Buy How to Drive Your Competition Crazy from Amazon

Every company should have a nemesis. You need someone to spur you on to greater innovation, service, and success. If you don’t have an enemy, get one. This is one of the tidbits of wisdom Guy Kawasaki outlines in his book How to Drive Your Competition Crazy.

In addition to Kawasaki’s solid principles, each chapter has an interview with someone demonstrating real-world success with the concepts discussed. These, combined with his other examples, validate the author’s points. Topics covered include the following:

Know Thyself

Before you can be more successful than your enemy, you need to understand your business. Kawasaki suggests some thought-provoking questions to ask about your company and its products.

Know Thy Customer

Hit the road and “press flesh” by meeting and talking with actual customers. See how they use your product and see what challenges they are having.

Know Thy Enemy

You can’t hope to defeat your enemy unless you’ve got good intelligence on it’s every move. Study your competition and see how it operates. How would it respond to your actions? Does it even consider you competition? One of my favorite ways to “know thy enemy” is to buy and use their product.

Focus on Customers

Kawasaki provides some great examples of success by focusing on customers first. When your customers are happy, your competition doesn’t have a chance.

Other Topics

• Focus your efforts on a decisive point. This could be a niche market or you providing an alternative to another existing solution on the market.
• Turn your customers into an effective sales force as customer evangelists.
• Give back to society and the community.
• “Build customer allegiance early and often.”
• Exploit problems with your competition’s products to your advantage.
• Partnering with your competition is one way to eliminate it.
• Be ready to defend your new market share.
• It helps to draw outside the lines and ditch the status quo in defeating your competition. See Rules for Revolutionaries

I enjoyed this book but after having read Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries, I did see some overlap with his other volumes. Nevertheless, this is a great read on how to get under your competition’s skin by making your customer happy.

Since this is an older book you may have trouble finding a copy. Check your public library, Amazon’s used books, or a local used book store!

Have you read How to Drive Your Competition Crazy? Tell us what you thought of the book in the comments below.

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When people buy your product or pay for a service, they are looking for a return on their investment. They come into the purchase with certain expectations of results.

I recently attended a conference where I paid extra for two half-day seminars. The morning seminar was amazing and I learned a lot from two industry leaders.

After lunch I headed to my second seminar with a different presenter. The afternoon was a complete disappointment. The presentation style was disjoint, random, and hard to follow. The presenter made assumptions about his audience that were often flawed and he didn’t even follow the “official” time schedule.

After filling up about two-thirds of the time, the speaker called it a day. This was after two unscheduled breaks. What? Did I not pay for a half-day seminar? You can’t just stop! I want more. I want my money’s worth!

And so do your customers. They pay you for something. You better deliver.

Keys to Delivering Great Value

• Know and meet your customer’s expectations
• If you’ve set expectations for time, content, or quality, you must fill those expectations.
• Follow the rules of normal conduct. Breaking with routines can be dangerous if it is unexpected.
• Ere on the side of caution. You can always underpromise and overdeliver.

I took the family with me on my recent trip to San Diego for a conference. We flew Southwest Airlines because they had a direct flight.

In all the times we’ve flown as a family, our baby boy has traveled on our laps. If you’re a parent, you’ll know this makes for a long trip. We could have purchased a ticket for our infant but since we’re trying to save a penny to take our chances with a lap child instead.

When we checked in for our flight this last time, we asked if the plane was full. It wasn’t. Would there be room for our child’s car seat? Absolutely. We were able to preboard the plane and find a row of seats and set up the car seat before the plane filled with people.

The subsequent flight was enjoyable because we were free of having to deal with our wiggly, ever-moving son on our laps for three hours! He was happy playing or sleeping in the car seat while we read or napped ourselves.

This was our best flying experience thus far as parents. The simple fact that we didn’t have to pay extra and could use a seat that would have been empty anyway made our day.

Unused Capacity

Your company will at some time have some overproduction, unused inventory, or day old bread. All of these opportunities give you the chance to be charitable and make a customer happy. You’ve already done the work. Your plane is flying to San Diego even if it has empty seats.

What should you do with your leftovers?

How can you give customers your product or provide bonus accommodations that are really no extra cost to you?

See what you have extra. Then see what you can give away.

Even little things will make a big difference to customers who are constantly ignored, beaten up, and otherwise herded like cattle in a world where good customer service is hard to find.

Over the last two weeks I attended two major conferences: ETech in San Diego and SXSW Interactive here in Austin. Both conferences tried their best to gather feedback on the sessions, panels, and overall experience.

ETech blanketed the keynote ballroom with legal sized feedback forms. Lots of questions and lots of paper.

SXSW Interactive passed out small postcard size “Instant Panel Feedback” cards in their panels. These cards had 2 questions where you could rate the panel and presenters on a scale of 1 to 5. There was also room to enter your comments. Short, concise, and easy to fill out.

Short and Sweet

The shorter a survey, the more likely people will take the time to respond. If you overwhelm them, they may just give up and you’ll get no feedback. Be sure to ask quality questions.

Be Timely

You need to gather feedback as soon as possible following the event you’re surveying. When your customer is fresh in the moment, they’ll give you more accurate and meaningful responses. If you wait for a follow-up phone call or email, the details you ask about will have been obscured by time. Gather feedback right away!

Give Options

Both of these conferences let attendees take the surveys on paper or on the conference website. By giving a choice of survey-taking venues, people are more likely respond via the most comfortable and convenient means for them.

Incentivize?

ETech feedback forms asked for your email address so you could be entered in a drawing for fabulous prizes. Some people will answer surveys just for the chance of winning something. Be careful with these types of incentives as people may fill out gibberish just to try and win something. You may be better off ditching incentives and relying on the good will of individuals who care enough to respond.

