Updated on November 1, 2021
Here’s the problem: Most of us don’t really know what our differentiators are because we haven’t researched our competitors. It’s hard to do well, but that’s critical if you want to dominate and win. So how to stay competitive in a global market?
- Get clarity on who your competitors are
- Understand what your competitive advantages are
- Understand the specifics of the marketplace where you hold that advantage
- Design a highly targeted marketing campaign
- Target your efforts on that marketplace
Are you different? Is the experience you are providing to your customers better than the experience your competitors provide?
You might be sure that the solution you have to offer is market-ready, but if you don’t know what your competition is doing, you could find yourself in an unpredictable situation.
In other words, if you don’t know who you compete against you risk to have:
- No knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses
- No knowledge in which niche market they are concentrating
- No foundation for designing your marketing plan to maximize your advantages
- No information about how you differentiate from them
But how could you prevent this? You can start by doing a segmented research on your competitors. Make a list of segments you want to cover in your research like industry, company capacity and location to begin with. After that, you can analyze specific segments like company revenue and company contacts.
Biggest challenge here would be to find all these information. You can either try to manually find and fill the segments by yourself, or buy a contact list from a vendor. But, be careful! Studies have shown that when collected manually, 62% of organizations rely on marketing and prospect data that’s up to 40% inaccurate. On top of that, 1/3 of companies leave their databases with outdated records.
How to stay competitive in a global market with Sales.Rocks
Other, most stable and profitable solutions would be to use a data-based platform, that would automatically fill in your required information from an in-house database in a few seconds. A solution like this would give you more security and accuracy to the data you are using for your business development.
For example, the Company Search module gives you access to more than 33 million companies in Europe. You can search who your competitors are by registering on the platform.
You can target your own segment and get all available records of your competitors which you can use for further analysis (where are they located, how many employees etc).
By creating a free account, you can do your research in a centralized database with more than 2.2 billion available data points from companies in The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
Once you have an account, you can start filtering your competitors based on several criteria.
Step #1
Start by filling in the location and industry filter. There is an option to segment by city, region, postcode, headquarter location or branch location. You can even use SIC, NAICS or NACE codes to target the industry more specifically.
Step #2
Check out the keywords filter to find all the companies by specific keywords in their name or data.
Step #3
You may want to check the company size and look into the number of employees.
Step #4
We recommend using the revenue filter for getting insights into the financial situation of the company.
Step #5
You may also find out the date of establishment and check out if the company is still active on the market by using the founding date and operating status filters.
Step #6
Our experience shows that contact option is the most utilized filter in this module. Clients use it to discover an available phone number, email address, website URL, as well as to find the first and last name of decision-makers in a company.
Next steps…
Very soon, we will be launching our next feature Contact Search, another powerful sales enablement tool.
Stay tuned!
