EP193 Tear Down 4 Growth

Business is a competition. You need to keep up in order to survive. Not only that, you also need to grow in order to succeed. Ken gives great nuggets of wisdom that will help you rise above from your competition: tearing their products up for growth. He explores the things you can learn by observing and getting down into your business competitor’s products and/or services, reminding you once again the difference between knowledge and wisdom – learning from your mistakes and learning from other people’s mistakes.

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Tear Down 4 Growth

This one is titled Tear Down for Growth. When is the last time you purchased three of your competitors’ products and tore them apart? Literally broke them, tore them apart and figured out exactly how they were built. Did you know that Ford, Lexus, Nissan and almost every single car manufacturer has a hidden plant or a hidden location in which they buy once a year every new model by almost every other manufacturer for the express purpose of tearing them apart? Every single piece, every nut, every bolt, every part of the engine, the block and everything. Why do they do this? Why would a company buy a competitor’s product and then rip it apart? There are two reasons.

Number one, each of the manufacturers knows that they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know the advancements that the other intelligent people working at these other companies know. The only way to know is to tear apart the competitive product and find out what’s shaking. This is a Q-tip moment. Q-tip moment means I’m about to say something that can change your business if you catch it right, if you have ears to hear. Number two, these manufacturers understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is learning from your own mistakes, learning from your own intelligence. Wisdom is learning from other people’s mistakes. Almost all manufacturers’ advancements have seeds in prior failure. Most manufacturer advancement, not just the auto industry, all manufacturing, the advancements often are because of previous failure or previous knowledge that something could be improved. It wasn’t at maximum performance.

All manufacturers’ advancements have seed almost all in the prior failure of some kind. That’s the wisdom that the other manufacturers know and that’s why everybody tears apart everybody else’s car on an annual basis. My suggestion is why don’t you pick a month of the year, maybe March, April, May, and on an annual basis, tear apart one competitive product? The question I get when I teach this point a lot is, “What if you sell insurance, what would you tear down?” That one’s pretty easy. Service industries tear down what is known as pre and post. If you’re in a service industry, maybe a mortgage or real estate, the competitors are tearing down pre and post. What that means is you would ghost purchase the insurance from another company via somebody else, and you want to first get into the marketing flow of that other insurance company.

Find out how exactly are they engaging? Is it Facebook? Is it Google pay-per-click? Is it TV, radio, Sirius Radio? What exactly are they doing? You’ve got to do some homework. You’ve got to use tools like SpyFu or SEOmoz. You can put the names of these companies into these tools, and it will show you the five to ten different ways they are marketing and then you physically tear it down. That’s called the pre, pre-engagement of a client. You can use some tools and figure that out. You do the tear down via tools, but then you hire someone to buy that insurance and then you post it. You do what comes after the purchase. What were the deliverables? Were they received on time? Was the customer service phenomenal? Did they deliver?

Here is the key. Companies have been hiring ghost shoppers since the 1950s. When they hire a ghost shopper, it isn’t to just go into their own store, shop and give feedback so they can tweak their own store. The first ghost shoppers were sent into competitive stores. This is a 70-year-old concept. When is the last time you ghost shopped your competitor and then tracked all the posts, all the deliverables and the service? There is so much to be gleaned by tearing down your competition. If you want to compete with complete clarity, if you want to grow with complete clarity on what is being done industry-wide, then you’ve got to break down your competitor’s stuff. It’s a great business. On an annual basis, Ken recommends that you tear down for growth. I hope this helps. Take care.

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• SpyFu
• SEOmoz

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