The only competitor that matters

As I mentioned in my post about benchmarking, freelancers that do the same work as us are rarely competitors.

In fact, the only time they are competitors is when they’re bidding on the same job. I’ve found that only rarely happens, especially if you’re like me and avoid wasting time quoting for quote collectors.

Anyways, our main competitor is the status quo.

We generally don’t have to prove that we’re better than xyz firm. We have to prove that our solution is better than the status quo, and costs less than the benefits associated with what we do.

When we start thinking like this, we talk in different language.

Instead of “WordPress is the most popular CMS and is better than all the alternatives”, we say “WordPress has a feature set that will work perfectly for your goals to have a blog featured heavily on your site” or ” Magento is a great solution for you because it’s got all of the functionality you require, plus it’s open source so it will cut costs considerably”.

Beating the competition is not a case of having better features and benefits than other solution providers in your area. It’s about providing a solution that improves the status quo as much as possible.

Related posts:

• Benchmarking is bogus
• 5 reasons why job boards suck
• 4 lines you can add to a proposal that will get you paid in lightning speed
• Interview with Tristan Judd from Able Net Design
• Human Behaviour in Search – plural vs. singular matters