Tips to Avoid Demo Drama - Tip 17: Respect your competition

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It is always worth respecting the competition. After all, without them, your software would not be as good. However, it is not worth consciously trying to appear either different or the same as your competitors. That will just get you into a trench warfare situation, where you end up trying to beat the competition by showing different features—a classic ‘feature and function’ battle. This will almost certainly lead to a “so what?” situation, where you are messing with things that are not relevant to your customer.

Instead, respect and know your enemy. Be aware of where each competitor is better than your company, but don’t dwell on it.

Of course it is tempting to focus on your USPs, especially when you know that another competitor is in the arena. However, as I said yesterday, it is far more important to concentrate on your customer’s expectations.

I often hear frustrated users saying, “Why is this so complicated, when in competitor x’s software you just right-click and…?” I used to get very annoyed by this. I even attended a competitor’s online course once, to understand the user experience better. Today, I fully understand why this kind of experience can make users frustrated. Being humble instead of annoyed is much better when you are communicating with people.