Creating Competitive Advantage: Give Customers a Reason to Choose You Over Your Competitors

Why should I do business with you… and not your competitor?

Whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor, or service provider - if you cannot answer this question, you are surely losing customers, clients and market share. This eye-opening book reveals how identifying your competitive advantages (and trumpeting them to the marketplace) is the most surefire way to close deals, retain clients, and stay miles ahead of the competition.

The five fatal flaws of most companies:

• They dont have a competitive advantage but think they do

• They have a competitive advantage but dont know what it is—so they lower prices instead

• They know what their competitive advantage is but neglect to tell clients about it

• They mistake “strengths” for competitive advantages

• They dont concentrate on competitive advantages when making strategic and operational decisions

The good news is that you can overcome these costly mistakes - by identifying your competitive advantages and creating new ones. Consultant, public speaker, and competitive advantage expert Jaynie Smith will show you how scores of small and large companies substantially increased their sales by focusing on their competitive advantages. When advising a CEO frustrated by his salespeoples inability to close deals, Smith discovered that his company stayed on schedule 95 percent of the time - an achievement no one else in his industry could claim. By touting this and other competitive advantages to customers, closing rates increased by 30 percent—and so did company revenues.

Jack Welch has said, “If you dont have a competitive advantage, dont compete.” This straight-to-the-point book is filled with insightful stories and specific steps on how to pinpoint your competitive advantages, develop new ones, and get the message out about them. 

Whether your business is a small video store or a major department store, a local car dealership or Toyota North America, it is essential that you identify your competitive advantages—the reasons your product or service stands above the rest—and trumpet them to the marketplace clearly.

Most companies don't know what their competitive advantages are—but by sharing scores of real-life stories from her decades of consulting experience, Jaynie L. Smith reveals how you can identify your competitive advantages and turn them into powerful weapons of persuasion in the fight for market share. Your competitive advantage might be the fact that 90 percent of your clients are repeat customers, or that you can save a customer a bundle in freight costs. When Smith worked with a CEO frustrated by his salespeople’s inability to close deals, for example, she discovered that they stayed on schedule 95 percent of the time, an achievement no one else in the industry could claim. By touting this and other strengths to customers, her client's closing rates increased by 30 percent—and so did company revenues.

Jack Welch once said, “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” This popularly priced, straight-to-the-point guide will reveal how to pinpoint your competitive advantages, develop new ones, and use them to stay miles ahead of the competition.

JAYNIE L. SMITH is the founder of ICS Marketing, and president of Smart Advantage, Inc., a management consultancy whose clients include hundreds of middle-market businesses. She also serves as the Florida chair for the Executive Committee (TEC), an international network of over 11,000 CEO. She resides in Hollywood, Florida. WILLIAM G. FLANAGAN has been a writer and editor at Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Esquire, and New York magazine. His last book was Dirty Rotten CEOs (Citadel).