Monday, June 02, 2008

Two Questions That Provide Competitor Intelligence Statistics

By Linda P. Morton

Knowing how to gather competitor intelligence statistics provides you with information vital for good business and marketing decisions.

To start gathering competitor intelligence statistics, you need to answer two questions:

How Do You Identify Your Competitors?

How Do You Determine Your Competitors' Intelligence Statistics?

What Businesses Comprise Your 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?"

You need to list not just businesses that do exactly what your business does, but those that also meet customers' same needs.

Thinking that only businesses that sell the same services and products that you do will cause you to overlook many competitors.

For example, if you are an online marketer selling information products, you may think that only other online information marketers are your competition. But any kind of information seller, no matter where the information products are marketed, is a competitor.

Once you've completed identifying the businesses that comprise your competitors, it's time to start accumulating competitor intelligence statistics on them:

Determine the executive officers for each competitor.

Learn how every competitor is perceived by the market,

Identify each competitor's key product,

Uncover how that product contributes to each competitor's total sales.

Note whether the competitor is public or private,

Note how many shares the corporation has sold,

Learn the present share value for each publicly-held competitor,

Find out how much cash each competitor reserves.

Reveal each competitor's venture backing,

Discover the primary investors for each competitor,

Locate sales information over the past two years for each competitor,

Translate those sales figures into percentage of growth for each competitor, and

Learn the primary channel that each competitor uses for most of their sales.

By gathering all the information above, you'll acquire a wealth of competitor intelligence statistics.

What Competitors' Intelligence Statistics Influence You Business Success?

Now that you know who your competitors are and have lots of details about them, it's time to really delve into competitor intelligence statistics.

You need competitor intelligence statistics on:

How each competitor prices competing products or services,

How well each competitor's product is made or service is provided,

The quality of each competitor's customer service,

The full range of products that each competitor sells,

How each competitor distributes products,

The market share captured by each competitor,

How much profit each competitor makes,

And other statistics that provide you with insights about your competitors.

You can put this information in a table for each competitor and rank each competitor on each statistical variable with:

1 for an extremely weak competitor, to

10 for as very strong competitor.

Using this approach to competitor intelligence statistics, you will make more informed business decisions and make your products and services more competitive. So waste no time in gathering your own competitor intelligence statistics.

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