Slaying Goliath: 11 Ways to Destroy the Larger Competition

Data is key. Information is the weapon. Data gives you the ability to slice through the sides of your larger competitor. In a rapidly expanding digital world, it’s tempting to gather exceedingly large amounts of data simply for the sake of collecting and having access to it (or building a larger sword). However, hoarding volumes of data won’t do you much good if it’s not actually useful.

In fact, it will likely just overwhelm your team. Instead, the key to maximizing your information-gathering efforts is to uncover truly valuable information — not data — that is contextually relevant and beneficial. Ultimately, that can be achieved by performing one or all of these activities:

1. Expose All of Your Employees to Your Customers. Your employees walk around with mental models of your customers, including their needs, the technology that will best meet their needs, how they interact with your product, the best approaches to helping them resolve issues, and the marketing messages that will best resonate with them. Your employees use this mental model to help them make decisions. The better their mental model aligns with reality, the better their decision-making. That’s why everyone in your organization, or at least all key decision makers, should be interacting with customers to better their understanding of them.

2. Ask Your Salespeople. Salespeople generally have a very good view of how prospects and customers perceive all aspects of your company. Speak to several of them to help separate the overarching themes from the one-off situations. Conduct pipeline reviews to study each prospect situation to see where you stand in the process. Perform loss reviews as well. Most loss reviews come from the salesperson’s presumptions.A better approach is to ask the prospect why he or she chose a competitor and for feedback on what you can do better.

3. Study Your Customer Service Interactions. Tracking trouble tickets is one of the best ways to determine how your customers are doing with your product and how you are servicing them. If you have customer service reps, listen to the phone calls, ask them about their interactions, give them a few questions to ask your customers, and then gather the feedback. Once a trouble ticket is closed, ask your customer for feedback on the process.

4. Monitor the Internet. Monitor social networking sites, Internet forums, message boards, blogs, and other sites. There is a tremendous amount of information available online. Most people reading this already know what todo. If you don’t, enter your company and product name into Google and start reading.

5. Ask Your Customers. Once customers have purchased your product, most will be willing to give you detailed feedback because they want you to continue getting better. User conferences, advisory boards, and surveys are great ways to get information. Another approach is to sit down with customers periodically to really get to know them.

6. Ask Industry Analysts. Some product markets have industry analysts who cover providers, customers, and prospects. Good analysts tend to have an accurate pulse on the perceptions in the market. Be careful, though, because they often have a large-company bias.

7. Use Your Website. Incorporate web analytics into your website and then mine the results for useful information. Beyond building better usability and conversion into your website, the data can be very useful for improving various functions. For example, visitor interaction with your product pages can tell you a lot about their interests. Interaction with your customer self-service pages can tell you a lot about their issues with your products.

8. Use Your Product. Incorporate data gathering into your product and then mine that data for useful information. When the product is browser-based, it’s a pretty straightforward process of instrumenting your Web interactions with the customer using Web analytics. When the product is on the customer site, the issues become trickier because privacy issues are more amplified and many customers do not want information flowing out of their computer systems. That said, many customers will still allow the information sharing if it’s done properly.

9. Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing. Make a list of things you would like to know about your competitors and then get creative about how you are going to (legally and ethically) get the information.

10.  Find Out What Related Companies Are Doing. Do the same things you would do to find out more about your competitors, but also call the person who shares your role at a related company and invite them to lunch. Ask about their best practices.You can probably get and share some good ideas, as both sides will be more open given you are not competitors.

11. Share What You’ve Learned. Work this knowledge into your management meetings, company wiki, e-mail, management reports, employee feedback systems, and all other vehicles you have to manage/monitor progress and communicate internally.

This list is intended to generate ideas, not mandate all of the things you need to do right away. If you try to do too much, youwill water down your efforts and actually get less useful information. Remember it is information, not data, that you are looking for. Also, you need to spend the vast majority of your time building a great product and then selling and servicing it. Start with the easy steps, and increase the activities as you grow.

A natural question is, why can’t large companies execute against the same tactics? They can, and some do. But they still have the natural disadvantage of being large. If the large company and the small company execute these tactics equally well, the small company will have the edge.

This is an excerpt from Slaying Goliath.