MARKET & COMPETITIVE INTEL
COMPETITIVE PLAN
(for SaaS companies)
"When you’re playing a great game of chess, there are two things to keep in mind: the board and your opponent. As I study my opponent’s moves, I can see he has a weak pawn on his right side."
- Bobby Fischer, former World Chess champion
Market segment analysis of competitors:
For each of your named competitors, we find for each of them - their strong market segments of adoption. For each competitor, we find the countries or regions, industries and company size segments where they have a large concentration of clients.
We now take a unified view of two distinct sets of market data:
1. Market segments we identified as being attractive
2. Market segments where each of your named competitors is strong
Next up, we would need to understand which of the competitors is strong from a user satisfaction perspective. This would give us a judgment on which competitors are:
1. Too strong - should ideally avoid competing with them proactively
2. Moderately strong - we could avoid trying to replace them as incumbents. However, we could effectively compete with them in a competitive situation
3. Not adequately strong - we could effectively compete with them in competitive situations, as well as try to dislodge them where they are incumbent vendors
Combining the above, we shall get:
1. List of attractive segments
2. List of segments where competitor penetration is high and are hard to compete with
3. List of segments where competitor penetration is high and are relatively easier to displace
Regional strategy - Competitor Sales
For shortlisted countries/regions, we try to determine for competitors:
-
Presence of Salespeople
-
Presence of Account managers
-
Presence of Partnership managers
-
Presence of Consultants
-
Presence of Customer Success managers
Regional strategy - Competitor Marketing
For shortlisted countries/regions, we try to determine for competitors:
-
Presence of marketing managers
-
Online Ads - countries of focus for Premium Online Ads
-
Internationalization:
-
Product internationalization
-
Languages supported by the website
-
Product differentiation:
SWOT:
-
Strengths and weaknesses of each product
-
Relative strengths / weaknesses among products
Regional strategy – Partner marketing (evaluating suitable partners):
In Partner marketing - we can evaluate potential partner companies on the basis of
-
Market synergy:
-
Focus market segments
-
Partnerships and Sales people in your own target regions
-
Spend on premium B2B ad networks in which countries
-
-
Partnerships focus:
-
Investment in Partnership roles
-
-
Reference knowledge of competitors:
-
Who are competitors’ partners
-