How To Write a Business Plan Part 10 – Your Competition Slide Business Podcast
Summary
Part 10 of How to Write Your Business Plan where we build your Competition Slide.
Who is your competition? Different ways you can present and think about your competitors. And…
The one thing you want to avoid doing.
We’ve covered your elevator pitch, problem, solution, product, market size, business model, and traction slides. Now we analyze your competition⚡️
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A full summary of the How to Build Your Competition Slide podcast episode is below
Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of the Build a Business Success Secrets Podcast. I am your host, Brandon C. White. And today we are on part 10 of our series on how to write a business plan in 13 slides.
As a quick review. In Part one, we did the overview where we went over the 13 slides that we would be covering.
In Part two. I talked about how to build your elevator pitch.
In Part three, we talked about the three mistakes to avoid when building your elevator pitch.
In Part four, we set up the problem that you’re solving.
In Part five, we talked about a solution.
In Part six, we talked about how your product is the solution.
In Part seven, we talked about your market opportunity and how to do that correctly.
In Part eight, we went over your business model and how to determine what business model you have.
In Part nine, we talked about your traction and setting goals for the future.
And today we talked about your competition, how to map that competition and how to set up the slide.
Let’s not waste another second. Let’s get to it we are talking about your competition. And there are four main things I want you to think about when you think about your competition.
One who they are to. Where are they meaning where they selling? Where are they online? What are they doing? How are you different? How would you articulate the difference between them and you?
And while functions and features are a great comparison, which you could build really quickly in a Excel spreadsheet or a chart that you may have, you could do this in a notebook. You don’t have to do it online, or you can build it online.
Whatever you want is, the main thing is to get this stuff down. But talk about how you are different from a standpoint of not just the functions and features, but your brand.
An example that comes to mind is software that you can use to manage your landing pages and your sales funnels. We use several different products, but one of the of them that we use a click funnels, and Russell Brunson does an incredible job marketing Click funnels in that you’re really buying the brand.
If you listen to him, you rarely ever hear about the functions and features. You hear how easy it is and how quickly you could do it. But you don’t hear him comparing himself on a one by one basis unnecessarily to an infusion soft or lead pages or any of these other competitors that he has.
In fact, if you go through one of his webinars, he never even gives you a comparison as it relates to any of these other competitors.
And I think the lesson is that that is how you can think about how you’re going to differentiate yourself. He differentiates himself in that he gives you all this extra stuff, and you’re part of this movement versus just being a function and feature piece of software.
Another person that does that is Nathan Berry with ConvertKit. ConvertKit doesn’t necessarily ever compare themselves to Send Grid or a Mail Chimp or any of these others.
It’s really this community that you could be a part of, and he helps you with tips and tricks and things to get your emails to be delivered easier and quicker and all these other things, but as you can see, they’re not doing just functions and features, so think about how you are different from your competition in that regard.
Now, the other thing that I want to say in competition is sometimes people obsess over their competition.
And here’s the deal.
You have no control over your competition. You can’t sit back every day, bring it up in the morning and say, ‘What are they doing?’ and react.
That is not a strategy you need to be aware of your competition. You need to check in regularly, but you need to not be obsessed about them.
You need to have had and built a strategy with your business plan, your sales and marketing strategy and your differentiation strategy of what you’re going to do and go execute on that versus obsessing about your competition that you can’t control.
So keep that in mind as you go through and use these examples and go look at how these companies market themselves so that you can figure out how you can position yourselves beyond just functions and features.
Now let’s talk quickly what your actual slide will look like.
There’s different ways that you can present your competition. You could do a SWOT analysis, which is a strength, weakness, opportunities and threats, and you could put each one of those in a quadrant and then list those things out and put that on your slide.
You could do a X/Y axis, where you talk about your challengers in the upper left quadrant, your leaders in the upper right, your niche players in the lower left and your visionaries in your right.
And you would probably put yourself in the visionary and you could come up with some X Y axis that helped the viewer differentiate and understand where you are in the market and so that you can show your team where you are, where you want to go or you could do an X Y axis where you had price and performance, and you could map where you are to these other people.
Now, the one thing when you are presenting this slide, whether it’s in the sales presentation and investor pitch or any of these other things, is never mention your competitions. Name doesn’t mean that you can’t put there information on this slide, but what you want people to remember is your name, not their name.
And as soon as you trigger if, let’s say you have an e commerce company and you put Amazon up there and you you say Amazon, you say the word Amazon that’s going to trigger very quickly in someone’s head.
As soon as you think Amazon, they think giant. They think this isn’t this or if you’re competition is Microsoft, they’re gonna think Giant, don’t say it, say your brand and point to it and even reference it.
But don’t say the name, So that’s a little tip for you when you are giving the slide. So come up with the answers to this and in some cases, go and follow them and hack what they’re doing, so to speak.
Reverse engineer what their marketing is. See what is working out their map it and then I would say maybe once a month check in and see what they’re doing.
But remember what I said earlier. You can’t control what your competition does. You want to be aware of them because they are your competition and where they’re going and in comparison to where you’re going.
But you don’t wanna be in reactive mode. Reactive mode will just lead you to a place that doesn’t really build your company strategically, and you’ll find yourself really not making the type of progress that you want.
So rewind this. If you need to figure out how you want to present it in your slide and then start to put together your competition so that you know who they are. You know where you fit in the market and where you want to go.
All right, well, that was pretty easy, right? You can get your competition slide together, and in the next episode, we’re going to talk about your moat, what it is and what things you are doing to build it.
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