Why worry about what your competitors are doing?
Competitive analysis is your yardstick against the rest of the world. To use a boxing analogy: your form may look impressive when you’re boxing with a punching bag, but you can’t hit back. There are also no surprises or unknowns. Ultimately, to see what you’re made of, you have to face an opponent. Your capabilities, in and of themselves, may be impressive, but would they hold up to your thinner and badder opponents? Let’s look at the reasons why you should care about your competitors and predict their possible actions; what you need to know about your competition; how to find this information; and how to put all the pieces of the competitive analysis puzzle together to take advantage of your competitors’ shortcomings and overcome them through strategic actions.
When I consult companies, I often hear their business development professionals say, “Why should I care about my competition? We have what we have to offer, and as long as we can offer the government the best price that we can honestly offer, we should be Good. If they don’t select us, well, so be it. We wouldn’t want to do this job at a loss anyway. “
Other companies don’t care about the competition because they just don’t have time to do a competitive analysis. Some have not seen much use of the competitive analysis they have done before, and others just don’t know how.
What would you do differently if you knew that with good competitive analysis and actions your rate of profit would double? Competitive analysis affects every aspect of your capture efforts and can make a big difference in your search results.
• You have to identify competitive positioning with the customer and make your competition a ghost of the customer. Knowing your customer’s hot spots will also help you determine where you stand against the competition.
• Through your intelligence gathering efforts, you will identify your competition and investigate competitor information.
• Through your winning strategy analysis, you will make changes to your winning strategy to outperform the competition. You’ll be able to leverage your strengths, mitigate your weaknesses, neutralize your competitors ‘strengths, and exploit your competitors’ weaknesses, all based on customer access buttons. You will be able to develop discriminators and differentiators, eliminating winning themes and anticipating the attacks of your competitors through winning themes of change.
• You will be able to determine Price-to-Win and your cost strategy based on this information.
• You will make team decisions based on a competitive strategy, because choosing a teammate before discovering the competitive landscape is a fallacy.
• And finally, you can determine a better solution that sets you apart from the competition.