Questions About Your Competitors

Posted: August 11, 2015 by Jaime Stenning

There are many things you need to consider about your competitors. They are your competition, they take your customers, you take their customers and you are both competing to get more people using your products and services.

In this article we list a number of questions that will help you better understand your competitors, their target customers and their understanding of your business. The better you can answer these questions the easier you will find it to outmanoeuvre and outperform your competitors.

Here are the questions:

• What industry are you in?
• Is this a good industry to be in?
• What do customers think about your competitors?
• What do you think about your competitors?
• In what areas are you beating your competitors?
• How else can you beat your competitors?
• How do customers find out you are better than your competitors in these areas?
• What problems do your products solve that your competitors’ don’t?
• Are you serving the widest possible market?
• How good are your competitive positions?
• What do you do differently from your competitors?
• What’s the difference between your customers and your competitors’ customers?
• How can you find out what your customers think about your competition?
• Do you compare reviews of your products to those of your competitors?
• How can you encourage your competitors’ customers to switch to your company?
• How can you get in contact with your competitors’ customers to tell them why they should switch to you?
• Which clients are driving you mad?
• Maybe you should suggest they go to your competitors?
• Who is your most serious competitor?
• Who are currently just new/minor threats?
• What would your closest rival do if they took over your business?

Robert Craven (@robert_craven) is an international Keynote business speaker, author, consultant and owner of The Directors’ Centre, a consulting and training company which helps owner-directors run the business they want to run.

His latest book Grow Your Digital Agency, which provides the business fundamentals that every growing agency needs to address, is now available.