Consolidate

After gathering feedback from customers, it will be time to act. You’ll see recurring themes in feedback that will guide you to obvious improvements. There are numerous ways to analyze customer feedback that we’ll have to discuss later. For now, be sure to collect customer feedback “in the heat of the moment” so that you have a true feel of your customers’ emotions and experience.

I recently saw international shipper DHL’s commercial on TV. The piece ended with the announcer stating:

Bringing customer service back to shipping.

Those last words stuck in my mind and left me thinking: “what did they mean by that?”

I immediately remembered all the bad experiences I’ve had with DHL’s competition. Foremost of these has been the United States Postal Service.

This is exactly what DHL wanted me to think. Brilliant! The natural next course of action would be for me to say: “Oh yeah, I did have a bad experience with UPS/Fedex/USPS. Maybe I’ll try DHL next time.”

Overt Jabs

You can indirectly attack your competition by making them look bad. You don’t even have to mention names. By alluding to problems of customer service, DHL let the customer draw the natural conclusions. Can you do the same in your industry?

Customer Realization

Customers are more likely to act upon conclusions that they make than ones you force feed them. Lead your potential customer down the path but let them take the final step. Make it so easy and natural that they have no choice but to choose the conclusion you want.

If you have kids, then you’ve probably taken a picture or two. If you haven’t, then the grandparents have surely encouraged you to go get pictures taken.

We take about 20 pictures of our constantly-in-motion son just to get one good one. So we sought professional help to get some portraits taken.

Slow Turnaround

We got the first portraits of our 3-month old at JCPenney’s studio. After the photo shoot, we had to wait several weeks for the pictures to be developed. Unfortunately, to add insult to injury, the quality of the pictures was disappointing and amateurish.

Customer result: we would try some place different next time.

Company result: one time customers will never return. No more money for you!

Instant Gratification

For our second round of pictures three months later, we went to Kiddie Kandids. Using their digital equipment to process our images, they were able to deliver prints to us in under 15 minutes. The quality was superb and far superior to JCPenney.

Customer result: we’ve already been return customers and will continue to patronize their service in the future.

Company result: gained a customer for the long term plus all the referrals we’re sending their way!

Which company would you rather be?

Customers will buy when they can see what they’ll be buying instantly and the overall purchase experience is pleasant. Step up and exceed customer expectations.

My fellow 9rules members over at Particle Tree have been publishing a great web development magazine for the last several months. Treehouse magazine covers topics in programming, design, and business and is available in PDF format.

I wrote an article about customer relations for the web professional that was just published in the March issue of Treehouse. I’ve got some great company in the business section with a Guy Kawasaki interview who, by the way, was even kind enough to comment on my last review of his book.

With the Winter Olympics a few weeks behind us, I must ask: did you buy anything you saw advertised on TV during the Olympics solely because you saw it during the Olympics?

I vaguely remember car commercials: were they for Chevrolet? I don’t know because I didn’t buy a car due to its appearance on TV.

How about beer? There were lots of those commercials. Which brand? I don’t remember because I don’t drink beer.

Doesn’t Home Depot have lots of Olympic employees? I don’t care because Home Depot has failed me in the past. I love competitor Lowe’s.

Then there was that one movie preview I kept seeing. I think it was The Da Vinci Code. This one did look promising. I’ll have to add it to my list of movies to see.

Of the four commercials I can remember, I will most likely take action on one of them (the movie). Why is that? Because TV commercials are too broadly targeted.

Mass Media

As Seth Godin communicates in his book Purple Cow, mass marketing is useless. Companies spent millions of dollars on Olympic advertising and sponsorship to questionable financial benefit.

Brand Reinforcement

Commercials during the Olympics, while ineffective in swaying you to purchase new products, did hammer the companies’ brand into your head. This may just leave customers thinking: “oh, I already do business with company XYZ. That’s nice that they sponsored our Olympic team.”

Doing Good

You may say that sponsoring the Olympic team is a noble and charitable endeavor. Absolutely. Guy Kawasaki in his Art of the Start reminds us that we should give back to the community by being a Mensch. Give charitably because it is the right thing to do, not because you think you’ll gain business because of it!

Buy The Art of the Start from Amazon

Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, The Art of the Start, helps your business get started on the right foot. Each chapter focuses on the “art” of something and walks you through the principles needed to succeed every step of the way. Principles are intermingled with real-world examples to get your brain juices flowing.

The Art of Starting

You can read several of Kawasaki’s “Art of” principles on his blog. In fact, if you wait long enough he may just cover everything in this book on his blog.

I highlight the topics he covers in the book below.

Causation

• Make Meaning - your product or service should “make the world a better place.”
• Crafting a Mantra instead of a mission statement
• Get to work. You’ve got to get your product out the door, work on the business formalities later.
• Identify your business model
• Aim towards key milestones, identify your assumptions, and what tasks need to be completed.

Articulation

• Positioning - how to distinguish yourself from the competition, focusing on a niche, choosing your company/product name.
• Pitching - how to explain your company to anyone
• Writing a Business Plan - which should be a verbose version of your pitch.

Activation

• Bootstrapping - how to survive and succeed in the early, no-cash days of your company.
• Recruiting
• Raising Capital

Proliferation

• Partnering - when, with whom, and how to schmooze
• Branding
• Rainmaking

Obligation

• Being a Mensch - when you make the big time, or even on your way up: give back to others

I enjoyed this book and it gave me some great ideas on how to better kick off a project I’m starting. Kawasaki does reuse some stories and content from his previous books but includes enough new material to merit your attention.

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