What do you need to know about the competition?
The most important thing you need to know is their strategic intent – what is it they are trying to accomplish. Once you understand this, you’ll have a framework for understanding virtually every decision they make, from hiring key personnel, to product strategy, benefits, features and functionality and pricing. Take, for example, a competitor whose CEO has made aggressive revenue growth commitments. You might deduce s/he will aggressively pursue every opportunity in the marketplace, regardless of profitability. Or, if the technical staff dominates development, offerings may include features and functionality customers don't care about.
You don’t need 100-page documents, chock full of data but poor on insights. If your CI team is producing these, fire them. What you need is a one-page report that shows the competitor’s approach and what their likely next actions will be. You need to understand their key people – what they do and how they think, because people and organizations repeat their successes. You need to understand the likely impact of new initiatives, and their financial and technical capabilities. And, most importantly, you need to understand the competitor’s culture
Lou Gerstner was maniacally focused on customers and competition from the first day he joined he joined IBM. At his first executive retreat, he forced his senior executives into red-team exercises and asked them to attack their own businesses as if they were the primary competitors. He got immediate results, and extended the concept by naming each senior executive to be in charge of a major competitor as part of their responsibilities.
Make your executive peers part of your CI team. You’ll be delighted with the results.
Next: Differentiation: What Really Matters
The most important thing you need to know is their strategic intent – what is it they are trying to accomplish. Once you understand this, you’ll have a framework for understanding virtually every decision they make, from hiring key personnel, to product strategy, benefits, features and functionality and pricing. Take, for example, a competitor whose CEO has made aggressive revenue growth commitments. You might deduce s/he will aggressively pursue every opportunity in the marketplace, regardless of profitability. Or, if the technical staff dominates development, offerings may include features and functionality customers don't care about.
You don’t need 100-page documents, chock full of data but poor on insights. If your CI team is producing these, fire them. What you need is a one-page report that shows the competitor’s approach and what their likely next actions will be. You need to understand their key people – what they do and how they think, because people and organizations repeat their successes. You need to understand the likely impact of new initiatives, and their financial and technical capabilities. And, most importantly, you need to understand the competitor’s culture
Lou Gerstner was maniacally focused on customers and competition from the first day he joined he joined IBM. At his first executive retreat, he forced his senior executives into red-team exercises and asked them to attack their own businesses as if they were the primary competitors. He got immediate results, and extended the concept by naming each senior executive to be in charge of a major competitor as part of their responsibilities.
Make your executive peers part of your CI team. You’ll be delighted with the results.
Next: Differentiation: What Really Matters
