"5 Surefire Ways To Drive Your Competition Crazy"

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"Five Surefire Ways To Drive Your Competition Crazy"

- by "Dangerous" Debbie Jenkins

(c) Debbie Jenkins. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.debbiejenkins.com

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Taking an aggressive stance to your competition is not the
most productive way of running a business. However, there
are times when some people just get a little too cocky and
need knocking down a peg or two. If you want to put an
annoying competitor in his or her place then these tips are
for you.

1. Keep Friends Close - Keep Enemies Closer
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Befriend your competitors and learn all you can about their
business needs, challenges and wants. In essence "Know Your
Enemy" but don't give away too much about yourself. Then, if
they get too big for their boots, go for their weak spots to
undermine them.

2. Give Your Competitors Your Business
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"What?!?" I hear you cry! Yes, give your competitors all the
leads you don't want. That means pass on the desperate-
blame-meisters and long-term-tyre-kickers. Your competitors
will think you're nice and harmless. But you'll be sending
them a Trojan-Horse-Load of trouble!

3. Own Customer Brain-Time
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Make sure what you're saying is more memorable and more in
tune with your customer's needs than what your competitors
are saying. The easiest way to do this is to describe things
in your customer's terms and shut up about yourself.

Also, make it your job to stay in touch with your customers
and your competitors' customers, by providing highly
valuable freebies at regular intervals. A newsletter or
eZine is ideal for this purpose.

4. Patronise Your Competitors
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Yes, in both senses of the word. If they're doing well, tell
them you're impressed with the "effort" they've put in
recently. In fact, tell your prospects (ie their customers
and yours) that it seems they've come on leaps and bounds in
recent months. All the time be sure to imply that if they
keep this up they may even be as good as you some day.

Another way of patronising your competitors is to actually
give them your patronage. That is buy something that they've
got in order to really check out how good or bad they are.
And if you're feeling really mean become the customer from
hell and complain tirelessly.

5. Steal Their Customers
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Nothing works better than this for causing trouble. If your
competitors are worthy then you'll have trouble coercing
their best customers away but it's still possible. Even if
they're doing a bad job, people will need a pretty good
reason (ie they mess up or you offer something much better)
to do something different.

So a stealthy approach would be to seduce a member of their
team (preferably with a customer-facing/sales role) over to
your company. If the person you head-hunt has good customer
relationships, then customers will follow them as if by
magic. If you think this approach is unethical then it
probably is - don't do it. I don't believe I'm in a position
to judge your morals or ethics so I include this tactic so
that you can decide for yourself.

Another trick that works is to set up Free trials/audits
designed to point out flaws in the work of your competitors
without ever naming them. Then, once you've scared the
customer enough, they'll be more inclined to consider the
better alternative - ie you.

A Final Word Of Warning
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As you can imagine, these dangerous tips can quite easily
cause a war with your competitors - which is almost always
destructive. So take my advice; only use my dangerous tips
if you're attacked first and when you've struck a telling
blow, let it go and get on with being your best.

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