Keys to Success: Competitive Advantage

Another key to having a successful company is creating a competitive advantage in your marketplace.  What I see all too often is that companies don’t have a competitive advantage or have one but don’t understand how to leverage it.  If companies don’t fully understand their competitive advantage, how is the customer supposed to figure it out?

In one of my previous businesses, in our leadership strategy meeting, the team put together what we believed to be our competitive advantage and where our dollars should be spent. However, after receiving feedback from our clients, what we believed was our competitive advantage and where we were allocating our cash, differed drastically from the value our clients realized from our solution.

So what is a competitive advantage? Wikipedia defines it as a condition or circumstance that puts a company in a favorable business position. I want to take a step away from business real quick and give an example from sports.  All the players on a basketball team can score, pass, and rebound, but the players that can do all three (a triple double) possess a competitive advantage over those on the floor who cannot.

Try Changing Your Lens and ask yourself what are your differentiators in the marketplace?  What is your unique selling position? This will steer you in the right direction of determining your competitive advantage. After all we can all learn from a very successful former CEO and Leader:

“If you don’t have a Competitive Advantage, don’t compete.”                                                               Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

If you would like assistance in determining your competitive advantage in your marketplace, please reach out to me.