You Should Be Funnel Hacking Your Competitors

So when it comes to growing your business, I think there’s really two schools of thought around how you should approach the idea of competition. Your competitors, the other people in your space that are maybe a similar products servicing a similar demographic of customers. The first camp is the camp that believes you should just put your head down, focus on what’s in front of you, focus on what you’re doing to the best of your ability, ignore the competition and just stay in your lane and just make the absolute best thing that you can to service your own customers. And I think there’s a lot of really, there’s a lot of wisdom in this, because often when it comes to the competition, if you allow yourself to go, pay attention to what they’re doing, you can very easily start to create products and services or processes in your business based off of the ghosts that you see presented in your competitors marketing or in their products, right? And not necessarily paying attention to what it is that your customers are asking you for. So on the one hand, I can see the rationale behind the idea of just ignoring your competition. And if there is an aspect of this advice that I do agree with, it’s that you shouldn’t compare yourself and then judge yourself as a result and say, oh, we’re doing worse and feeling bad. Because I think that’s the real problem with comparison, is not that you’re making the comparison, it’s the judgments that you make about your self worth or about the value of your business as a result of that judgment. Now, I am in the second camp school of thought when it comes to competition, which is that you are leaving money on the table if you are not paying attention to what your competitors are doing, if you’re not actively funnel hacking them.

So funnel hacking is a term which just simply means you get into their ecosystem by buying a product or signing up for their emails or their newsletters, or signing subscribing to their YouTube channels or whatever it is. You get into their ecosystem as though you were a customer, and then you pay attention to the cultivated user experience that they’ve created to take their customers or their cold leads and graduate them up to paying customers. So you pay attention. You sign up for their lead magnet, you look at their landing page, you figure out why, you make some informed decisions about why they laid it out the way that they did. You pay attention when they make tweaks and you can then devise, oh, why did they make this tweak? Was it because this was working better than that thing you can pay attention to the emails that you’re getting at the cadence, how frequently they’re sending those, you can see the deals that they’re offering, and then when they do price cuts or when they do upsells, pay attention to every part of the funnel. And when you do this, you can gain some really valuable insights about what’s perhaps working and what’s not working for them behind the doors. But then also you can come up with some new, fresh ideas about what you could be implementing to service your own customers better. Because at the end of the day, your customers are probably going to be looking at their funnel, your funnel, and then they’re going to be buying from somebody and assume that they’re in both of your funnels.

You have to ask yourself, which funnel is more likely to lead to the desired result. And I think that there’s a lot of value in paying attention to what the competitors are doing in that way. Now, you have to be careful. You have to be very careful because you don’t have access to the behind the scenes data. You don’t necessarily know what their numbers are, their margins, or their conversion rates. You don’t know any of that stuff. And so when you see them making a change on a website and you see them swapping out this copy for that copy, and they’re now addressing this pain point rather than this other pain point, well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should do the same. It doesn’t necessarily even mean that the one was converting better or worse than the other.

There could be other reasons and rationales behind it. And without having the full scope of perspective, you can often make uninformed decisions in the wrong direction. And this is very important. This is one of the reasons why you don’t copy what you see them doing. Because if you copy the exterior, then when the machine breaks or it doesn’t yield the results that you want, you don’t have the knowledge or the experience to be able to troubleshoot it and fix it accordingly. What you want to do when you’re funnel hacking is you’re gaining inspiration. Because as Pablo Picasso said, good artists copy, great artist steal. Now, I’m not saying go steal what they’re doing, but take it and ask yourself, would this work better in our context? Is there some inspiration that we can derive from this, that we can implement in our own processes? And then start a b testing, do some, do some side by side comparisons.

Oh, when we use this pain point as the antagonist to drive the sale, it converts at this rate versus when we did this one so I’m a big fan of that because entrepreneurship, often we’re just kind of in a silo trying to find the solution to our customers problems. And we’re operating often on limited information. Now, the best way to get information about your customers problems is to go directly to the customer and talk to them. But if you’re just starting out and you don’t have a lot of customers yet, you don’t have a lot of data points to work with, and you’re still trying to figure out who are they? How do I speak to them? Well, go pay attention to how others in the space are already speaking to that desired audience, and that can really fast track your process. Now, I like to keep, there’s like five or six people that I keep a tab on. I like to pay attention because I think they’re great thinkers. I think they’re great competitors, like in a similar space talking about a lot of same things and they have a lot of acumen. I can learn a lot from them and how they do things.

And we’ve used this over the years to really level up. We use this very extensively at escape climbing. In fact, that was and Invictus capital. Now I come to think about it, because private equity in the real estate space was already a very well established sector. You know, there’s multiple billion, billion dollar companies in that space. So just going and paying attention, how do they speak to the target audience? How do they structure their copy, their landing pages, all that stuff, and then use that because you don’t want to copy, but you do want to rhyme, right? You want to be similar in the consumer’s mind, unless your goal is to stand out as the black sheep and be completely different. And that can be good, too, but at least do it with intention. Know what the rules are, the rules of conformity, or the rules of that industry, or the expectations within that industry before you break them, break them with intention.

So hope this brings you some value. Go figure out your homework. Here is to go figure out who are some competitors in your space and people who are servicing or speaking to a similar customer. Maybe they’re not in the same exact space. They could even be tangential. I think looking at other verticals, other industries, and how they’re doing things and then copying bits and pieces and saying, oh, maybe I can plug that in over here. That can be very effective as well. We did this with escape climbing again, because we’re in the rock climbing space.

It’s a very small industry. There wasn’t a lot of other rock climbing companies doing exactly what we’re doing. So we didn’t have a lot of competitors in that space to compare against. So we went to other industries, you know, the surf industry, the skateboard industry, other extreme sports, and how they speak to the client, which is not too dissimilar than the average rock climber. Right? So take that. Go find your homework. Your homework is to go find those, those other brands, those other businesses, get into their ecosystem in whatever way you have to, and then pay attention to how they are operating. Take notes, figure out what could you integrate into your business, and then go do it.