If you’re still not sure about collaborating with your competition, let’s discuss the reasons collaboration is better than competition when it comes to growing your online business.
Collaboration Reduces Stress
It can be stressful to go to work each day thinking about how the competition is doing this or that better or faster than you. It can also make you second guess your offers to the point that you are frozen in fear. Instead of seeing yourself and them as competitors, see each other as complementary to each other, your stress will be reduced. It’s okay if one business makes more sales as long as you’re working together to figure out how to serve the audience.
Collaboration Lowers Costs
This is especially true when you are talking about planning large online or offline events for the customer base. If you find five or six competitors to help with the planning, organization, and running of the event, the cost will be divided among you, but the profits will end up higher too because you’ll be able to have a more significant and more in-depth event. Since you all bring different skills to the event, duties can be spread out, so no one has too much to do, so you’ll enjoy your events more too.
Collaboration Improves the Creative Process
Competition tends to slow innovation more than you think because it’s hard to know what you don’t know. But when you share resources with the competition, the creative process will flow faster and become more effective. Consider how scientists worked together to create a COVID-19 vaccine quickly. The research company released the virus’s genome openly, allowing anyone who thought they could produce a solution access instead of hiding it to be first to market.
Collaboration Increases Industry Brainstorming
When more people with different experiences work together to brainstorm a solution, they often become even more useful. More minds to figure out a puzzle means the puzzle will come together that much faster too.
Collaboration Improves Customers Lives
Ultimately, working together to produce solutions for your joint audience will improve your customers’ lives, which is the point of your business in the first place. Some may choose to buy from you, and some may choose to buy from the competitor, but ultimately the customer wins, and their lives are better.
Collaboration Boosts Skillsets
When you collaborate with other businesses, you’ll end up acquiring their skill set, and they yours. This can make for a huge difference in your ability to get your product to market faster because you can outsource the stuff you can’t do to them and vice versa, thus boosting the skillset of both of your businesses.
Collaboration Improves Deliverable Quality
Having another set of eyes on the result or deliverable is essential for most business owners. However, an online business owner who started from their kitchen table alone may not have access to others to observe and critique. Working with your competition in this way can improve your deliverables exponentially.
Collaboration is always better than competition, but you can still introduce fun elements of competition when you launch your newest offer by offering your collaborators a boosted affiliate percentage and by having fun sales or industry award contests amongst yourselves.
