themadpeacock

Your business is unique, the people you employ, the skills they possess and the solution you provide all make it unique. But you do have competitors and they are taking market share from you every day. In this post I will help you quickly identify your primary competitors so you can include them in your go-to-market strategy.

I mostly work with startups and find that it’s all to easy for them to underestimate the challenges they will face in the market. They don’t identify and plan for indirect competitors in their go-to-market strategy.

Your market competition will come from four directions;

• Do nothing – In these tough economic times lots of companies are looking to do zero investment. Could more of you market be choosing not to address the problem you solve this year than did last year?

• Do something else – For people that don’t understand the work involved social media and crowdsourcing look like a free way to get stuff done. Stuff they would have paid you to do last year.
• Do it themselves – Could they? Did the business tools in your industry improve to the point that more of your customers can now do it “good enough” themselves?
• Purchase a Solution – This is the obvious sector everyone thinks of when they plan for competition. The market still needs to solve the problem, its not the kind of thing they can do themselves and solutions like yours are a common way to do it. Now all you have to think about is all the businesses offering similar products, how much are they hurting, how deep will they cut their pricing and are you still competitive?

There has been a lot of volatility in the market in the last 5 years. Technology was already changing many markets forever and then the economy collapsed. Markets that had done “business as usual” for decades are gone or changed forever and the maturing of collaboration technology is making every company in your field your competitor regardless of geography.

Change is the driving force of business opportunity, the key is to recognize the changes in you competitive landscape and use them to your advantage in your go-to-market strategy

I hope this post was of some help and would value your input. How has you competitive landscape changed this year?