Read the latest market analysis for your industry. For better or worse, the landscape is likely saturated with dozens of competitors – each promising the latest and greatest. While a crowded industry can signal strong demand for your products and services, it also means competitors are not just vying for the attention of your prospective customers. You’re at risk of losing existing accounts to the competition as well.
Of course, if you’ve been actively listening to customers and putting customer experience at the heart of everything you do, you’ll be better positioned to combat customer churn. Still, with so much noise in your industry, now is not the time to ignore your competitors and rely solely on the strength of relationships with customers. You need to keep a close watch on what the competition is saying and doing to position themselves as they are likely doing the same with you.
How to Research Your Competition
How do prospects see your cost/value compared to the competition? Which company’s messaging is resonating more? What are the perceived advantages and gaps of your solutions versus others in the market?
Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of the companies you compete against – and exploiting them – is critical for outperforming the competition. Beyond conducting a simple Google search, how do you secure useful competitive intel?
We give you helpful suggestions for researching the competition in these posts:
- How do you gather information about your competitors
- How B2B companies can gather competitive intelligence
Protecting Your Customers from Competitors
With lots of options available, companies can struggle to retain existing customers who are being lured in by the competition. How can you protect customers from the sales and marketing techniques of your competitors? Importantly, what questions should you be asking customers to understand where you stand and how to retain their business?
Check out our recommendations for reducing the burden of customer churn here:
How Do You Deal with Losing Sales
There’s no greater frustration to business executives, owners, and boards of directors than continually losing sales opportunities to the competition. What is it about their product or service offering that your prospective buyers are gravitating towards? Avoid playing the blame game and instead look closely at the drivers of the purchase decision.
For our clients, the most effective approach for understanding the competition and consequently, improving sales effectiveness, has been the Sales Win Loss Analysis. That’s because we’ve helped them to gather and activate important insights from the sales process, including what prospective customers value, perceived strengths and weaknesses of their offering, and how they stack up against others in the market.
You can delve deeper into learning from lost sales in these articles:
- Maximize Learning Opportunities from Won or Lost Sales
- 5 Reasons You’re Being Passed Over in Favor of a Competitor
From a Sales Win Loss Analysis to a Customer Defection Analysis to Customer Experience programs, analyzing the competition can take many forms. Use the information you’ve collected to identify opportunities to improve your business and stand apart from the competition. That way, when the next market analysis comes out, you’ll be identified as the one to beat.