Become a secret shopper

A year or so ago the CEO of Palm, Jon Rubinstein shocked the tech community when he said he had never used an iPhone. “So what’s the big deal?” I hear you say. After all there are plenty of people who have eyes only for the Blackberry.

Agreed, but Jon Rubinstien wasn’t just anybody, he was running a company that turned it’s PDA into a smartphone; he was trying to compete against the iPhone. That he had, apparently, never used one sounds unthinkable.

Maybe not.

Last week I was talking to a couple of business owners (in the service industry) who were wondering why their proposals didn’t seem to be converting into sales. They had it on good authority that their competitors had a good proposal conversion rate so they wanted to know where they were going wrong.

I asked them how the competition’s offering was different to their own. They said they had no idea because they hadn’t seen competitors’ proposals nor knew anyone who had used a competitor’s service.

Of course I asked them if they had gotten any clues from feedback on their unsuccessful proposals. They hadn’t because they didn’t ask.

Another business I know – an online retailer – was wondering how they faired on timeliness of delivery compared to their competitors. “Easy,” I said, “buy something from them and check”. They queried whether this was ethical; I thought it was just plain commonsense.

Let me be clear, I’m absolutely not about to advocate industrial espionage, but I do think you need to find out a bit about what your competitors are doing.

This isn’t so can copy them – you are better than that – but rather to keep you on your toes. If you know what everyone else is up to, improving becomes an imperative. Only then are you working on being the best.

Maybe you do it by a bit of secret shopping, maybe you do it by listening to what your customers say about your competitors, maybe you do it by getting feedback on failed proposals. However you do it, it’s important. How else can you be sure that what you are delivering is ahead of the game?

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).