Clients Will Build Your Market Share

Recently, I was working with my son, trying to teach him to help him start his own candy business. He wanted to know how to make a certain sucker that he buys from the store. He was a little frustrated that he couldn’t find their recipe online and he certainly wasn’t going to get the formula from that company.

In the end, I told him, it just doesn’t matter. It would be cool to know how to make the competitor’s sucker. But, it would be even better to create your own and make it better.

How do you find out what people will like better? Ask them. The consumer (or client) knows what they want to buy and they will tell you without much trouble. In my son’s case, following the leader might not be as productive as blazing a trail, based on market needs.

Yesterday, I described an RFP we received at Primary Intelligence that requested mountains of competitive intelligence. In a nutshell, our client wanted to know the inner workings of a specific competitor’s sales, marketing, operations and financial divisions.

Some of the more interesting requests were:

*What is the typical, daily experience of a LaborFree sales associate (number of prospect/client contacts; “roll-calling” requirements; prospecting vs. account maintenance/growth; interaction with accountants and existing clients to acquire referrals; support from other LaborFree’s organizations and management, etc.)?
*How does LaborFree calculate its customer retention rate (by client, or by revenues)? What has that rate been over the last five years?
*Does LaborFree use its LaborFree Agency commission revenue to support discounting to customers who use the pay-as-you-go insurance products? If so, to what extent?
*As compared to SOFTTIME, does LaborFree match us expense-for-expense, or are there whole categories of expense not present in the LaborFree business model?*Where LaborFree and SOFTTIME expenses are similarly defined, where are their expenses materially less or more (proportionately) than SOFTTIME’s expenses?

This laundry list was five pages long and most of the requests could only be fulfilled by tunneling in to the competitor and stealing all of the trade secrets.

The most amusing part of the deal was their requirement that the vendor had to demonstrate how each data request would be fulfilled in an "ethical manner."

And, when we asked SOFTTIME’s CI group to explain how they were going to turn this information into revenue, they had no clue; just a hope that someone above them knew what would come next.

At this point, the CI group at SOFTTIME needed to step up. They should have asked why all of this information was critical. They should have made stakeholders explain what they would do with the information. They should have explained the risks in obtaining this kind of data. (“How would a competitor find this information out about us? They couldn’t? Well, how do you expect us to ethically get this information on them?”)

If the goal is to win business, increase market share, serve clients and keep them in the fold, these information requests have very little to do with those objectives. In short, collect the data that will bring more clients to your company and keep more from defecting. Knowing your competitor’s sales commission plan probably won’t get you there.

This approach is working for my son. It will work for you. Make the Voice of the Customer an integral part of your CI plan.

Let's chat about these ideas. Call me at 801.838.9600 x5050 or leave me a comment below.