Open enrollment for Medicare Advantage and ACA Marketplace plans is just around the corner…and competitive rivalry will be more intense than ever. Brand positioning, marketing mix, direct-to-consumer messaging, and customer experience will separate winners from losers.
Whether going up against a national mega-Plan or start-up niche player, competitive intelligence should be an integral part of a company’s market preparation. Don’t operate in an information vacuum when it comes to knowing your adversaries. Going head-to-head takes insights and intelligence to enlighten operations, marketing, and sales.
Disciplined Espionage
Meaningful competitive intelligence delivers actionable insights on critical in-market factors such as product differentiators, customer preferences, technology advances, and sales tactics. The right intelligence is a powerful tool to position against…and beat your rivals.
Learning from the opposition requires you to dissect their underlying strategies and thinking. Analyze your competition as if you had a financial stake in their business---an investor's due diligence perspective. These seven categories create a snapshot of your challengers:
- Business Verticals– how do they define and describe their business?
- Strategic Vision– are they aspiring to the same position as you…what’s different?
- Best Practices– what are their strengths, weaknesses, and unique selling proposition?
- Marketing Mix– how do they match up: product, price, place & promotion?
- Financial Indicators– are growth and profitability targets comparable to yours?
- Infrastructure– what does their customer journey look like…do they have happy customers?
- Talent – are they beating you in recruiting and thought leadership?
Outsmart Rivals
Competitive insights can be one of the most important business tools in the company. It reveals how rivals view their business, implement strategies, and succeed or fail in the market. These discoveries help delineate a company’s comparative market position. They provide value to every operating unit in the organization. Here’s how:
- Develop counter sales strategies
- Achieve market differentiation
- Restructure marketing mix
- Displace competitors in sales situations
- Highlight customer preferences
- Strengthen messaging and branding
Competitive intelligence informs management on what’s working, what’s not and why. It’s the key to knowing what’s undermining or enhancing market performance. Having information to scrutinize a competitor's business and support internal decision-making sets the stage for an enterprise to know what’s necessary to topple competitors.
"The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be your only sustainable competitive advantage" – P. Senge
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