Should Letting Agents Worry About Their Competitors?

This week I was asked by a client whether she should be worried about her competitors?

My response:

Not really

Back in the old days when Marketing was all about The P's (4 or 7, take your pick) and less about building relationships, knowing what your competitors were doing DID play a more important part of the marketing process & getting a sale over the line

Nowadays it's far more important to have a strong proposition based on a deep understanding of how you uniquely solve your ideal clients problems

Then you nurture relationships to build your own loyal tribe who really buy into what you do

Do that well & you can pretty much ignore the competition

That's why you could have 2 businesses in the same industry next door to each other - as long as they'd each identified their niche, their offering & how to communicate their Special Secret Sauce - they could happily co-exist never treading on each other's toes

But if I take off my rose tinted glasses for a minute - many businesses worry about sticking their neck out & doing something different, not because of a fear about how their clients may react - but fear about how the competition will judge it!

How MAD is that?!?

Recently an agent said she was worried about putting testimonials on her website as she thought competitors would try to tempt her testimonial-givers away with a cut price deal!

Did she really think a client who liked you enough to write a testimonial would be tempted away with a cheap deal???

Now I'm not saying that you completely ignore your competitors - a healthy understanding of what they're up to will help you to stay relevant and in line with the market - but don't fear them or worse still, hold back on anything because of what they may think or do...

Finally...and this is getting close to the sort of WooWoo stuff that makes me uncomfortable...worrying about your competitors comes from an attitude of Scarcity rather than Abundance

There is plenty of business out there

Focus on reaching out to the ideal prospects who will be most interested in what you offer & let your competitors worry about their business!