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Ask HN: Handling Aggressive Competition
It came to my attention today that a competitor of ours is spreading false information about my company in their sales process. My co-founder occasionally takes meetings, on behalf of our clients, with other marketing companies. At a meeting today, the account manager of one of our competitors gave my co-founder incorrect "factual" information about our company, unaware that while my co-founder was representing the client at the meeting, he represents our company full time.
While I'm not terribly concerned about the competition, as I feel we have a superior product, and I know we have a substantially lower price, I am concerned about the nature of the information that they are spreading. Essentially, we know that they are willing to tell our clients that we have poor search engine visibility and substantially less traffic than we actually have in order to encourage them to cancel our service and transfer to theirs. Neither of these statements is true, we currently rank first on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the appropriate keywords.
In addition to their statements, I am also concerned by the company itself. Unfortunately, the competition in this case is a Fortune 500 company. My concern is that their status and partnerships will lend credibility to their account manager's false statements, and start costing us clients and future sales. The situation is essentially upside down; we have captured the market in this geographic area, and the new entrant is our large competitor.
Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? What do you do when your competition isn't playing fair?
- ctingom 17y agoIf it's a large company, talk to the manager of the person who is sharing incorrect information and ask them politely to talk to the person about it.
- adrianwaj 17y agoFind out if you have legal recourse. Assess the extent of the situation, and the clients involved. Place correct information on your website. Expose your competitor in whatever way necessary, especially for people cancelling with you.
- lsc 17y agoEh, personally, I think it's important to appear graceful about it. Sure, post truthful statements on your website, tell people, etc... but, for example, publicly accusing your competitor of lying about you is probably in bad form.
- lsc 17y agostick with measurable advantages. Nobody rational expects a salesman to tell the truth, so when you have a measurable advantage, the salesguy has got to work extra hard to make the sale. If you are charging $20 for something that is measurably quite similar to what your competitor charges $70 for, well, they have to do a lot of talking to close the sale, while you are in a pretty good position just slapping the price and how you are measurably similar to the competition on your webpage. Having a liberal money-back guarantee (and following through with it; people talk.) also helps overcome credibility gaps. I think Paul Graham wrote something about how 'you might be able to out-hack oracle, but there is no way you can out-sell oracle' or something like that. I'm probably misquoting him. but the idea is that large companies have huge sales advantages that you simply can not touch. your product needs to be a better enough value that it doesn't matter that the competition has better sales than you do. at prgmr.com, I focus on picking up the 'cheap' customers- I don't just mean people who don't want to pay, I mean people who don't cost as much to support. Don't be afraid to loose high-effort customers to your competition. (as much as possible, do so gracefully.)