A mining equipment company won a major Australian contract by stripping their product to bare essentials while competitors couldn't quickly simplify their feature-heavy machines. The strategy: sell the core product first, add optional extras later, and avoid feature bloat that slows you down.
One simple strategy on how to beat your competitors, and it's not what you think. Let me give you an example of this. So I had a mining equipment company for a while, and we were actually number 2 in the market. We weren't number 1. Our biggest competitors were by far much bigger than we were. They were at a $50 million valuation, and we were barely trying to make money, to be honest. And you know what happened? We went to a massive bid in Australia, and we were bidding on this big contract. It was worth multiple million dollars. And I said to our team, One thing, and I hope this helps you in some way or form. Let's look at our machine. So then we decided, you know what, let's pull all those pieces off. Let's bid this deal, but for the bare bones machine that does exactly what it's meant to do. But because we had been doing this for so long, we kept on adding pieces to keep up with the competition. Thereafter, we continued to win other bids. Our competition, all that paraphernalia, the densitometers, flow meters, everything else was built in under their machine. They couldn't just get rid of it that easily. Their re-engineering would've taken them months and months. And guess what? We just started winning order after order, and that put us ahead of that competitor. So I'm gonna ask you this for your own business. Go back to being simple, sell the simple, and add the extras on, because a lot of times we keep on adding on and we don't really need all those extras. There's key pieces here that will help you grow a successful business in a way that I hope really transforms the way you think and the way you look at things within your business.
