Your Competition Your Profits

There are few things in business more crucial than understanding your competition.  An intimate understanding of the other players in your field can mean the difference between running a prosperous business and going bankrupt.  By knowing what products your competition is offering and understanding their pricing strategy, their preferred customer segments and other crucial aspects of their business, you will be able to develop a better business strategy, react to competitive moves in a timely fashion and even avert money-losing business disasters.
There are three elements to building an accurate picture of the competitive landscape: understanding what the competition is saying about itself, finding out what clients are saying about the competition and experiencing the competition firsthand.
WHAT THE COMPETITION IS SAYING
Every business is constantly releasing a never-ending stream of publicly available information.  Such information includes print ads, a company website, public relations statements, press releases, coupons, press interviews and much  more.  By paying attention to this widely broadcast information you will be able to learn a great deal about your competitors and how they do business.  For example, coupons and print ads will tell you about your competitors’ prices, while product catalogues will tell you about the breadth of their product offering. 
A competitor’s website can often provide you with a great deal of information about the company’s financial strength, while press releases may give you information about key new accounts that your competition has been able to land. (Some privately held companies release information about their numbers of customers or employees, which, using general industry metrics, can be translated into a good guess as to the company’s revenue.)  If your competition produces a newsletter, find a way to subscribe to it.  If your competition will be giving a speech at the local chamber of commerce, be sure to attend.
Tracking such publicly available information is effective, simple and (mostly) free. A great way to start monitoring the competition is to set up a Google Alert (see Report Link #205 on nyreport.com.)  This excellent service can send you daily, customized email notifications regarding any press releases or news stories that involve your target companies.  While you can gain a great deal of information by listening to what your competition is saying, your competitors’ clients and partners are an even better source of competitive intelligence.