There is no such thing as competition
I recently had a strange interaction at The Business Show with another person that owned a business that's in the same field as mine.
He was very cold with me and straight up told me that he wasn't comfortable sharing his price range with me. Why?
1. I know the industry and how much differently positioned businesses are charging.
2. I'm certainly not going to lower my price if he was charging less in order to "compete".
3. If I had lowered my price that doesn't guarantee me the job anyway.
4. There are like a million of us and 10 million more clients. How likely is it that we would be competing over the same client?
I have never had an issue with businesses that could be viewed as competition as I’m curious to find out what we do differently to one another and how we could benefit each other. I'm always excited to teach small start-up businesses everything we've done to get to this point.
Guess what? None of them stole our clients. Nor do I believe that they could because I am confident in both our creative skills and our business acumen.
If the day comes where we lose a job to a superior company, I have no reason to feel bad about it. Firstly assuming the choice to go with them was correct, they would offer that client better value, which is great.
Secondly, we didn't deserve that project; we were lacking something that made us not get it. Time to improve. Improving and adapting ultimately means that we will be able to offer better value, negotiate larger deals and that we will generally become a better company.
People don’t choose to work with us because we’re the cheapest, or because we have a great package that suits them, or because of our “USP”.
We’re often the most expensive out of the options the client is considering, we don’t like gimmicks to make it look like we’re selling something totally different when we’re not, which brings me to my last point. No one that does this at a high level has a USP. They just make it look like they do.
So what is it that does make companies choose to work with us? Because we are better and we can authentically express that. We are no slick sales people. We simply tell it like it is and clients appreciate and trust us for it.
The reason I wanted to engage with this person at The Business Show is to refer projects to his company that may not have been suitable for us.
Having said that, I did have more interactions with other great people that work in my field that I’m excited to build a friendly and a professional relationship with.
