6 Best Ways to Make Your Competitors Improve Your Sales

The old adage that you can only succeed in your business and improve your sales by beating your competitors can be somewhat true in its sense, but the real truth is that by having this attitude you could only do more harm to your online business rather than having success.

The reason is times are different now, that attitude won’t get you were you want to be, it won’t improve your sales, and the best way to succeed in any business is to make your ‘nemesis’ your ally. This may sound silly, but to have a successful internet business in today’s technology laden world is to find a common ground by means of collaboration that will help you and your competitor to collectively acquire more buyers or customers.

In today´s online business world, your competitors are actually your friends, because it´s so much more what you gain by collaborating with each other, than what you do by racing each other cold blooded style. Big “No No” for that.

Does it make sense?

In today’s social media hype awareness the only way to keep your business progress is to have a better grasp of the power of partnerships. It is not right anymore to see your business competition as an enemy, but instead make some collective efforts to strengthen both your businesses and that would make you a winner!

Focusing more on your business growth than worrying about your completion is the key to success. Now the puzzling thought is how do you go about joint ventures that will gain positive results without sacrificing your own gains?

To begin with, you must make sure that you study your lesson well before jumping into any collaboration or partnership with your competitor. Here’s how:

Talk straight of your objectives and reasons for this partnership. Of course your ultimate goal is to increase your profit. Plan and be concise and tackle the benefits of your proposed mutual agreement for your success and that of your competitor.

A background check on his online business will give you an idea if your competitor is credible or not. You don’t want to jeopardize your own credibility by joining forces with your competitor’s bad reputation.

Learning about your competitors missing points in his business would give a better reason to collaborate just to fill in that gap. Learn how your product compliments your competitor’s. Let your so called ‘enemy’ need you at this point.

Once you already established a joint venture it is only right to commit to it in order for both of you to succeed.

Learn about these 6 effective means to control your competition to gain more sales:

1. Your Own Reports (branded)

PDF reports are now a key factor in modern marketing strategy. It would generate a good email list where people can freely join or offer bonus or deals for your main product. This strategy really works when looking to improve your sales and has been proven by many. Make sure that you create highly branded and customized PDF report for your partners.

Of course this will solely depend on the value and quality content of your PDF report meaning to say the more exposure and shares is equal to more exposure of your online site- more chances of converting readers into buyers, big bucks ahead!

credit photo: csjedwar

2. Referring Sales to Getting Sales in Return

Your partnership venture should focus on the idea of supporting and complementing each other’s products for you own benefit and the benefit of your partner. Learning about your competitor’s branding and product and looking in on how you can fill in some gap by providing your awesome product that will compliment theirs is a great strategy. And this where great opportunity knocks on your door- so make sure to welcome it with open arms!

Choose your best possible referring partners- understand their product and how you can penetrate their own marketing system. Why need to be choosy? Quality products, great website and good reputation are the things you should consider in sourcing your referrals as an affiliate. The key here is to find a competitor with high ratings in terms of quality service, customer’s feedback, reviews, and the professional look of their website- that is trustworthy and genuine. Of course you want to build a good reputation for yourself and would not want to risk your online business. So be smart and choose wisely!

3. Cross Selling Related Products to Improve Your Sales

Cross selling is a proven marketing strategy that you will often see on many fast food joints. Remember this usual phrase “Would you like to add a dessert to your coffee?” or “Would you like some fries to go with that?”. These phrases are intended to increase sales when there is already an ongoing sale. Meaning? No need to fish out in the ocean when you already have an established market and by simply offering additional products that go with their orders is a sure way to increase your revenue. Does this make sense?

Since you already researched and probably contacted competitors selling related products negotiate with them to cross sell your products in exchange for some percentage in profit and ultimately improve your sales. You can also cross sell their product to have additional income. This idea would not work on everyone you approached but it is worth a try- and for sure you’ll find some great cross selling partners.

NOTE: Just to warn you, you must never cross sell mismatched products and make sure you are partnering with the right contact that has a good market for your product.

If you are confident that you’ve got a valuable product with good reputation, it would be easier to strike a good partnership. Even with just a handful of competitors offering to cross sell your product is a lot to reach to a bigger audience great for marketing your product.

4. Conduct Free co-hosted Webinars

Free webinars are popularly use today to get the right audience, acquire more leads and eventually acquire more sales, it´s value, and value is money.

The beauty of a free webinar is that you can connect to your target audience on a more personal level. So, why you and your competitor collaborate and host a webinar? Webinars are successful in converting audience into customers for the very fact that webinars are perceived to be very valuable and useful to audience.

Collaborating in a webinar with your competitor (or co-hosting it) is a sure way of gaining potential customers since you can directly tap into your competitor’s list of customers given the fact that these are verified and existing buyers, but the only way that you can do this, is to convince your competitor to work with you and host a webinar together. You must present your competitor a win-win situation. And here’s how:

Your goal is to create a solid foundation for your webinar not only to generate leads and incur sales. Once you lured your competitor to join you in hosting a webinar, you now have your apples in your basket and you can control what topic to discuss and what the content would be. This of course will take in consideration the advantages that you could gain but not making it too obvious to your “partner”- since he is focused on the possible profit he will get-right?

Choose from possible topics like:

Conducting webinars is a fun way to know your target audience and at the same time a great opportunity to convert attendees to customers using your persuasive power. But make sure you have a good number of attendees.

5. Offer 100% Commission on a Front End Product

Yes- you heard it right. 100%? Correct. First, you must find a product that is truly of good quality and value that you can offer to sell to your competitor’s proven list of customers. This could be a drastic marketing move for you but you must leverage and create lead generation that would translate on many transactions for your future products.

The 100% commission is an offer that is hard to refuse and this will entice your competitor to partner with you. Don’t think about not earning from this front end tactic but what matters most is that you get more leads and buying market to capture for your next product offering.

This crucial step is the initial phase to get people into your own sales funnel. Let your competitor enjoy his reward while you get all his valuable customers in return. This will translate to more future sales to genuine paying and proven customers which is really great for your online business success.

Make sure you offer the best product whether it is a wordpress plug-in or an e-book, in other words offer salable and useful product for this. Next- install the Rapid Action Profits or RAP in your website this will help in automatically give 100% commissions to your affiliates and you need not worry about anything. RAP is a script and an affiliate marketing system.

Many others don’t realize the power of this strategy for growing your business but you can prove them wrong. Disregard the fact that you will not profit on your front end product, BUT you are increasing your customer database which is excellent, a ready market that is available to use not once but all the times you want!

credit photo:SproutLoud

6. Perform Interviews

This is a fact; people are attracted to situations where their ego is fed. And especially online, where we marketers need to show our audience why we are qualify to “preach” about our niche, authority and reputation is everything on this industry.

Just as with search engines the more reference a website gets the better ranking it receives, the more exposure a marketer or public figure receives the more credibility they get.

So how does this marketing strategy works?

Reach out to as many of your competitors as you can (avoid spammy practices), use Facebook, youtube, twitter, forums, product launch directories, blog posts, every single place you see them at.

Tag them, poke them, scream their name (ok, maybe not that). Try to contact as many people as you can, you WILL receive answers (not all of them will respond obviously).

When they agree to do the interview, perform a background research on them to elaborate your questions.

They will most likely mention that interview to their network and that’s how you’ll gain exposure to their audience.

It’s all about creating win/win situations.

credit photo: AnnaRachel1

As many successful internet entrepreneurs reveal the secret “That big sale comes from the back end and not from the front end”. Now you know why, all you have to do is follow these simple steps and realize that you can improve your sales using your competitors as leverage.

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