Two Questions That Provide Competitor Intelligence Statistics
Linda P. Morton
Competitor intelligence statistics provide the best information about your competitors and enable you to make good decisions about your product and business.
To start gathering competitor intelligence statistics, you need to answer two questions:
Who Are Your Major Competitors?
How Do You Determine Your Competitors' Intelligence Statistics?
What Businesses Comprise Your Competitors?
Before you actually start gathering competitor intelligence statistics, you need to identify your competitors.
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.
If another business is meeting the same customer need that you meet, then they are competing for that customer's money.
For instance, if you own a video store, you may think that only other video stores are your competitors. But in reality, all businesses competing for customers' entertainment money are competitors.
Once you've completed identifying the businesses that comprise your competitors, it's time to start accumulating competitor intelligence statistics on them:
List your competitor's officer names,
Learn how every competitor is perceived by the market,
Identify each competitor's key product,
Determine each competitor's total percent of business sales from that product,
Note the ownership status of each competitor,
Note how many shares are outstanding,
Determine the value of each competitor's present shares,
Find out how much cash each competitor reserves.
Know how much venture capital supports each competitor,
Learn who the lead investors are for each competitor,
Determine how much each competitor has sold in the past two years,
Detemine what percent growth this meant 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 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.
This competitor intelligence statistics includes:
What each competitor charges for the service or product that competes with yours,
The quality of each competitors product or service,
What kind of customer service each competitor provides,
The full range of products that each competitor sells,
The distribution outlets that each competitor uses,
Each competitors percent of the total market for competing products,
Each competitor's profit,
And any other statistics specific to guide your business decisions.
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
ten points for each that a competitor does well.
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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