Selling Learning – Learning Selling

Follow your competitors’ moves in real time!

Today, one of our school’s primary competitors introduced a 15% discount for anyone enrolling over the next 3 months. That means they’re undercutting our prices: our “list” prices are very similar, and my maximum discount is currently zero for “normal” customers (young ones and very old ones get 10%).

In the past, we matched each other’s discounts and had a bit of a price war going on, but these days I’m positioning my school as the highest-priced in the local market, in order to capture the more well-off clients who are less interested in price and more in quality. Not a bad position to be in.

But how did I know that they’d introduced a new discount today?

Of course you DO monitor your competitors’ websites. If not, start now. They’re an invaluable sources of information on your local market and on what your clients are thinking when they make their buying decision.

One of my OTHER competitors claims she never checks what other schools are doing. If true, it’s very foolish. Information is power, and leaving any stone unturned in your search for a competitive advantage when you are responsible for a company and people’s livelihoods, cannot be justified on the basis of hubris alone.

Of course, it’s cool to SAY you don’t care what the others are doing.

But checking out three, four, ten competing schools regularly, especially if you’re NOT the market leader, can be at best depressing and at worst paranoia-inducing. Will I ever be able to compete with these guys? What sort of marketing budget do they have that lets them do THAT!

So, here’s a tip: work out which pages on which websites your REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT when they change, and get your “robot spies” to do the work for you. There’s an excellent, free service, which will let you know each time the pages your are interested in change.

Want to know when your competitors put their prices up? Fed up of checking the website of your local Cambridge ESOL centre in the hope that they have FINALLY put up the next exam dates? Your robot spy will check the relevant pages each day, and send you an e-mail when something new happens.

I honestly don’t know who the hell these people are, or what they get out of it, but you should check them out. It’s an essential tool for any school owner, manager or marketeer: http://blog.imparareinglese.co.uk/wp-admin/edit.php

Anyway, the discounting competitor? What does this tell me? Should I worry? Need we rush out my own competing discount?

I once read something that said that the best positions in any market are that of lowest-priced provider, and highest priced-provider. But that the latter is the easiest to defend. So in a crisis, when everyone’s pushing their prices down, or discounting, and when the highest-priced provider is panicking and keen to introduce “value” or “discounted” products in order to shore up revenues, that could just be the time for the second or third placed school to move out of the “deadly middle” and learn to fill the top niche.

Everyone’s reducing prices, so we INCREASE them. Suddenly, we’ll be perceived as the top quality provider, at least on price. Or go broke quickly.

Check back here in a year to see if I made the right decision.