In today’s marketplace, competitors need to collaborate on different projects, whether charity fundraising, creating awareness in the audience, or educating customers. Collaborating with your competition is a win-win for you, the industry, and the customers.
- Get More Exposure – When you work with a competitor, you’ll automatically be introduced to their audience as someone who is trusted and valued. Likewise, you’ll do the same for them. This may seem a scary proposition, but if done right, you’ll all get more exposure, and the customer ends up with more choices that are good for everyone, especially customer satisfaction, which is imperative to building a stable long-term business.
- Create Good Will – There is no reason to fear your competition because there are enough differences in preferences by the audience to ensure a place for you all. Therefore, why not create a feeling of goodwill toward your industry by working together on projects that are good for the community, like charity drives, educational events, and more?
- Innovate Faster – There is no doubt that more minds are better than one mind. Every person on the planet sometimes gets stuck in their ideas and beliefs that can only be broken through by joining forces with others with different skill sets and knowledge.
- Grow Your Business Faster – When you take the time to learn about your competitors, you’ll hit the ground running, building your business faster than if you started from scratch with no knowledge.
- Achieve Economies of Scale – When you work with your competition on a short-term project, you’ll experience economies of scale because you’re spreading out the work to more people and selling to more people. This means you can charge less but still earn the income you need.
- Share Skillsets – It’s going to be clear when you start working with your competition that you have different skillsets than they do. You may be great at public speaking while they may be great at the behind-the-scenes technology part. Once you combine forces, you’ll become even more powerful.
- Learn from Their Mistakes – If you study your competition long enough, you’ll also be able to learn from the mistakes they’ve made. Set up an alert using Google Alerts to see discussions about the brand or the generic product idea to learn from complaints and mistakes.
Each competitor brings a unique skill set to the collaboration while introducing yourself and each other to a broader audience base. Connecting with like-minded people also tends to drive innovation faster since you’re more than likely to understand where they stand before you get started.
