The coronavirus pandemic has led to the closure of many companies and alerted many others. Competition between companies is becoming stronger, so companies must enhance their brand and corporate competitiveness strategies. This is not always an easy task to undertake, but it is paramount to continued success. Jorge Zuñiga Blanco, a successful business owner from Costa Rica, provides insight into how businesses can improve their competitiveness in order to achieve greater results.
The product or service you offer is the best weapon you have to win and retain customers. Explains Zuñiga, “The higher the quality of your items or the services you offer, the easier it will be to increase the sales volume. Therefore, increasing quality is always a factor that we must take into account when making our company competitive. To do this, you must know our product and evaluate the factors to define the quality of a product. The goal is to know in detail fundamental aspects of the service such as customer feedback, market price or efficiency or performance of the service.”
If you manage to reduce superfluous expenses you will be more competitive. Assess what you’re spending more money on and try to cut spending to improve competitiveness. Not only to save money but to spend it on other interesting points of your company such as new machines, marketing campaigns, more employees to produce, etc.
Markets evolve daily and new business opportunities appear every day. Don’t shut out expanding your business by offering new products or services in market niches that can bring exponential growth to your business. This will make it more competitive and better prepared for more expansions in the future or you’ll even be able to open new doors to potential sales. The exhaustive search for new businesses must be a recurring task for the managers of large companies, as renewal becomes essential in such a changing world.
The most productive employees are those who produce more in less time and therefore bring us much more benefits. “To improve productivity,” asserts Zuñiga, “you’ll need to do a full study of workers’ habits and the resources they use. Investing in new equipment, new systems or making schedule or facility changes can increase productivity that in turn will make our company much more productive.”
Talent is the fastest path to productivity, so entrepreneurs need to surround themselves with valuable people. Betting on talent is betting on your company and its future, so technology companies are looking for new young talent in prestigious universities. Young talents quickly adapt to new demands and working methodologies, so try to surround yourself with talented people to improve your company’s competitiveness.
Innovation and the development of new products or services are essential if you intend to maintain and position the brand in the market. Achieving added value in the product or service is essential to achieve differentiation from the rest of the competition.
Continuous improvement in all the processes of the organization, in the search for quality and excellence is another way to improve competitiveness. This includes the management of Human Resources (and the performance of professionals), procedures and operation in the development of the product or service.
The search for new markets that are less mature than domestic markets, is, even more so with the current economic crisis, a way to achieve greater competitiveness. Although it can sometimes be difficult to position the product or service because of the unfamiliarity of the environment and the market. Today, it is more of an obligation than a possible alternative.
Lastly, the use of information technologies as tools for productivity improvement is now a growing need. This applies both for the optimization of internal logistics and distribution processes, as well as for marketing and communication tools.
