50 Reasons Your Competitors Are Kicking Your Butt

  1. You’re not keeping your pipeline full of new business
  2. You’re solely focusing on new relationships and not nurturing your existing ones
  3. You don’t know why you’re losing customers
  4. You’re not building partnerships with other vendors
  5. No one knows who you are
  6. You’ve been pigeonholed as ’that’ type of company
  7. You don’t have a value proposition (pick a team: do you offer the lowest price or do you have a value differentiator?)
  8. You’re too difficult to contact, find or make a transaction with
  9. Your products or services are too difficult to use
  10. You’re not measuring the success or failure of your activities
  11. You’re not focusing on the future of your business
  12. You’re business issues don’t keep you up at night
  13. You don’t have key suppliers
  14. You don’t know how to communicate what you do in a sentence or two
  15. You’re not investing in the area of your business that makes you the most money
  16. You’re not staying on top of industry news
  17. You don’t recognize and reward your star employees
  18. You can’t be found in the first couple of pages in a Google search
  19. You’re not constantly reassessing your plan
  20. You’re not holding post-mortems with your key clients
  21. You’re too focused on what your competitors are doing
  22. You’re immersed in status-quo and don’t ask yourself "what if…"
  23. You’ve hired mini-mes instead of people who complement your deficiencies
  24. You only focus on ’big picture thinking’
  25. You only focus on executing
  26. You’re talking ’at’ your customers instead of having a conversation with them
  27. You’re not contributing to your industry
  28. You’re not helping others
  29. You don’t have an advisory board or a strategy business support resource
  30. You don’t have a common language for all of your employees
  31. You’re over-priced
  32. You’re under-priced
  33. You’re not using testimonials to sell your business
  34. You’re not monitoring your reputation
  35. You’re not focusing on the needs, wants, desires of your customers
  36. You’re not innovative
  37. You’re not quality-control focused
  38. You’re not learning from your mistakes
  39. You’re under-staffed
  40. You’re giving away too much stuff for free
  41. You have one client who represents the majority of your revenue
  42. You don’t have the right channels of distribution
  43. You’re not solving a problem for your customers
  44. You’re not bundling the right products / services for the right customer segments
  45. You don’t take risk
  46. You’re not consistent
  47. You’re inflexible
  48. You’ve stopped having fun
  49. You don’t know where you make your money
  50. You’re not using social media

Tag, you’re it.
Add to the list and create a reason I haven’t listed here…

Published
22/09/2011