Knowing & understanding your prospects & competition

[Scott Tyner]

Knowing and understanding your competition!"

Once you've determined your marketing area, you'll need to know who else is after your market? Your marketing efforts will never take place in a vacuum, there will always be others competing for your prospects attention and business.

Your competition and dozens of other businesses and salespeople are approaching your same prospect time and time again. That's why an essential part of successful marketing involves close scrutiny of your competitors, in an attempt to understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how well they are doing it.

To be ahead of your competition you need to know:

1) Who is offering a service like yours?

2) What's unique about doing business with them?

3) What's unique about doing business with you?

4) Why someone should use you instead of your competition?

Unless you know this information and can use it to formulate your marketing strategy, can you really believe that your marketing efforts will pay off?

Understand this: a competitor is someone who's getting your prospects to use them instead of you.

Is this something you want like and want to keep happening? NO!

Therefore, you've got to know about all of your competitors, who they are and how they work. You must reasearch.

Also remember this: being anxious and worried about your competition will do you no good at all. Learn from them. Understand what they do, what works for them and how it can work for you.

As a final note on this subject: Remember, there truly is more work out in this big world than any of us could possibly do, so don't get too caught up in worrying about your competition...you'll have plenty of work if you learn how to market yourself effectively.

And a key to marketing yourself effectively is to follow the next step:

Understand the frustrations & problems of your prospects & how you can solve them!

If you want to succeed in marketing your business, you must understand that you are not selling anything. YOU ARE SOLVING A PROBLEM FOR A PROSPECT!

However, you can only solve a prospects problem if you understand the problems they have. No one is really interested in buying a product, or service, they are only interested in getting a solution to a specific problem that they have.

So, solve your prospects problems for them and you'll be successful.

You must walk a mile in your prospects shoes to understand what they are looking for. To be a marketing success, you will do it, you must.

You can only succeed to the extent that you understand precisely what bothers your prospect, and precisely what the prospect wants to achieve.

If you're hoping to be successful, you're going to make sure your service is the absolute very best it can be, that it delivers an answer to your prospect.

If you're really concerned for this prospect, and you honestly have a solution that'll solve their problem, don't you think you'd try really hard to focus on what they want, how they want it, and how you can prove it to them that you're the one who has the best solution?

If you don't get your prospect to call you, you've done them a disservice!

You must do everything you possibly can to get these prospects to take action...it's for their own good!!!

If you'll put yourself into that state of mind, you'll have come to know the attitude it takes to create winning ads.


My suggestion to you is this:

If you're serious about becoming a real success in windshield repair; you've got to get serious about serving people.... caring about people -- getting to know people and care about them and their concerns. Empathize with people.

At the end of our lives, we take nothing with us. We only leave behind two things:

1) Possessions, which in the end are worthless to us.

2) What you have contributed in this world, whether it's bad or good.

To new techs and veteran techs: Don't neglect your family in pursuit of things that won't mean anything in the end.

Have goals...they're important for achieving success.

Help others whenever possible.

Strive to offer the best repair possible and look at each customer as more than just money in the bank....look at them as a friend.

Remember, that what you put out into the world is precisely what you are going to get back.

I'm now going to take a break from this forum for a few days and decide whether or not to keep posting. I hope my posts have helped some of you in some way.

Sincerely,
Scott

[Scott Tyner]

Hi Squirrel,

One can learn alot from their competition. Not only what works, but what not to do.....what is the competition failing to exploit.

I agree that 99% of normal....notice I said "normal" advertising is flat out useless with windshield repair. In fact, most service businesses are wasting enormous amounts of money on "normal" advertising.

But, I do have to disagree with advertising not working. When I got into this business three years ago....I knew right away who my biggest competitor was.....he had been in business going on 5-years when I started.

You could find his ads in every paper.....you would get coupons via direct mail and you could see his billboards in every city in my market area.

This guy had 5-guys working for him and he was spending an enormous amount on advertising. Now, my point is this....he is still in business, he now employees 6-guys and he continues his advertising.

