As a sales and marketing consulting firm, we spend a lot of time focused on tactics and techniques that will influence your prospects to make buying decisions. Many of our blog posts are focused on your buyers - who they are, what drives them to purchase, and how they make purchasing decisions. In this blog, we dive into the fourth idea of our five-part series: Competitive Intelligence Briefs – and how you can use them to influence your prospect to take the next step.
Think of a competitive intelligence brief as a simple checklist of features and benefits you offer vs the competition. The purpose of a competitive intelligence brief is to put distance between you and the competition in the mind of the buyer. Although similar tools are often used for marketing purposes, customers that are close to making a buying decision can be heavily influenced by one. At the final stage of the sale, competitive intelligence briefs can make a big impact as they can quickly scan how your system integration business stacks up.
Competitive intelligence information can be collected through online searches and other data-gathering methods, or by talking to your team members, customers or other industry experts.
Here are five resources for quickly gathering information on your competition:
- Scan your competitor websites for insights into target audiences or shifts in strategy, product pricing, and benefits.
- Look for company press releases for new product, staff, or expansion news.
- Examine their social media posts, particularly if the company begins sharing information related to a product or service that delivers new technology
- Read their Blog articles to gain insight to the types of solutions they deliver
- Talk with your team – Ask your fellow sales and marketing team members if they know anything about the competitor you are researching
Once you’ve gathered information on your competition, create a simple checklist that compares what your company offers in the form of services, products, solutions, maintenance agreements, and support contracts to what they offer. Competitive intelligence briefs will go a long way in influencing your prospects and give them confidence that they are making the best decision to work with your company.
If you are looking for help in creating content that influences prospective buyers, then enroll for a content marketing discovery call.
