Bigger competitors have more customers, more money and more recognition.  But they also have more stakeholders, more legacy and more complacency.

You can combat bigger competitors by taking advantage of their weaknesses.  Here are six strategies for beating that bigger competitor:

1. Hit them where it hurts

Your bigger competitor will have a key strength compared to your own offer and a key weakness.  For instance, their price might be slightly lower than yours but their quality might be too.  And often that strength comes at the expense of the weakness.

You can’t butt an evenly matched offer against them and hope to come up trumps.  Their reach and their budget will defeat you.  But you can strike at their weakness by repositioning it as more important.  In the example of inferior quality, paint a vivid picture of the consequences, the risks, the losses, the penalties of accepting the lesser quality.

They can respond with strategies around cheaper prices which hurt their margin, with counter messages which weaken their net message or they can pursue improvements which is a slow road.

2. Make buying easier and safer

Your bigger competitor might not see the need to make it easier to do business with them.  But you can’t afford that complacency.  Adopt a strategy of seeking ways to eliminate the risks and obstacles between you and your customers buying from you.

If you need to offer a guarantee, find a way to do it.  If you need to offer more ways of transacting, do that too.  And if you need to change your store hours or go online, find a way to do it.  Make it easier and safer for your customers to try you that first time.

Using this strategy, your product or service may not need to be any more appealing.  Simply removing obstacles can produce a sale where they wasn’t one.

3. Leverage customers better

Customers are a great under-utilised asset.  Your customers can be sold more, can refer other customers, can be used in testimonials, can be featured in advertising and much more.  Your customers are an asset worth real currency, greater per-dollar than the equivalent money in marketing budget.  Yet most companies overlook them.

Your bigger competitor is probably focused on lead indicators like new enquiries and current performance in figures like ‘gross sales’ and ‘store profits’.  So they can miss the opportunities that lie in getting any customer asset working harder.  But you can’t afford to miss that strategy.

4. Go direct

Don’t limit your operational and promotional efforts to indirect activities that fail to develop and exploit a direct relationship between you and your customer.  That relationship is critical for three reasons: it gives you more control over what messaging they get, it gives you greater selling opportunities and it’s largely hidden from your bigger competitor.

If you’re in retail, develop a database and use it.  If you sell through distributors, introduce database marketing that protects your distributor’s name and never bypasses a sale from them.  If you sell products, use the packaging to solicit a relationship.  If you sell services, use the service-rendering to solicit add-on communications.

5. Foster passion

An intangible but powerful asset you can develop is a passion in your customer-base and in the market’s perception of who and what you are.

Apple is a company that long attracted passion through quality and service before their more recent innovations took the company to a new level.  But smaller examples of passion exist, too.  Black Milk’s impressive support for their range of clothing is shown best by an incredible engagement on their Facebook page – 150,000 likes yield for them 30,000 talking about them.

6. Retain more customers

If all you do is lose fewer customers than your bigger competitor, you’re getting ahead.  Generally accepted figures suggest that 68% of customer leave due to perceived indifference.  That suggests that simply exercising a strategy of better service and making unsolicited gestures of thought and care could be enough to stem a great proportion of lost clients.

But to be safe, interview your lost customers to learn more about the reasons they might leave.  Then use these answers to adapt what you do and retain more customers.  Coupled with the other suggestions, this idea is like plugging the holes in the bucket you’re trying to fill with new customers.

Any of these six strategies can do a lot to make your scarce resources work harder.  But use them in concert and you can achieve more.  Doing so can help you beat a much bigger competitor.