Tips on Getting Competitor Intelligence Statistics
Competitor intelligence statistics may sound too difficult to acquire. But with the tips in this article, you’ll learn to gather information to give your business a competitive edge.
You start by answering two important questions:
How Do You Identify Your Competitors?
What Competitors’ Intelligence Statistics Influence Your Business Success?
Who Are Your Major Competitors?
Your first tip is to identify all your competitors. Until you know who they are, you don’t know which businesses to gather competitor intelligence statistics on.
This requires that you identify your competitors by answering the question “Who are your major competitors?”
Now don’t answer this question quickly. Give it some serious thought and research before you begin gathering competitor intelligence statistics.
Thinking that only businesses that sell the same services and products that you do will cause you to overlook many competitors.
If you are a carpenter making cabinets, your competitors are more than just other carpenters. Any business that makes storage units of all kinds are your competitors.
Once you’ve completed identifying the businesses that comprise your competitors, it’s time to start accumulating competitor intelligence statistics on them:
Get a list of each competitor’s officers.
Discover each competitor’s reputation.
Determine which product is most important to each competitor,
Discover how much of each competitor’s total sales come from that product,
Note the ownership status of each competitor,
Note how many shares the corporation has sold,
Learn the present share value for each publicly-held competitor,
Know how much cash each competitor has on hand.
Know how much venture capital supports each competitor,
Reveal each competitor’s lead investors,
Locate sales information over the past two years for each competitor,
Translate those sales figures into percentage of growth for each competitor, and
Determine the channel through which each competitor makes most sales.
By gathering all the information above, you’ll acquire a wealth of competitor intelligence statistics.
What Are Your Competitors’ Intelligence Statistics?
After identifying your major competitors and acquiring a wealth of information about them, you now need more in-depth competitor intelligence statistics.
You need competitor intelligence statistics on:
What each competitor charges for the service or product that competes with yours,
The quality of each competitors product or service,
How well each competitor serves its customers,
The product range carried by each competitor,
What distribution channel each competitor employs,
The percent of the market that each competitor holds,
How much profit each competitor makes,
Plus additional statistics that help you to understand how you measure up to your competitors.
To easily visualize the results of all your research, list each competitor and rank each by every statistic with:
1 for an extremely weak competitor, to
10 for as very strong competitor.
If you take this approach to using competitor intelligence statistics, you can find the best opportunities for your products and services. So start today gathering your own competitor intelligence statistics.
Filed under: Business