Sweet Spot Martech specializes in competitive intelligence research, and because any strategic planning requires an external view, its key for corporate or market researchers to incorporate up to date, and accurate data about the competitive environment. We also strictly adhere to legal and ethical practices to ensure your reputation is secure – a key attribute when outsourcing CI services.

Competitive intelligence research is often considered by most information B2B technology providers as the most difficult type of information to acquire. Collecting such information requires access to an expert market intelligence consultant, who is also technology savvy, has enterprise technology domain experience in order to glean information from the competitor or another source. Our experts help you answer questions like:

• What do we need to learn about competition in order to invest and expand into a new market
• Who is our competition? Picking the wrong target, might mean doing the wrong thing right
• What is the profile of our competitors? Create a standardized competitor portfolio
• What are the business goals of our competitors?
• What threats / opportunities do they pose?
• What market strategies are being followed by the competition and what is the success rate?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors?
• How will the competition react to our business tactics?
• Do we truly have ‘First Mover Advantage’, or are there customer alternatives not yet considered

We can help you with:

1. White space opportunities to help uncover and build a successful M&A strategy
2. SWOT analysis
3. Competitor landscapes mapping (present, to-be with new products/markets)
4. M&A due-diligence and funding event prep (technical reviews, interviews with ex-employees, customers, partners, suppliers)
5. Press and social media analysis (public data that requires data science to accelerate search and vetting)
6. Competitor pricing research (the toughest project, and often obsolete before its useful. Price-to-value analysis)
7. Product pipeline history and futures
8. Facilitating customer round-table sessions – with a subliminal focus on competitors

Sweet Spot Martech provides comprehensive competitor analysis services so you can understand exactly what you are up against when launching a new product, producing a new marketing campaign or expanding your brand into new territories. Contact us today to learn more about our full range of competitor analysis services and how we can present data that is critical to your decision-making process.

Sweet Spot Martech helps your sales and marketing teams identify growth opportunities using comparative analysis of competitors’ portfolios including sales performance, innovation, positioning, target customers and channels of distribution.

As information continues to be increasingly available to customers during their purchase cycle, they can easily get a negative impression of your company’s products if your sales teams don’t understand how to sell against competitors – we can help establish best practices with you and your teams.

When possible, we combine external competitive intelligence with internal data collection of usually diverse (and sometimes opposing) views on questions like:

• What is your comparative advantage, differentiated value, or “why to buy”?
• What is the blueprint of your competitive landscape and threat level of key competitors?
• Can you provide a sales and marketing effectiveness comparison to your competition?
• What motivates your customers to chose a competitor instead of you?
• Can you enter a new market, and what ‘magic’ can you bring to the table?
• Does the customer need something different from what they want?
• Are you competing against “do nothing” or “if it ain’t broke, why fix it” legacy competitors?

Ways in which we help your go-to-market teams:

1. qualification matrix testing: competitor response readiness
2. low pressure win-loss review: (vs. audit), geared toward understanding why a competitor won the deal you should have
3. message comparison: matching product to marketing, to sales positioning and messaging relative to the competition
4. Vetting CRM data: review and match your CRM data with face-to-face customer and analyst conversations
5. CRM design: improve your CRM input requirements and train sales and customer success teams on sourcing competitor input
6. CI Deal support: source technology or domain specific, short term pre-sales analysts to support specific engagements

As a marketing or sales leader, its crucial you cultivate internal best practices around collecting competitive intelligence on competitors’ projects and products, as well as any new market segments they’re targeting, giving you time to be strategic in your responses. Don’t be stuck being reactive, lurching from defensive tactic to defensive tactic as new products appear, seemingly out of nowhere.

