Competitor intelligence statistics provide the best information about your competitors and enable you to make the best decisions about your product and business in today’s competitive environment.

To start gathering competitor intelligence statistics, you need to answer two questions:

Who Are Your Major Competitors?

How To Determine Your Major Competitors?

Who Are Your Major Competitors?

The first kind of competitor intelligence statistics that you need to gather should provide details on your competitors.

This requires that you identify your competitors by answering the question “Who are your major competitors?”

Now don’t answer this question quickly. Give it some serious thought and research before you begin gathering competitor intelligence statistics.

Too many business owners think that only products, stores, or service providers just like theirs are competitors, but that just isn’t the case.

Competitors can be any person or product that meets the same customer needs as your business, even if the products, services or stores are quite different.

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.

This includes, theaters, sporting events, board games, etc. So you need to think broadly, when you’re identifying your competitors.

Once you’ve made a list of all your competitors, you need to gather competitor intelligence statistics that include:

Competitor’s officer names,

Competitor’s perception in the market,

Competitor’s key product,

Competitor’s total percent of business sales from that product,

Whether the competitor is public or private,

Competitor’s number of shares outstanding,

Competitor’s recent share price,

Competitor’s cash reserves,

Competitor’s venture backing,

Competitor’s lead investors,

Competitor’s last two year’s sales,

Competitor’s percent growth, and

Competitor’s primary sales channel.

When you have gathered these competitor intelligence statistics and information, you will have a good understanding of your major competitors.

Gathering In Depth Competitor Intelligence Statistics

Now that you know who your competitors are and lots of details about them, it’s time to really delve into competitor intelligence statistics.

This includes acquiring competitor intelligence statistics on:

Price

Quality

Customer Service

Product Range

Distribution Outlets

Market Share

Profit

And any other statistics specific to guide your business decisions.

You can put this information in a table for each competitor and rank each competitor on each statistic variable with:

1 for extremely weak competitor, to
10 for very strong competitor.

You can use simple statistics just dealing with market share to show you how much information this one variable of competitor intelligence statistics can help you answer the question: How much of the market do your competitors have?

If you take a similar approach to using the simplest of competitor intelligence statistics, you can find the best opportunities for your products and services.

Of course, the more competitor intelligence statistics that you gather, the more those statistics can reveal opportunities to help you beat your competitors. So start today gathering your own competitor intelligence statistics.

Submitted to Article Directories 6-2-08: Competitor Intelligence Statistics

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