using Competitive Intelligence in Your day to day Work
This article offers a couple of quick ways on using competitive intelligence in your day to day work. These day’s it’s straightforward to look for information about your business and offerings. Most potential customers will do some research before emailing you for a call or demo.
They can do this to you before even picking up the phone. And they will be looking at your competitors too. I know we have competitors, and some of them are pretty good. Many companies know they have good competitors. But dont really understand which ones are decent. And which ones do you more good than them? And it’s not fair or necessary for your potential customer to know more about them.
Think like them
One of the best ways to gain insight into your competitors is to become a customer. Think like a customer. Approach your competitors with interest in their products. Even better, get someone impartial to do it.
This will be a good start for you. But you will need more Intelligence to be able to develop your game plan to enable you to counter your competitors’ strengths and attack their weaknesses confidently. And here, we do not mean a simplistic SWOT analysis. Which, of course, means strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. SWOT is a good exercise. But if competitive intelligence is a football match, SWOT is the first pass back to the keeper. Just to give him a touch of the ball and settle him down. There is a lot of the game to be played. Saves to make. Defensive mistakes and goals to be scored. Tactics tested and weaknesses exploited.
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the finding, sorting and critical analysis of information. To make sense of what’s happening and why. Predict what’s going to happen and give the options to help you control the outcome. Competitive intelligence offers certainty, competitive advantage, insight, growth & security.
Learn where to position yourself
A competitive analysis allows you to isolate gaps in competitors’ products or services. Enabling you to exploit them to your advantage. By learning the best way to position yourself in the world and the actual service and products you offer. And, also, how and to whom do you offer them to? Can you use what you have found working for them and see if you can improve it? Look at why their offering has problems and find the subsequent solutions to them.
These sort of activities is an excellent use of competitive intelligence. Leveraging what you know about competitors to assault them in their market space. And make yourself seem completely fresh and different in the customer’s mind.
Using Competitive Intelligence in your day to day work
So, in summary, we introduced these six points:
- Most potential customers will do some research before emailing you
- They will be looking at your competitors too
- Many companies dont know which competitors are the decent ones
- And which competitors did you beat hands down
- Become a customer of your competitor. Think like a customer and call the competitor up
- Develop your game plan to counter your competitors’ strengths and attack their weaknesses.
This article was called using competitive intelligence in your day to day work, and we welcome your feedback.
