How do you get information about your competitor?
Competitor information is an important part of marketing. To get your competitor’s information, do you search on the web, and collect reputation in the market?
Information from customers is one of the most reliable information. However, getting information about competitors from customers is not easy. Therefore I would like to write some points.
Build relationship first
If you ask a customer you meet for the first time about a competitor, they probably won’t tell you. First, we need to build a relationship with our customers. Without the trust of our customers, we cannot get information about our competitors.
Then, to get customer trust, we shouldn’t be a taker in the give-and-take mindset. First of all, we have to be a giver, so we need to provide useful information to our customers. And we keep providing it without expecting a reward. And finally, we’ll ask when we really need the information.
Whom should I ask?
We ask our customers who are interested in something we want to know. So if you want to know about the product quality of our competitors, are there any customers who compare quality with their competitors? If yes, that customer will be oiur target.
In other words, when we want to know the quality of our competitor’s product, don’t ask the customer who doesn’t care about the quality of the product.
What should I ask?
When we ask for our competitor’s information, our customers probably won’t answer it. Therefore, instead of asking for competitors’ information, we ask for customer information. That is, we want to see our customer’s evaluation data rather than asking for competitors’ measurement data or catalog values.
The point is that customers cannot provide competitor information about competitors but may be able to provide their evaluation data about competitors.
How should I ask
First of all, we need to explain the background of why we need that information. For example, we are planning our next-generation product and quality is one of the major challenges. In order to achieve quality goals, there are trade-offs with schedules and costs, and it is necessary to set optimal quality goals. That’s the reason we would like to know about our customer’s quality targets. We also want to know if my competitors can reach that goal.
In this case, we want to say that getting information about the competition will ultimately benefit the customer.
One more thing…
One more tip is to use closed questions rather than open questions.
Open: What are your quality targets?
Closed: Is your quality target 100 or more?
Open: What is the performance of competing products?
Closed: Is the performance of competing products over 100? (When the performance of your product is 100)
Thank you for reading this post.
I know it’s difficult to get competitor’s information from customers but it is worth trying. I hope you can get it using those points.
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