Lead Generation

"How to Legally Steal Your Competitor’s Best Customers

We can thank our biggest competitors for several things.  They paid heavily to attract our perfect customers.  These customers already believe, trust, and have paid for products and services similar to ours. 

Ideally, what we want is the 20% of your competitors’ customers that give them 80% of the business.  The current buyers of the competitor’s products and services are your target, or current prospects who are about to buy or thinking about buying your competitors product.  Start making part of your marketing strategy to specifically target and appeal to people in that position of being in the process of making the decision or maybe even have somebody else’s information on their desk before they make the deal and you’re coming in with this strategy, that’s where you want to meet them.

Our goal is to break the loyalty factor of these people by rewarding them for taking action with you.. 

The real gold for us are those people who have already bought from our competitors and are waiting to be stolen.  Our main goal is to break the loyalty factor of these existing customers who currently belong to our competitors.  What we’re really looking for is the 20% of our competitor's customers that give them 80% of their profits. 

The current buyer of our competitor's products and services is our target.  By concentrating our efforts on these people what we’re doing is acquiring the very best most lucrative buyer of all – a repeat buyers: someone who has bought two or more of the very similar thing. 

Currently, the smallest stream of future prospects is where most businesses unwisely spend all of their advertising and marketing dollars.  One way to legally steal your competitors repeat buyers is; to focus your advertising efforts on all the places where largest competitors advertise: i.e., trade magazines, yellow pages, newspapers, etc. 
Of the 100% of the money flowing business, the percentage of buyers that haven’t bought before, is less than 5% of the total revenue.  Absolutely less.  95% of the revenue that’s generated by sales is existing customers: those who either just bought or bought over the last year or the year before and have been buying for years.  That’s 95% of the money.  And we deploy most of our marketing strategies to the segment that can only contribute – if you target them – 5% of the whole industry.  So the 95% is what we want to focus on.  It’s the 95% of the money.  Now, within that 95% of the money flowing into that industry, there’s the 80/20 that add to that.  Remember, 20% of those buyers – depending on your kind of business – are spending 80% of the money.

Prove to them what we have to offer is far superior and in their best interest to do business with us.  The beauty of this scenario is that these people are proven buyers.  They are probably repeat buyers and the lifetime value of these customers is gold to our competitors.  And that gold is what we’re after.

Think strategically.  Think of incentives.  Think of irresistible offers that will lead them your way.

Think of how much money it costs to acquire a brand new customer with advertising expenses, overhead, employees, etc.  They can be astronomical.    Our biggest competitors have gone through all the trouble, time, effort, and money to find qualified people, get them to raise their hand and actually make a purchasing decision.  Your competitors have saved you a fortune both in time and money. 
What can you do or say directly in marketing and advertising that would be powerful and compelling enough to steal away your biggest competitor’s best customers and prospects?

Professional business or practice owners make the same costly mistake of neglecting the largest segment of their industry’s market.  That is, their biggest competitors, client base and prospect list. 

We’ve all been doing our marketing and advertising backwards.  All of our ads have been written to focus on the wants and needs of the brand new customers new to the market place.  This segment makes up only five percent of the available market.  The real money is in the 95% of the market that we’ve all been ignoring.  The 95% of the available market belongs to our biggest competitors.

Your biggest competitors’ customers have already been converted to believing in your products or services.  Your job is to offer greater incentives than your competition.

So what we’re looking for is a way to steal those customers.  We’re looking for prospects and customers who have already made the decision to buy.  They haven’t made the purchase yet.  Now you are opening up our marketplace to a whole lot more opportunity and focusing on getting market share.

There’s more gold in those customers who have bought from a competitor, waiting to be stolen, than the small stream of future prospects that are coming.

Where can you get direct exposure to your competitor’s customers?  Look in the places where your competitors advertise: newspapers, magazines, yellow pages, direct mail, catalogs.  If you were there too, when they’re looking at their ad, you’re right next to them.  You’re going to create a competitive advantage that is designed to lure your competitor’s best customers.

Use the model that banks use.  The turnover rate for a bank with a customer who has only one account, either a savings or a checking account, but just one account, is something like 96%.  It’s almost 100% a year.  Those customers don’t stay.  But the more accounts that they have, a loan, a savings, a CD, the longer they stay.  And I think the critical number for a bank is like 3, 3 accounts.  And 3 accounts, I think, is something like 5 years that a person normally stays.