Given the current state of the door and window market, I find that many of my customers, due to concerns about the state of the economy and world events, are concerned about achieving their goals for sales growth and market share. Well, when the market itself is not growing fast enough to help support your desired level of sales growth, then the only way to get it done is to steal market share.
To steal market share, you must disrupt your competitors’ hold on customers by being more innovative, relevant and customer centric. While there are many tactics, experts consistently point to three foundational pillars for successfully taking market share.
1. Innovation and Differentiation: You must offer something your competitors do not. This can range from introducing cutting-edge technology that solves unmet needs to refining your production methods for better quality. Developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is critical to clearly communicating why a customer should switch to your brand. But innovation is not usually something that you can just decide to do spur of the moment. It requires an ongoing corporate cultural movement from the top down. Taking a portion of the company’s earnings every year and plowing them back into key areas such as market research, R&D and product development is key to developing groundbreaking new products aimed at target markets which will get you noticed as an innovative company that stands out from your competitors.
2. Customer-Centricity and Service Excellence: Gaining share often starts with “listening more closely” to your competitors’ dissatisfied clients. By focusing on customer service excellence—such as faster response times or solving specific pain points that rivals ignore—you can build the trust necessary to woo them away. Hiring independent sales agents can be an advantage in this regard. If you only have direct sales reps, then they may not be able to get regular appointments with your competitor’s customers if you do not currently sell to these companies. But if you hire independent agents, they may already sell other (non-competing) products to your target customers and already have regular visits with them. This affords them the opportunity to develop close relationships with them and to continuously interview them, gauging their current level of satisfaction with their current vendors. Therefore, these independent reps can provide valuable feedback, somewhat like an everyday market research team. This information can be used by your research and product development teams to help develop new products and services at the right price which can potentially solve current customer problems, pricing or service issues to provide a greater level of satisfaction to these target customers, therefore enabling you to steal them away from the competition.
3. Acquisition: Sometimes the fastest way to gain share is to simply buy it. Acquiring a competitor allows you to instantly absorb their customer base and eliminate a rival. But there is a danger of taking this approach that is not always fully considered in the early stages of the acquisition planning. If one large company absorbs another large company, thereby creating a much larger organization, then it can sometimes backfire in the early stages and negatively impact customer satisfaction of the combined customer bases. The new organization is sure to have overlapping job positions and not enough natural attrition to support the combined workforce. So valuable people on your staff that are highly regarded by your customers may be forced to leave the company, oftentimes landing at other competitors along with their knowledge accumulated through years of service, as well as valuable customer relationships. But now they are working for another competitor, who would now love to woo them away from your new larger company. Meanwhile, your larger company may be losing some of its customer focus in the first few years after the merger while it figures out just how to combine the resources of the two companies. Now you have a David versus Goliath type of situation with the new, larger company being burdened, at least temporarily, by multiple layers of management and bureaucracy, while other, smaller competitors are quicker on their feet and able to satisfy customer needs faster and with a more personal approach.
Just like a boxer who steps into the ring, winning the fight for market share does not happen without years of preparation. These three elements are key to winning the bout, but you will get knocked out in an early round unless your company has done the training and has the right mindset to compete in the fight. If a long-term commitment is made to these three key areas, then you will have the opportunity to compete like a champion in the ring!