Running a sales analysis of our competitors can be a bit tricky. We'll want to track down the answers to questions such as:

What does the sales process look like?
What channels are they selling through?
Do they have multiple locations and how does this give them an advantage?
Are they expanding? Scaling down?
Do they have partner reselling programs?
What are their customers' reasons for not buying? For ending their relationship with the company?
What are their revenues each year? What about total sales volume?
Do they regularly discount their products or services?
How involved is a salesperson in the process?
These helpful pieces of information will give you an idea of how competitive the sales process is, and what information you need to prepare your sales reps with to compete during the final buy stage.
For publicly held companies, we can find annual reports online, but we'll have to do some sleuthing to find this info from privately owned businesses.

WeYou could find some of this information by searching through our CRM and reaching out to those customers who mentioned they were considering our competitor. Find out what made them choose our product or service over others out there.

To do this, we can run a report that shows all prospective deals where there was an identified competitor.

If this data is not something we currently record, we can talk to marketing and sales to implement a system where prospects are questioned about the other companies they are considering.

Essentially, they'll need to ask their leads (either through a form field or during a one- on-one sales conversation) to identify who their current service providers are, who they've used in the past, and who else they are considering during the buying process.

When a competitor is identified, we can have our sales team dive deeper by asking why they are considering switching to our product. If we've already lost the deal, be sure to follow up with the prospect to determine why we lost to our competitor. What services or features attracted the prospect? Was it about price? What's the prospect's impression of your sales process? If they've already made the switch, we need to find out why they made this decision.

By asking open-ended questions, we'll have honest feedback about what customers find appealing about our brand and what might be turning customers away.

Once we've answered these questions, we can start scoping out our competitor's marketing efforts.

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