Webinar: How to run competitor analysis

Are you aware of your competitors? Watch our webinar and learn how to run competitor analysis.

To succeed in business development, you have to know your competitors.

They can be businesses that provide the same service to customers as you do. Or they may be companies that specialize in the same industry.

To understand what competitor analysis is and how it works in practice, we organized a webinar. 

The founder of The BD School, Lucia, is the speaker of this webinar. With 14 years of experience in business development, she experienced firsthand the pains and gains of being a business development pro.

With The BD School, she aimed at creating a safe place where business developers could learn, share experiences, and advance their business development careers.

Join our platform and watch this webinar to learn about what a competitor is, the process of competitor analysis, and how you can use your competitor analysis data.

Key takeaways from the competitor analysis webinar:

Lucia shared many tips on how to run competitor analysis during the webinar. Here are the main takeaways.

1 – What is a competitor?

Before you do competitor analysis, you need to know what a competitor is. 

You’ve come across companies who say they have no competitors. This is simply not true. Every company or business has competitors. 

Competitors are other businesses that provide similar products or services to you. There are three types of competitors.

The first one is direct competitors. An example of direct competition is McDonald’s and Burger King. They both provide fast food, so they offer similar products to their customers.

The second type is indirect competitors. An example of indirect competitors is McDonald’s and Dominos. 

McDonald’s specializes mainly in burgers. On the other hand, Domino’s offers fast food, but it’s a pizza brand. So, they are relatively similar, but they differ in the product.

The third type is potential competitors. Newcomers who could disrupt your presence in the market.

Once you know your competitors, you can analyze them. 

2 – The process of competitor analysis

Now that you know the types of competitors, you can start searching for the competitors of your business.

There are three main steps to the process of competitor analysis: identifying, analyzing, and assessing.

The first step is to find ways to identify your competitors. At this stage, you can use various platforms. For example, you can do market research, Google search, social media, and use customer feedback.

For example, you can use LinkedIn to browse your competitors. On the other hand, when you do a Google search, try to “think like a customer”.

What this means is that you need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. So, if a customer wants to learn business development, what would they type on Google?

Probably something like “how to learn business development“.

This is the keyword you need to use to find all your competitors. 

The second step is to analyze. At this stage, you should analyze relevant people, products and services, value propositions, marketing channels, customer feedback, and revenue.

Also, try to understand what their value propositions are. In this way, you’ll learn the results your competitor promises to customers and what they see as valuable.

Further, look at the marketing channels they’re using and identify what type of audience they’re talking to.

The third and final step is to assess your competitors in order to understand if they’re a threat to your business. At this stage, it can be useful to do a SWOT analysis.

So, find out their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then, organize the data. On the platform, you will also find a template that you can use for this purpose.

3 – How to use competitor analysis data

Once you collect and analyze the data, you can use the insights to create transformational opportunities. These will be different for each of you, but let’s look at some examples.

Let’s assume you have only one main competitor which has a resource you really need. On your side, you also have a resource that your competitor doesn’t have. You both need these resources in order to grow.

In this case, a smart thing to do is the so-called: “coopetition”. This is when there is cooperation between competitors to get mutual benefits.

For example, Pfizer and BioNTech cooperated together in the creation of the vaccine against Covid-19. They are competitors within similar industries, but they joined forces in order to serve the greater good (and of course, generate revenue).

This shows that a company can be strong in a specific area, but weaker in another. So, when two competitors work together, they balance each other out.

Apart from coopetition, you can use the data to generate more opportunities.

For example, you can contact unsatisfied customers, adjust your price to be lower than your competitor’s, create new features, or start using the same channels.

Some useful tools are Similarweb, Owler, and SpyFu.

If you would like to increase your value as a business development pro, this is the time to become a certified BD Pro.

Join the next class of our live training!