Win/Loss:
- Decide on the set of questions that were asked when they made a purchasing decision. And sales team ability, pricing, contracts and feature and benefits of your offering.
- Which product lines and departments need to know the results of the Win-Loss analysis
- Then develop a knowledge of your business sales and marketing processes. Product lines and target market attractiveness.
- Conduct impartial interviews with the client or prospects’ decision-makers. To discuss won and lost deals.
- The interactions are analysed, and report the critical trends and findings.
What are your competitors doing?
To ensure you have a good understanding of the situation. Where you sit in the market and what’s going on is the next thing to do. Make sure you can determine what your competitor is doing.
Are your competitors offering something different you could also provide? Have you got your pricing right? Do you know what they are charging for their offering?
Your value proposition
Most of the time, people don’t just make a buying decision based on price. When they say, they want a good deal usually means the prospect needs to see value in the money they pay for your product or service. Understanding what your competitors are doing and some win-loss analysis to know why you lost business enables you to revise your value proposition. You may have the best product in the world, but if you don’t tell your customer what you can offer to them, they will not pick you, especially if your competitor has a clearly defined value. That said, it’s important to not frequently change your value proposition just because one prospect dislikes a particular thing. Yes, look at the situation and when you see patterns look at how you can do better.
Then develop a relationship management structure to encourage you to get to know your customers inside out. So you will see before it’s too late what they think about you and why they like working with you. A stable business built on solid relationships.
Your brand
Pay attention to your branding when trying to shift up a gear against your competitor. Ensure it’s relevant and attractive to the sector you work in. Attracting the wrong targets in the first place is a waste of time and money and will result in losing more business than gaining.
Reflection, analysis with some creativity will be helpful when looking at your brand.
Take action and evolve
It’s no good losing a customer and then looking at what the cause was and then just agreeing it was them and not us. Moving to the next prospect and doing the same things wrong again. A business is never stood still. It has to be continually evolving. Just like a shark can’t stop swimming and moving forward or it will die, you need to keep winning and moving forward.
You must always think about what makes your business special. What makes it different from your competitor? Understand why you win and, more importantly, know why you are losing business to your competitors.
