How to Crush Your Competitors In Any Market (McDonalds & Best Buy Did This)

Last Updated on: 5th August 2022, 08:59 am

You are in a constant battle with your competitors. You are fighting over the prospects that are interested in you and your competitor’s products or services.

The better job you do of encouraging those prospects to spend that first dollar with you rather than the competition, the better your chances are of succeeding.

If you offer a great service or an amazing product, that prospect will develop trust with your brand, and your competitors will find it near impossible to shift that brand trust.

Here’s the thing:

If you can get someone to give you money, even if it’s just a dollar, your relationship with that person instantly changes.

You become a vendor, a provider, and an authority to them.

When somebody becomes a customer, they are 20 times more likely to buy something else. (Provided what they bought from you proved to be valuable to them, of course.)

So the question is: how do we get them to become a customer in the first place? What can we do to make that transformation of prospect to customer?

It’s really simple; you make that transformation easier on the prospect.

Make them an offer that your competitors wouldn’t dream of doing, even if it means you are barely breaking even.

The Tripwire

A tripwire is a cheap but highly valuable product or service that does actually what we have been discussing. It turns a prospect into a customer.

The idea is that you utilise a tripwire within your business, and then make your money off the back-end. Through upsells, repeat business or sheer volume in sales.

Let’s look at some real examples of companies that have done this.

Mcdonalds spend $1.91 to get someone to go through the drive through (this includes all their costs such as advertising and staff wages etc). Their average hamburger sells for $2.08.

The burger is the tripwire in this scenario, if you buy the fries and the coke from Mcdonalds for another $1.77; they make $1.38 additional profit on that.

Those are real figures. They spend a ton on advertising and other costs to get the customer, and they even sell the hamburger ridiculously cheap. Simply because they know that they will make their money on up sells and repeat business.

Another great example of a massive company using this strategy is Best Buy, the biggest consumer electronics supplier in America.

Best Buy sell products like televisions to only cover their overheads and the amount that they paid for it. They make absolutely no profit from selling any of the electronics alone.

So they make no profit for selling the item that the customer entered their shop to get, yet they are the one of the biggest companies in the world.

Crazy, right?

How do they make money?

They make their profit from selling warrantees or geek squad service.

So now it’s your turn.

What can you offer to prospects to make it easier for them to become a customer? What valuable product can you sell ridiculously cheap to get them in the door.

Have a think. It makes the difference between winning and losing.

In business, if you are able and willing to spend the most to acquire a customer, you will win.