There are countless obstacles to growing one’s company: slow economy, minimal sales, lack of branding and a corporate structure built on sinking sand, just to name a few. Many times a company hits a roadblock in growth because a competitor is too organized and too strategic to leave any portion of the marketplace unclaimed.
Sometimes, if you’ve waited too long to respond to the actions of a competitor it’s too late, throw in the towel and move on, you’ve lost. Other times there is still ample opportunity to rebound. The objective in this case would be to inject chaos, confusion and communication blockades along the path of the opposition.
The world of propaganda and chaos can pull you down into the underbelly of dirty tactical purgatory so it is important to get in and get before it affects the longevity of your corporate position in a negative branding sense. First, to keep from direct association by the public of your involvement in this campaign your actions must be indirectly facilitated (no one can know you’re involved). The best cat’s paw for this are local competitors in your market place that could use a helping hand to paralyze certain aspects of your targets corporate model. You may want to offer assistance to the most verbal and dirty of local competitors by way of marketing collateral that pursues the customer base of your competitor. Offer better rates, better services, better terms whatever, just get the clients thinking about their options. This serves many purposes. It confuses the seemingly, calm and organized client retention model of your target, the smaller competitor takes the heat and liability and this chaos process is scalable to the extent you could go to each of the smaller competitors in your locality and do the exact same thing.
Once this is done, you can count on the target’s infrastructure to start coming apart at the seams, slowly so you want to help it along. The first thing companies do when times get tough is pass the blame which depletes the cohesive nature of an otherwise solid company. This is when you want to start pricking the company with rumors and recruiting calls. Start with the salesman and work up to the sales manager. Sales are the lifeblood to any organization. No sales, no money. Recruit sales agents when you can. Have a local executive recruiting firm do this for you and make it aggressive. You want the sales agent and all their contacts. Some executives will come over and some will not. For those who do not, give them a little baggage in the form of gossip to take back to your target to get the rumor mill started. Rumors are like a cancer and will eat away at an entity like corrosive rust. When a sales executive turns you down, pass his name and info to the smaller local competitors so that they can take their turn to try to recruit them. Whether he goes with one of them or not isn’t the issue, the agenda is to poison the organization, not kill it. Confuse the management.
After the above has been done move to the financial side. After the sales, the financial department of an organization is most critical. These paper-pushers are always upset with their lot in life and their employer will typically personify the epitome of what has gone wrong so feed on that. plant seeds of discontent in the minds of these unstable desk jockeys. Find out where they have drinks after work, buy them a round, become friends, tell them that you’d be happy to ‘hook them up’ with a job at your company or a local competitor. The feeling that they have options will induce an artificial sense of confidence that will only last as long as their relationship with you is intact. You’re the guy that tells them how they are worth more than what they are getting, they can do better etc.
Usually, this will do the trick. Keep the above going as long as you can and it will slowly eliminate your largest competitor as a threat and you can dip in and claim your rightful position in the market place. Sometimes you’ll need to run though the above cycle a few times for optimal affect but the above process will always have an impact as long as you are in control.
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