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May 12, 2022

Boost Your Company's Competitive Advantage In 3 Key Steps



Building a business and seeing it through, despite the many troubled waters it has to cross, is not an easy task for anyone to accomplish. Entrepreneurs know this more than anyone and there’s plenty of literature that can give them an insight into the reasons why this happens.



However it doesn’t automatically mean this information does wonders for anyone engaging with. There are a few secrets though to successfully growing a business that any budding or experienced entrepreneur needs to be in tune with. One of the best tricks in the book is to gain a competitive advantage for your company on the market.

Thankfully, there are a few good ways in which you gain an important competitive edge over other companies on the market. In fact, you also can refine the type of competitive advantage you get, being able to choose from a need-based one, an access-based one or a variety based competitive advantage. All in all, these powerful ways to gain an edge over competition are:

1. Define a Powerful Niche

As a company, if you’re going for those customers that are within reach and that tend to be undiscerning, you may be surprised to see another brand get them first. This is because they are pretty accessible consumers that don’t have very selective processes in choosing their favorite brands or services. In other words, they might choose another company or switch to it just as easily as they will choose your company.

What your company does need is to identify a niche that’s so strong, only a handful of people adhere and stay loyal to it for clear reasons. Once your company does pinpoint it, make sure it also finds ways to best deliver that product or service in a way that keeps customers engaged and wanting more.

2. Automate Processes

A company has no real chances at scaling its business, if it doesn’t automate its processes. First of all, any business needs to have tremendous clarity into its processes, the way they are carried through, their timeline, their purpose and their faults. However, regardless how well-designed your company’s processes are, they still have very little chance of actually proving useful or long-lasting over the course of time, if they’re not automated.

What does this mean exactly? Take ERP, or enterprise resource planning, as it’s a suite of applications especially designed to better support a company’s operations, financials, human resource, reporting, commerce and supply chain operations. Unfortunately, few companies out there have implemented ERP and are still trying to do everything the more traditional way. However this could give your own company an upper hand and a very attractive edge.

What many entrepreneurs don’t know though is that getting the most of ERP boils down to how well you implement it in the first place. Not going through all the seven stages of proper implementation profoundly impacts every ERP implementation project's efficacy.

3. Raise Prices

In the more classical way of approaching things, there’s no better way to get yourself a fair competitive edge on the market than by raising your prices. While many companies are fearful when it comes to raising their prices, thinking it will scare customers away, others are gaining larger and larger slices of the market by rewarding their customers with this kind of exclusivity.

As long as your company can justify this kind of price increase through the heightened quality of their products or services, it should pave the way in getting that important edge over competitors. True blue customers will know that quality comes at a fair price and will not make any kind of compromises in their standards to get the cheaper stuff - instead, they will go with yours.

Charging more for what your company offers is a sure way to gain more social capital, which, in time, will translate to solid streams of incoming revenue.

The Takeaway

In the end, it’s important to remember that while the business world is, indeed, very competitive and harsh, it’s not a completely opaque environment. There are secrets and tricks to it and once you know them and strive to understand both their reasoning, as well as their best implementation methods, you are bound to gain a competitive edge for your company on the market.



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