1. Know your competition. Know what they’re doing, what their strengths and weaknesses are, who their target market is. Know what they want to do. The more you know about your competition, the better you can position yourselves in comparison to them.
2. Attend industry seminars and trade shows. Go to the panels and workshops. See what’s new from your suppliers, or what new technology is out there that will help make your job a little bit easier. Discover new techniques to do what you already do. Never stop learning.
3. Test your products. Depending on the type of product you have, you may need to do focus group testing, or usability testing, or stress testing. No matter what needs to be done though, testing is vital for any product – it keeps that quality of your product high. High quality products typically result in happier customers, and happier customers are more likely to stick with you than head to your competition.
4. Keep your current customers happy. We are always thinking about how to get new customers, and it’s not unusual for us to forget about our current customer base. Keeping our current customers happy is one of the best ways to keep ensuring our customers don’t go to our competitors.
5. Know what your customers want. This goes hand-in-hand with the above point. If you know what your customers want, then you can be sure that you are giving them what they want – especially when your competition isn’t. Be careful, though, to make sure you don’t become too preoccupied with what your customer wants, as you could lose focus on the big picture of your product.
6. Don’t get stuck on what has happened in the past. Focusing too much on the past won’t let us get a clear picture of what is happening currently, or won’t let us work towards where we want to be in the future. Whether it is something good that has happened in the past, or something bad, it can give us a skewed image of where we are right now.
7. Promote yourself and your products in different areas.
8. Don’t feel the need to compete on price. There are other ways that you can compete with your competition, than through pricing. You have to take into account the quality of products, the target market, and other considerations as well as pricing.
9. Never stop innovating. Products and processes can constantly be improved upon – innovation can happen at any point in the design process. Even after a product has been released, innovation can happen to make future product releases better.
10. Take advantage of government grants, loans and tax incentive programs. The SR&ED program is a great example of this – the SR&ED program will provide you with a cash refund or tax credit as a reimbursement for money that you have spent on creating and improving products and processes. Additional sources of funding can give you the much needed cash flow to invest in your business that will allow you to remain competitive.