What do you really know about your competition?
In contracting and mature professional services markets, it’s more important than ever to know how your firm stacks up against the competition. This applies generally to firms, but it is also really important in competitive tender, bid and proposal situations.
Even basic information about your competitors can be a powerful tool for your decision-making – and not just for competitive bids.
Here are 13 useful areas that are easy to research and collate about your key competitors:
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- Firm size and structure
- Range of services
- Profitability
- Charge rates and pricing alternatives
- Service models
- Revenue per professional and per partner
- “Stars” on their team
- Key clients
- Differentiators and market positioning (marketing materials – website, brochures)
- Special strengths and competencies
- Weaknesses and risks
- Expansion/merger plans
- Recent wins and losses
Of course, you probably won’t be able to build a complete profile for every competitor, but anything you know or can deduce will help inform your firm’s competitive, defensive and offensive marketing and business development strategies.
Pro tip: Set up a Google Alert for key competitors, so you can monitor updates and breaking stories that appear on the web. Follow your competitors’ social media accounts (or at least check them regularly). And if you haven’t already done it, set a Google alert for your own firm to keep track of how often people are talking about you and what they’re saying.
If your firm needs help sizing up the competitive landscape for a tender, or a framework to assess the competition more generally, ask us how we can help.
Get our guide to winning more tenders, bids and proposals for more helpful hints.
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Tender readability remains a problem for some in the 21st century. I still see submission documents that cling to a handful of really old hat tender presentation and formatting techniques. I suspect this is because some of these ‘rules’ are viewed as being more appropriate to a ‘formal’ style of document such as a tender. […]