He's been doing this for 8-years. I can only assume that he's not advertising just to waste money.

I also learned not to sweat the competition. We are both successful in our market.

I've also watched at least 7 guys come and go in the past three years as well as a few guys that were doing this before I started.

I'm not sure about others on this forum, but I tried giving away FREE windshield repairs when I first got started and found to my AMAZEMENT that there were alot of people who didn't want my FREE repair!

Just because you're giving something away for free doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be overwhelmed with customers.

I'm sure that the people who got in this business and gave it a shot, but are now out of business, tried giving away repairs, thinking they'd be very successful.

Like I said most advertising doesn't work but SMART advertisind does! That said, would I advice a newcomer to start out with a large advertising budget....of course not!!!

But, I would tell them to start small and build on it. And as their business grows, decide what direction they want to go in....stay a one man operation....successful but not overworked or take the road of hiring others.

I still do the "going business to business" thing, but more for the networking.

I guess you are fortunate to live in an area that people are so open to the FREE repair! Here, they are a little skeptical to say the least....

They have to be convinced!

Keep it up.

Scott

[Coitster]

This is a good post that I want to comment on. I agree with both of you to some degree. I agree with Gary (AKA BlindSquirral) in the point of keeping it simple. You always want to keep the concept and operation as simple as possible. Its easyer to manage and run.

I also agree with Scott in terms of knowing what your competition is doing and that some kind of advertising budget is needed. While I dissagree with mass media advertising for the chip business I do think for replacement shops that mass media advertising is a must. Remember most glass companies do use like Val-Pack or Money Mailer. They use them because they work, people have been conditioned to coupons and discounts.

Bit of topic but its because of these to companies that so many glass companies learned that waiving deductables was a way to get business and thats why almost overnight you saw thousands of glass companies all across the country started doing it.

I only dissagree with using them specificly for the chip business. Scott is correct that people are very sceptical about the Free Windshield Repair. I deal with this on a daily basis. When I tell people that windshield repair is free they look at me like I am talking some obscure dialect of Jewish/Chineese/Russian that no one has ever heard before.

I really have to educate them, once I have done that and explained why it is free its like a light bulb goes off in there head. I think advertising can work for cash business on a very limited and non cost productive resulted circumstance. In otherwords in my opinion it doesn't work. I have also seen glass companies (Full service that is) make advertising work, but thats why they get the big bucks for replaceing windshields. People are more prone to do something about a replacement then a repair. Some states give you tickets if your windshield is cracked out.

So yes, glass companies do advertise and can make it work. However for the one man opereration who is trying to make as much money as possible for the smallest amount of cost to get the highest profit margin I don't recommend doing any advertising untill you have mastered how to drum up business so that if you take a nose dive when you spend the money it won't end your business. Maybe I like to play it safe. I think both posts by Scott and Gary have good points. Thanks guys
David
Coitster

[Scott Tyner]

Hi David,

Great point about the one man operation.

When I was researching my marketing area, I realized that this guy was into windshield repair very big. He does as much or more advertising as the glass replacement facilities and he's "repair only."

If someone gets to the point that they want to hire multiple people and keep them busy, then a large advertising budget will be a must.

I reached a point in my own business where I had to make a decision to either hire people and the headaches that come with it (quality control and employee headaches....not to mention all of the extra paperwork ) or to do like you say.... "Keep It Simple." I decided for me at this point in my life that keeping it simple was the best thing for me.

Keep up the great posts David!

Scott

[Coitster]

Too True,
Employees can be the nightmare from hell. I know I tried that.
It was my experiance that for me, hiring people was not the best thing, however some people can make it work. For example Jeremy from Jeremia's Windshield Repair on this forum does a fantastic job at getting people to work for him. When people worked for me they just screwed around. Maybe I was to nice a guy to them all but they really took advantage of me and I lost my shirt with them. My hat is off to anyone who can make it work in WSR with employees.
David
Coitster