How do your competitors pitch their products?

The article answers the question — how do your competitors pitch their products? When working out your go-to-market strategy, it is an incredibly important step to conduct competitor analysis. Competitor analysis will allow you to have a great understanding of your main competitors. To provide a great foundation to plan your next market moves.

Sales decks

Start is by taking a look at their products and services. What they are saying to their customers. What is their pricing structure? Also, dig behind their website claims to understand how they position themselves in the market. And understand which of their products or services they think are the most important to them.

Watch and read everything about your competitors. From their conference talks, webinars, public statements, industry journalists interviews and opinions to product demonstrations and sales presentations. Analyse what they are saying and what they are not saying. Compare the new sales presentations with the older versions. What has changed? What else are they promoting and what have they stopped selling and saying? And why? Then dig even deeper still and find out what their salespeople are really saying in meetings, the discounts and offers made.

Segmentation

Now, look at how your competitors target their market? How do they split their market by industry, size or need? What’s the structure of their sales teams? Do they use and support resellers and distributors?

Social media

Take a look at their social media and the messaging they are sending out. Who is looking at it and what announcements are they making? What, if anything are their customers saying about their offering, features and how they are treated? It gives you astute and relevant sentimental analysis and may help you identify their customers.

Product analysis

How do your own products compare to competitors offerings? There will be a lot of public information surrounding each others products. What are the publicly available features and benefits of yours and their products and services? But what’s really happening? Are you and your competitors offering an honest assessment of their products benefits, features and capabilities? Your competitors may claim to offer a unique feature, but is it true? And if they do is anyone buying it? Also, is the product finished or still in development?

Features compared

Compile a comparison matrix of your competitors’ features and compare them with yours. It will help you understand the choice customers have available to them customers and isolate hidden gaps and opportunities.

Customers needs

Do their customers need to match what your competitors’ features and benefits offer? Are you and they just following the trends and doing what everybody else does? Are they missing anything? You will get some clarity about the in-demand features and benefits.

Customer lists

Who buys your competitors products? If you understand this you can determine:

• How effective their marketing is
• What they think the market is
• Their customer group motivation

If you understand these points, you will isolate significant gaps in the market. Also, if they have tried and failed at specific marketing strategies, why throw good money after bad and do the same? So this process will save your marketing budget. It’s clear that understanding who buys your competitors products will give you an excellent leg up.

Identify customer contacts

You will be able to find actual customer contact names on testimonials, case studies within their website and marketing. Further still, if you use specific tools, you can develop a very significant customer contact list. A bigger list than they would want you to know. We call it Traffic Analysis, it’s beneficial and we can do it for you. It also determines your competitors partners and suppliers etc.

Trade shows

At trade show what are they telling people on their stands about themselves and their products?

• Are they telling them about their next developments?
• What do 3rd parties think of their products?
• What are they saying to the press?
• What products or services are they presenting and pushing hard?

Finally

The article answered how do your competitors pitch their products? Working out your go to market strategy is an incredibly important step to do. And competitive analysis is vitally important for any product launch.

About Octopus Intelligence

Octopus is a global Intelligence service company. Answering the questions to help you grow.

We help you beat competitors, increase sales, be disruptive, enter new markets and invest with more certainty with our Strategic and Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence and good old common sense. We live in an increasingly uncertain, competitive and ever-shifting world. What you need is active real world business development strategy, where deep expertise combines with Competitive Intelligence based actions to answer the what and the how, for the now and the next.

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