You need all the market and competitor intelligence you can get, to ensure you can effectively drive product strategy, feature prioritization, product roadmaps, and ultimately enabling sales and marketing through better understanding of your comparative advantage and how to avoid competitor ‘FUD’. We know the buck stops with you (and your CTO), and competitive intelligence is crucial for strategy, execution, and growth stages of your business. We can help you answer:

• Why did you pick the solution in the first place? Is the customer problem still valid?
• Why do your customers choose your competitors solutions instead of yours? Or they simply “do nothing”
• What market mix best fits the market life-cycle stage will result in the right combination of market share growth and revenue
• Do your ‘must-have’ features really help you win deals or are they just baseline requirements for your customers.
• Your customers’ key buying criteria, motivations, in when there are multiple decision making personas (“minds that matter”)  in your target audience that conflict or overlap with each other. For example, users vs. CIO vs. Division General Manager.
• “Why our product couldn’t win the sale?” which happens to be a tough exercise because its often seen as fault finding in your marketing or sales teams. Your customer-facing teams know much about buying processes, motivations and competitors

Sweet Spot Martech, can help product managers execute on economical, quick and dirty, competitive intelligence practices.

1. Focus groups
2. Surveys (for example, “what features really mattered once you were done? “which ones drove ROI up and TCO down?”)
3. Usability testing 
4. Big data, data mining statistical analysis, qualitative analysis enhancements
5. Social media sourced participants, competitor customers

The combinations and iterations are numerous, but with a bit of up-front work, the requirements, boundaries, and scale can get you answers quickly.

One of the biggest challenges for corporate competitive intelligence teams is delivering timely and up to date insights about competitors. When requests come in, its usually ‘we need it yesterday’, especially if a critical deal is on the table, an upcoming leadership strategy meeting, or simply keeping up with the ever changing landscape of existing or potential competitors. This is where outsourced competitive intelligence and automated data gathering can help.

Wether your challenge is a lack of headcount, expertise or simply an immediate need for results, we’ll help you take the right initial steps to improving your capabilities. And because we also work with freelance experts with specific experience and knowledge, your CI function can be elastic depending on the situation.

Questions we can help with:

• Does it make sense to outsource part or all of your competitive intelligence?
• Does your competition have better market and competitor capabilities?
• How can your corporate strategy team disseminate and distribute competitive intelligence skills, responsibilities across your organization?
  Gone are the days of a single person or function being capable of covering all your bases. Our approach ensures you leverage skills across the organization ensuring a global perspective, catch changes in market trends, and in industries that could potentially disrupt your market.
• Automate or hire more people?
• Software as a Services (SaaS) automatically handles many of the CI tasks you or your employees have always been tasked with doing, like automatic tracking of website changes, product launches, and new features. While you once had to manually monitor each competitor’s company page, their press releases and industry-specific groups on LinkedIn and elsewhere, cloud-based solutions can automate the process for you, ensuring that vital data doesn’t fall through the cracks. Building, buying or a combination of technology tools may be your next strategic decision
• What competitive intelligence tools should I use for my particular needs?
  With over 3,000+ marketing technology software tools, the blend of tools you select, combined with your existing systems like CRM, web analytics, database, etc. has become a major challenge. Selecting the wrong tools (or none at all), may leave your team and organization exposed. Or you may simply outsource competitive intelligence automation to Sweet Spot Martech.

We can help with:

1. Deciding on whether to outsource at all, partial or on a tactical, on-demand basis. ROI, TCO and ‘why now’ is always part of our initial discussion. We won’t sell you something you don’t need.
2. Executing internal, neutral surveys on quality and value of existing competitive intelligence capabilities
3. M&A or venture capital due-diligence with regard to competitive landscape
4. Automating your CI data streams, knowledge warehouse and implement best of breed tools for your team
5. Training and mentorship – competitive intelligence skills need to be distributed across the organization, Cloud based tools, big data and data science enable a broader and deeper scope for your competitive intelligence practices. Our work leaves you with greater skills internally even if we are engaged on a project basis.
6. Recurring competitive intelligence services. For our most demanding clients, we offer a retainer service that ensures your competitive intelligence capabilities, sources and tools continue to evolve as technologies, markets and your unique needs change.

Mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, corporate alliances, technology transfers and licensing, and even consortia participation between otherwise distinct and separate firms, sometimes even competitors can be a major growth catalyst. However rather than selecting partners carefully based on product/service synergies and long-range market prospects, many such relationships are created based on convenience or opportunity….a recipe for disaster and ugly legal or commercial battles.

Very simply, Sweet Spot Martech has extensive experience in reviewing enterprise technology partner, developer, ecosystem or social network initiatives. We help you answer the “build-buy-partner-compete” questions with a solid framework, and help your partner teams move forward with a solid, standardized methodology.