What about my Competitor’s Management team discusses why and how to assess your competitor’s senior decision-makers. It’s important to assess your competitor’s management team. The most obvious reason for this is that you may want to recruit the right person in the future. But with the proper insight, you can handle how they react to a situation and understand what decisions they could take. It’s useful to be able to answer these questions:
Questions to answer
- Are the formal job titles a reliable guide to power the person has in the organisation?
- Is the Managing Director in control of everything?
- Has an investor appointed a Non-Executive Director to represent them?
- Who reports directly to CEO? And who does not?
- Which member of them brought their best customers with them?
- Are the divisions who appear to be higher profile than others? Why? Who runs them?
- Do you know their personality, skills, education, interests outside work and family details?
- Do you understand key people career history? Non-executive positions, shareholding status and what they did at previous companies?
- What’s your competitor’s management team’s approach to business? And their reputation in the market?
- The usiness activities do they do outside work?
- What was the performance of their key people when they worked for other companies? Any real events of note while they were at the company?
- The extent of autonomy and authority did they have in earlier job posts?
- What positions do their associates and friends hold outside their company?
What drives their decisions
It’s important knowing what drives your competitor’s decision making and actions. If you can do this, then chances are you can start predicting their future moves and strategies.
You can even predict how they would respond to specific scenarios. Scenarios and strategies that you can control.
Getting to know the competitor’s key people will allow you to make preemptive strikes. Perhaps by targeting their customers? And you will then learn how they will respond. Allow them to make the moves you expect and then ambush them at the pass. Or blindside them by appearing to attack one but go for the other.
Get good at it; you can make a competitor do what you want and hide what you want. What about my Competitor’s Management team discussed why and how to assess your competitor’s senior decision-makers.
