Some of the ways you might build or maintain a competitive advantage:

• Access to hard-to-replicate Talent
• Hard-earned skills
• Higher productivity due to insight or organization allowing you to be cheaper
• Low cost of living for you and your staff allowing you to be cheaper
• Protected or secret technology or trade secrets
• Existing relationships (switching costs working in your favor)
• Virally organized product and organization
• Large network of users already and a network effect to support you
• Focus on speed
• Monopoly power and the willingness to use it
• Unique story that resonates with the worldview of your target audience
• Shelf space due to incumbency
• Large media budget
• Insight into worldview of prospects–making what they care about
• Emotional intelligence of your salesforce or customer service people
• Access to capital and willingness to lose money to build share
• Connection to community

Not on this list, at least not prominently, are “we are #1!”, “we are better!” and “we try harder.” Cheerleading skills are not a competitive advantage.

Remember..If I don’t know about you, you don’t exist.

This is what many of us call “an elevator pitch” : a description of your concept or company which is short enough to be delivered to someone whom you or one of your advocates…..your spouse or colleague, perhaps.. run into and have the opportunity to pitch on the elevator, somewhere between the 10th and the 3rd floor. Three to five sentences would make a good elevator pitch, so they’d better be good ones, whetting the appetite for more.

This author also mentions figuring out what is unique about yourself…. your unique selling point… what makes you different from others… and you’d better have one.

Try to connect, of course, just like you are meeting someone you’d like to know better at a social occasion.