Buiness Competitors:

The essence of this strategy is, with the weaker army, always to have
more force at the crucial point than the enemy.” Focus all your
energies and resources on convincing your ideal customer that
what you offer is superior to anything offered by your competitors.
This is the key to victory in business.

Positioning:

In sales and marketing, perception is everything.
How are you positioned in your marketplace? What do
people think about you and what do they say about your company
when you are not there? What are the words they use to
describe you?

Your positioning very much affects your brand image. The
position you hold in the hearts and minds of your customers
and prospective customers determines whether they buy from
you, how much they buy from you, how much they pay you for
what you sell, how much they negotiate or delay making a
sales purchase, and how often they both repurchase and refer
you to other prospective customers. Your positioning is so
important that you cannot leave it to chance.

The reason for the harshness of the Mongol siege described
earlier was clear. It was a matter of positioning or “branding.”
Because news traveled fairly quickly over the caravan trails, it
soon became known that it was much better to surrender to the
Mongols than it was to resist them and suffer the consequences.

Genghis Khan made it clear that, if a city or even an empire
surrendered to him, he would leave all of its administrators
and tax collectors in place and allow them to live under a government
of their own people as long as they paid proper tribute
to the Mongols each year. This turned out to be a much
better solution than going to war against them. It was one of
the great marketing strategies of the Middle Ages.

In order to take the offensive, you must first be courageous.
Therefore the greatest obstacle to your success is the fear of
failure. Actually, it is not failure that hurts you. You have failed
lots of times in your life. It is the fear of failure that holds you
back. Fear of any kind paralyzes you. It makes you step on the
brake of your own potential. It undermines your confidence
and diminishes your expectations of yourself.

The starting point for the development of courage is for
you to set clear goals, make detailed plans, select the most
important thing that you can do, and then dare to go forward!
Courage is the willingness to embark on a new course of
action with no guarantees of success. In fact, you must expect
to suffer temporary failure and defeat over and over again if
you are really serious about being a big success. The fact is that
successful people fail far more often than failures do.

But the difference is that successful people expect to fail and expect to
learn something valuable every time they fall down.
As long as you have a goal, when you do fall down, you will
fall in a forward direction. When you pick yourself up, you will
be a little closer to the goal each time. “There is no dishonor in
falling, but only in failing to rise again.”