How To Choose the Best Sales Strategy Based On Your Competition (2022 Edition)

If you want to improve your outbound sales process, keeping an eye on your competitors might help you find the way. However, copying their strategies is not enough – you must understand them. You should focus on their sales strategies and gather intel on how they drive their sales.

You can get valuable insight from analyzing their strategies. This information can help you identify your weaknesses and find areas for improvement. If the competition is having an easier time than you, that’s probably because they’re doing something you’re not, or just doing it better.

Today, digital businesses must constantly analyze their products, pricing strategies, competition, and market to develop the right approach to sales and marketing. With that in mind, here are some aspects to consider when developing your sales strategy.

Avoid open conflict with your competition

One major mistake businesses often make is getting into open conflict with its competitors. Such conflicts can only endanger your brand reputation and result in reduced sales and negative customer reviews. While there are many ways to beat your competitors – such as lowering your prices and regaining market share  – you should do it ethically.

Instead of showing your company in a negative light, you should work on getting ahead of the curve by promoting your brand, adjusting your pricing strategy, and fortifying the relationship with your target audience.

Start by matching your competitors’ prices and analyzing their weaknesses – to learn from their mistakes, and develop great, customer-centric business strategies. Gather customer data to understand the needs of your consumers and build more effective marketing campaigns.

According to research, 80% of businesses use ineffective marketing strategies due to lacking consumer data. Understanding the competition and the ideal consumer is key to avoiding conflict and price wars with your competitors.

Offer products and services that solve real-life problems

Your focus should not be just on selling more, no matter the price. Instead, take a customer-centric approach and provide your consumers with real brand value. Take your time to build a genuine relationship with your target audience by educating them about your offer.

Create blogs with educational and easy-to-understand content regarding the usefulness of your products or services. Talk to your customers about how your offer can improve their lives and help them solve real-life problems.

Instead of attacking your competitors directly, you should turn inwards to your audience and work on delivering an unprecedented buyer experience at every step of the customer journey.

It’s much easier to give your consumers real value when you know what they need and want. Such dedication also proves your effort to build a genuine relationship with your target audience.

Study your target audience to learn more about your consumers

Understanding your target audience is the most effective way to improve lead generation, conversion, and sales. Knowing what they want is essential to providing them with unprecedented customer experiences.

In return, their loyalty and positive word-of-mouth will result in new leads, new opportunities, and more sales. Keeping an eye on your customers allows you to understand their real-time behavior. You can find out what communication channels they prefer, how they do their online shopping, what items they look for, etc.

The insight you get from monitoring your customers allows you to identify an ideal buyer persona and different consumer categories. This knowledge helps you to adjust your marketing and sales strategies according to the specific preferences of each demographic.

Do you need help nailing your ideal customer profile and building relevant messaging? Book a free discovery call to learn how we can help!

Here are some actionable tips to learn more about your audience.

Ask for customer feedback

Customer testimonials, reviews, and general feedback can benefit your brand and product development. The more you value their opinion, the more your brand grows and, with it, the loyalty of your customers.

Understand how consumers use your products

Technographic data can tell you all about the specific tech tools your customers use these days. It allows you to understand how your customers use your products and services.

Ask them what they want to change, and incorporate their ideas into your product and service development process.

Understand how your consumers purchase products

Knowing how and why your customers buy products and what they prefer is perhaps the best, most effective way to improve your sales.

This knowledge can help you to develop more customer-centric ways of marketing your products and services to your target audience.

Build a relationship with your consumers

Become active across the most popular channels of communication modern consumers use today. Establish an authoritative presence on social media to keep constant contact with your target audience.

Start a blog to help them understand your brand’s mission and the challenges, routines, and hardships your business deals with daily. Engaging your customers allows you to earn their trust and improve sales in the quickest way possible.

Learn more about your customers’ expectations

If your organization cannot cope with customers’ expectations, your customers will turn to your competitors. Since most modern-day consumers take time to research brands before making a purchase decision, your target audience might be a precious depository of knowledge regarding your competitors.

You can use their knowledge about your competitors to learn more about their products and services, improve your marketing approach, and discover opportunities to drive more sales. 

You can also learn about the disadvantages of your competitors’ products, and develop better solutions to address and mitigate those shortcomings.

Monitor and track your competition

Monitoring everything your competitors do will help you determine how they do their marketing, drive sales, and more. It enables you to monitor website changes and track customer interaction, pricing, marketing, and advertising strategies.

Here’s how to track your competitors:

• Monitor their websites – competitors’ websites can tell you everything you need to know, including data on their business growth, sales strategy, pricing strategy, product development secrets, marketing strategy, key investment areas, etc.
• Marketing emails – by subscribing to your competitors’ email marketing, you’ll find out their next moves regarding marketing and advertising campaigns, including webinars and events they attend, news mentions, the type of marketing content that works for them, etc.
• Track their SEO – search engine optimization is in charge of your website traffic. Tracking your competitors’ SEO ranking can tell you how to improve your SEO and attract more prospects to your content.

Learn from the missed sales opportunities

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for driving more sales and creating an effective marketing approach. It’s a process that requires time, effort, and resources. You’ll have to make constant adjustments and modifications to your approach if you want to come out on top.

Instead of ignoring your weaknesses, learn how to exploit them to beat your competitors. Look at your competitors’ failings and avoid making the same mistakes. Identify their weaknesses and learn how to use them to your advantage. Each missed sale and abandoned cart can become a new opportunity if you approach them correctly.

In a data-driven digital business landscape, digital businesses have access to vast quantities of data. The biggest challenge is to learn how to make the best use of all that data. Start by gathering the right type of data on your customers, market, and competitors – and make sure that it is accurate data.

Tap into the power of the latest analytics tools to understand your brand’s position in the local market and beyond. Compare your position to that of your competitors to identify the areas for improvement.

Accurate and up-to-date data is crucial for developing the best, most competitive marketing and sales strategies and fueling the process of decision-making.

Author: Peter Bray is an AI practitioner with a keen interest in competitive intelligence and web change monitoring. He is the CEO of Fluxguard based in Portland, Oregon.