Slaying Goliath: How Small Companies Can Compete Against Their Large Competitors

You may know the story of David and Goliath, but do you have a clear understanding of how your small company can compete and win against your large competitors?

If you are an entrepreneur, you may wonder how small companies can compete and win against their big competitors. It can seem like nothing short of a daunting challenge. After all, big companies have more money, more resources, and more market share. But that doesn’t mean that they are invulnerable. The trick is to successfully identify their weaknesses and formulate a plan of attack, leveraging a variety of competitive advantage strategies. You can start by asking yourself questions like: What can you do better than those competitors? What market pain point are they ignoring? What advantages does your smaller, nimbler business have relative to customer engagement, talent management, or new market opportunities?

Your Company May Be Small, But it Can Compete

The reality is that small companies have numerous advantages that, in concert with the right business strategies, they can capitalize on to compete effectively. For example, they are typically much closer to their customers than large companies are, which can be leveraged to create an information advantage. They are also able to be more nimble, giving them a time advantage, and more focused, giving them both a scope and scale advantage. It comes down to understanding the benefits of being a smaller company and making sure that you fully exploit them.

But it’s not just about taking advantage of being small. It’s also about undermining some of your large competitors’ natural strengths. Having great senior managers, well-established customer relationships, and fantastic distribution channels are often among the benefits of being a large company. Yet there are ways that small companies can minimize these strengths and, in many cases, even create an edge. At the same time, there are specific steps that small companies can take to defend themselves against attacks from their larger competitors.

Slaying Goliath: How Small Companies Can Compete Against Their Large Competitors demonstrates that the key to winning against larger companies is to understand your own strengths, identify and exploit your larger competitors’ weaknesses, successfully defend against their attacks, and execute against your goals better — and faster — than most bigger businesses are capable of doing. It stresses that once you develop some momentum, it is important to never take your foot off the gas.

By reading this eBook, you will learn the practical strategies necessary to compete against your large competitors and will gain an understanding of how to best leverage your size to your advantage. In the end, utilizing these strategies will force larger competitors to respond to you, rather than the other way around. That in turn will put you in a position to create opportunities in crowded markets that might have otherwise seemed impossible to grasp. We are small companies can competenot suggesting with this eBook that doing so will be easy, of course, but it’s certainly not impossible. Remember, before his battle with Goliath began, no one gave David a shot. And we all know how that story ended.

Find out more by downloading your free copy of Slaying Goliath: How Small Companies Can Compete Against Their Large Competitors. You can access any of OpenView Labs’ other eBooks by clicking here.

Share Your Thoughts

  • Mark Bayer

    Another area that could be included in this context is a discussion around how expansion stage companies can leverage the predetermined emotional preferences of individual buyers.

    A basic tenant of sales is, people buy on emotion and justify after the fact with logic. A key differentiator expansion stage organizations offer over large enterprises is a different emotional buying/engagement experience.

    Examples where expansion stage companies offer a different buying experience include:

    1) Solutions tailored to the unique needs of the buyer vs standard items selected from a catalogue. This may include flexibility around; packages, pricing, configurations, etc. This speaks to the emotional concern customers have over protecting limited resources.

    2) An engagement is a comprehensive relationship with a set of trusted advisors vs dealing with individuals from multiple departments (sales, engineering, consulting, support, etc.). An example might include; personal connection with everyone involved with the solution, a seamless approach to sales/implementation/go-live and direct executive level escalation. These help minimize the fear of failure (or at least reduce fear of angry people lined up outside their door).

    3) Demonstrating domain expertise in the space. Communicating a unique capability to explain how the solution will deliver the result, based on the required timeline and available resources. This approach allows the client to focus on the things they like to do most (and probably do best) without having to worry about every detail related to a project they may not fully understand.