How do find out about rival firms, their dealings and weaknesses? It doesn't require hiring spies or engaging in corporate espionage. It just takes time and the appropriate resources to engage in competitive intelligence (CI). It isn't hard to do and in fact, it may be a critical component of your professional future.
What is Competitive Intelligence?
The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals describes CI as a ?systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing and managing external information that can affect your company's plans, decision and operations.? So what does this mean to a law firm? It is about understanding competitive and complementary firms, potential clients and industry trends so that you can make smart marketing decisions and ensure your share of legal dollars from a client's legal budget. Law firms need to know what is happening around them in order to bring in new client business and survive.
Know Your Competitors
Competitive intelligence does require reading between the lines, but there is an amazing amount of potentially helpful information that can be easily mined from the internet. CI can start with news and basic research and evolve from there. A researcher can discover what a rival's strategy is by watching for news stories regarding their business.
They can unearth information from their company website, marketing materials, creating and examining lists of publications from a law firm, their charitable contributions and advertisements. From all this, you can extrapolate their business strategy.
Know Your Potential Clients
A firm can also use this information to make better decisions about romancing new clients. Beyond looking at their website and directories, you can also review state business records, SEC filing of the company if it is public, obtain news about its executives and look for complaints and settlements that pertain to the company. You will get an idea of their needs and what their management is thinking.
If a company has kept the same legal council for the last decade, they may not be a smart place to expend effort in possibly doing business. However if this same company has a new CEO, perhaps they might be positioned to look to a new firm. If you notice a certain company changes law firms with the seasons, then they may be too much of a liability to pursue. All of this information can be discovered through competitive intelligence.
Stand by you Ethics
The one thing that competitive intelligence is not is unethical. CI does not involve dumpster diving or dealing in lies. It is not unlawful espionage. It should not be undercover work. Most of what a law firm needs to know is available publicly. What is not readily unearthed on the internet can often be found simply by making a few phone calls and asking the right people questions.
Most major corporations have CI experts on staff, but the legal business is slow to follow suit. Likely this is because CI work is not generally billable to clients and must be budgeted in elsewhere. However, these days the competition is stiff and payoff can be huge, so adding competition intelligence to your firm's work may be worth adding into the budget.
A great way source of competitive intelligence is seeing the legal documents your competitors or companies in similar industries are drafting. You can search over 10 million legal documents and clauses for free at RealDealDocs.
Tracking your competitors is the only way to make to make sure you are thwarting threats, taking advantage of opportunities, marketing effectively, and, ultimately, winning in the marketplace. By performing competitive intelligence, you will significantly increase your margins and profitability.
There's one resource that's often underutilized in this regard: your competitors' websites.
Today's digital footprint, while increasing corporate transparency and yielding greater power to consumers in the marketing dialogue, enables marketers to measure conversions. Companies spend enormous sums of money on maintaining their websites so that they can attract and influence prospects, customers, and analyst.
Your competitors may wish they could block you from their websites, but remember that the information they post there is public. If you aren't harvesting this rich - and free - resource, you are the loser!
Here are 5 things you must do regularly to effectively track your competitors and uncover their not so hidden secrets:
1. Identify your competitors
Now, this may seem odd to you. You’re probably thinking, “doesn't a company know who its competitors are?" Not always. New firms come seemingly out of nowhere, preempting existing companies with different technologies or approaches they never saw coming.
Often a company in an adjacent area will change its positioning to try and address your market, or a new startup may emerge in a related area. You need to create a master list of your key competitors and make sure you keep this up to date.
To do this, Google the terms, which describe your industry, your products and services. You can also use a little known feature in Google. In the search box, type in "related:www.yourcompanyname.com" and Google will display a list of companies that it considers related to yours. Look for new companies that show up and see if any of these pose a threat.
2. Check your competitors’ home pages for positioning changes
When you visit a company's website, first look at its home page to see if they have made changes to the way they describe their products and services. Carefully scrutinize how they emphasize different features or benefits and how they are positioning themselves. Sometimes, you can learn a lot even from the subtle changes your competitors make on their home page.
3. Review the trade shows they participate in
Trade shows can take a big chunk out of a company’s marketing budget, so it is important to know which shows your competitors participate in.
Regularly review the events page on their websites and maintain a spreadsheet with names, dates and locations of the shows that your competitors plan to be at. You can then see which ones you might want to sign up for.
If you spot one of them at a new show, you might ask yourself, "why are they exhibiting at this defense-related show?" It might be an indicator of a new market they are entering – perhaps one that you should consider as well.
4. Create a competitive intelligence database of white papers and webinars
Increasingly, white papers and webinars have become the preferred way for a company to establish its mind share and leadership -- so this is another area you should be tracking. You should maintain a list of titles of the whitepapers and webinars your competitors create or host to get an idea of their new direction.
You may not learn much from one single event or white paper, but you'll learn a lot when you look at these as a whole. You'll see trends and patterns that clearly indicate how these companies are positioning or repositioning themselves.
5. Check who they are hiring and firing
Once in a while, check the management team and job postings pages on your competitors’ websites. Try and see whether your competitors have added or removed any names from their management team. This is often the only way you may learn that your key competitor has lost their VP of Sales; no press announcement is likely to be made about such events.
Competitive intelligence is rewarding, but not easy
You’ll gain a lot by making these activities part of your routine, but this work does take serious time, effort, and discipline!
If you don't have the time to invest in such activities, you can always stick to just using Google Alerts to get the top-level news about your competitors. But the truth is, you're short-changing yourself if you do this. Quality competitive analysis may not come easy, but it will go a long way towards ensuring your business success.
The good news is that some new automated competitive intelligence tools are now starting to become available. Such tools can automatically scan company websites and deliver any new information that posted. You may want to consider one of these to make this job significantly easier.
Both Mark Warner & are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Mark Warner has sinced written about articles on various topics from Family Concerns, Do it Yourself Sunroom and Legal Matters. Mark Warner is a Legal Research Analyst for . RealDealDocs gives you insider access to millions of legal documents drafted by the top law firms in the US. To. Mark Warner's top article generates over 27100 views. to your Favourites.
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