Once you have made the sale...you can stop selling.

Is the competition really some mythical beast? No, not really. Knowing how to play your group of salespeople as a team, to overcome the group objective of winning the customers support, is the objective. The opposing team in proper viewpoint is not just the similar competing business to yours. Nor is it the competing franchises of your home office.
No, in order to really be effective in the market place as a surviving business, you must go beyond that philosophy. You must be willing to expand your viewpoint to fully understand who the competition truly is.
Your true competition is simply this: Anywhere that your customer would spend his or her dollars as opposed to spending them at your company or place of business.

The only way to have great customers is to be one.

Avoid selling to dumb customers, there aren't enough left!

However, more important to all of that: the players played the game as a true team. There are many teams in baseball, but not all play as a team. Many merely play as a group of talented athletes, which is a huge difference over the course of a long season.

Every week the state puts out a new sales tax permit report that you can ask for sorted by ZIP code. We get a copy of that report to make sure that new folks coming into the city are reporting to the correct city. Every week there's an error.