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Today, you cannot gain a competitive edge in the fast growing Web conferencing industry if you do not know your competitors and what they have to offer.
To achieve success in this industry you need to know well what other products and services are available out there and what are the criteria customers and/or competitors would use to evaluate your tool against any other one.
Marketing today is all about positioning yourself effectively. To position your product effectively you must know where the others stand.
If you do not know who your competitors are and how they have positioned themselves on the market you cannot even start doing this process effectively.
You need to be up-to-date.
You must have detailed and comprehensive knowledge of your market, its players and the products being offered.
- By effectively knowing your competitors you may be able to better identify your own weaknesses, limits and strengths.
- You could also be able to better forecast your competitors direction, take advantage of their overlooks and better position your product.
- You can identify additional and more relevant niche target audiences that you had not considered.
- By knowing what other tools and systems can do, you can steer the development, personalization and marketing differentiation of your product/service across many new possible venues.
A new breed of SOHO Web conferencing and live presentation tools has appeared in the last 24 months. These new tools provide many of the features and facilities available in "enterprise" systems while costing a fraction of their price.
Some provide performance or new features that are not even available in some of the leading systems.
Their extremely favourable cost effectiveness ratio requires all players in this industry to wake up and look at what these new, apparently small competitors are now offering.
Understanding is the key. You need to understand well what other products are available and how to leverage to your own advantage existing key differences between your product and the other ones.
"If you are ignorant of both your enemy and yourself,
then you are a fool and certain to be defeated in every battle.
If you know yourself, but not your enemy,
for every battle won, you will suffer a loss.
If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win every battle."
Sun Tzu and the Art of War, 500 b.c.
For any business not to know the same, and more, about the competitive
situation as its customers is equivalent to not wanting to effectively
sell the product in the first place.
Do not try to persuade your customers. In many instances customers know
better than the company selling to them the differences between their
product and competing or alternative ones.
This is especially true outside of large corporations, where
individuals have a voice into selecting and evaluating critical resources
to buy. Small business, professional consultants, students and academics,
as well as many non-profit and NGO-like companies, do not have the
resources to afford highly expensive and sophisticated systems. They all
look for alternative, highly cost-effective solutions from companies that
they can trust and count upon.
- The SOHO consumer (small office - home office) today is capable of
doing sophisticated "shopping" and to gauge effective
alternative solutions and breakthroughs in a very short time.
- Today's SOHO consumer is also active in listening to word-of-mouth
advice coming from trusted contacts. She searches actively for informal
comments and reviews about a product before purchasing it
online.
- Today's SOHO consumer knows pros and cons of a product before buying
it. She gets this information by accessing forums, exchanging opinions,
checking online reviews and ratings. Consumers have been given the means
to do get quality information about any product before buying it and they
take indeed good advantage of this.
Letting your sales and marketing force attempt to sell products without
a full awareness and understanding of your products strengths and
weaknesses relative to the competition is like sending them out on a holy
crusade unarmed to respond to the intelligent queries, doubts, complaints
and natural resistance and from potential new customers. They will be
unable to answer objections and comparisons convincingly, and thus will be
less likely to make actual sales.
Customers are convinced only if they see that you truly know the market
and your competitors. Customers trust you when you are able to comfortably
share strengths and weaknesses of your own tool and to fairly compare it
to other ones available.
It is a hard job to really get to know your competitors.
To get to know your competitors is by no means an easy task. There are
many of them and new ones popping up every week.
To get some competitive intelligence about other Web conferencing tools
these are the steps that you have to follow:
- You have to study information, a lot of this info is not easily
available!
- You have to sign up for trials and demos, and spend many hours in
testing and trying out these tools.
- You need to have collaborators helping you because these tools
cannot be tested if you are alone.
- You need to setup different computer configurations to see how well
tools work across different setups.
- You have to write to customer support and find out more about items
that are not clear or do not work as advertised.
- You have to take quality screenshots to report features and problems
to your colleagues and partners.
- You need to check Internet resources such as online forums,
independent reviews, online commentary and posts relative to the tool
researched.
- You have to evaluate and review the data you collect and turn it
into intelligible information.
- You have to pitch your competitors against each other.
- You have to identify which are the key competitors in specific
fields of competence (e.g.: You have to identify who provides a video
conferencing facility which is as good or even better than your own one.)
- You need to write an exhaustive report that includes all of the
information you have collected.
- You have to organize this information so that it can be easily
shared and accessed by others.
- You need to publish this information into a report that can be
easily accessed, printed and viewed electronically.
- You have to share your report, inform staff in your company about
it and present it to your colleagues, bosses or clients.
As you can see this is no easy task at all. It takes a lot of time,
familiarity with the technology and its use, and a setup that allows you
to test effectively the tool with remote participants.
Feel free to accomplish the last step - I have already completed the
previous 13 steps for you.
My job is one of understanding things through extensive testing and
exploration.
I create my own special kind of Competitive Intelligence information by
following exactly the first 13 of the 14 steps I have outlined above.
Collecting competitive intelligence information and analysing and
reviewing different vendors' tools and products is much like searching for
gold. Finding nuggets is a rare event. I need to sift through lots of
information and systematically test every feature to find out those
weaknesses and strong points that can give an edge to a new company or
that can put at an impasse an established market player.
My Official Online Guide To SOHO Web Conferencing and Live Presentation Tools
already contains all the information you need, for a 1/100th of the price
it would cost you to hire me (or anyone consultant) to do the same.
The reviews in my SOHO Web Conferencing Online Guide are based on
extensive personal testing. I am personally signing up to all
the Web conferencing tools I am reporting about and I try them
out fully. I dedicate three rounds of testing to each single
tool, write to customer support and sales staff and
critically analyze the reliability of the marketing information
publicly available.
Another great resource of competitive intelligence I have prepared for
your use is the Insider Report "Towards A New Generation of Web
Conferencing Tools: 160+ Key Features Of A Competitive System". You can
find out more information about this new report here.
It's all available for you - you just have to put it into action.
Once you have all the information about your competitors, you need to
attentively evaluate it and to selectively communicate it to all who need
to develop the product further inside your company:
- to those who design new features;
- to those who provide customer support and technical assistance;
- to those who plan and implement marketing and sales strategies.
And in today's world, that usually means everybody in your company.
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