Stay Ahead Of Your Competition!

Are you using modern competitive analysis techniques to refine your sales strategy and boost your value proposition?

Any successful sales professional should be keeping close tabs on what is happening in their industry and with their competition. There are many traditional competitive analyses methods, which work well such as attending industry conferences, participating in networking functions, reading industry periodicals, listening to quarterly earnings calls and reading annual reports.

Although the insight you collect may helpful, it is often lagging versus leading information. You need to know what your competitors are doing right now and will be doing in the future. The past- has passed.

Your firm should also be using what I call modern competitive analysis techniques such as leveraging Social Networking and Internet Tools to gain up to the minute knowledge. Here are 5 techniques to add to your routine.

1) Read Competitive Tweets

Find and start to follow your competitors on Twitter. Read their Tweets and see who they are following. You can even sign up for their Twitter feed and get up to the minute updates on your work Blackberry or Iphone. If your competitors are not on Twitter, that also tells a story. They are not leveraging modern technology to interact with their customers- which could give your company a competitive advantage. (You can also incorporate Twitter into your pre-call sales preparation, which I’ve written about here.)

2) Follow Competitive & Industry Blogs

You will gain significant insight from blog posts written by your competitors and industry experts. Your competitors’ blogs are usually part of their company’s website, but may also be stand alone. Use tools like Technorati Blog Search or Google Blog Search to identify important blogs to your industry. Then sign up for Email alerts or RSS feeds to get notified whenever a new blog post is added.

3) Use LinkedIn to Get To Know Your Competitors’ Employee Base

Find out who your competitors employ and what discussions they participate in – on LinkedIn. Using the People Search function find out who leads the sales force, who your specific counterparts are and what they bring to the table. For example, if you are the Sales Director for the New England region and have 20 years of industry experience, yet your counterpart at a competitor only has 1 year of experience in the industry, that’s great information to know!

You should investigate which LinkedIn groups your competitors participate in- and you should be there also for two reasons. One, you can gain competitive insight through what they post and respond to. And, you ensure that your brand gets “equal exposure” and is not missing from critical conversations.

4) Investigate Website Traffic To Expose Weaker Competitors

While recently working with a start-up, we leveraged Google searches to identify possible competitors then visited their websites to learn more. At first glance, it appeared that we had a lot of strong competition. However, when we delved deeper into their website traffic we saw a very different story.

By leveraging tools on Compete.com and Alexa.com, you can find out exactly how many unique and repeat visitors go to yours, and your competitors’ websites. If you have a competitor that has a beautiful website, but very little traffic, they are likely not investing enough in their sales and marketing tactics. Website traffic tells an important story.

5) Use Sales Triggers and Alerts

There are technologies available that will spider the web and other data sources and look for meaningful information about your competitors and industry. (I wrote about this service in an earlier blog post focused on sales alerts about your customers or prospects.)

For example, you may want to receive a competitive alert if there are management changes, mergers & acquisitions, announcements about hiring, layoffs, expansion or new customers.

You can pay for services like this (see the blog post on one of my favorites- Inside View) or you can leverage the free Google Alert service. You can sign up for unlimited alerts based on the keywords or topics of your choice, which are delivered to you via email.

There is also a new service called TweetBeep, which specifically monitors conversations on Twitter and will send you an alert when the technology identifies your competitive keywords.

Here are some additional competitive intelligence resources:

“Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies” by Benjamin Gilad

“Competitive Intelligence : How to Gather, Analyze, and Use Information to Move Your Business to the Top” by Larry Kahaner

“Competitive Analysis, Understand Your Opponents” By Harvard University Press

“Competitive Intelligence: A Framework for Web Based Analysis and Decision Making” By Conor Vibert