Competition
Their loss may be your gain
13/10/09 21:17
As a business, are you using all of the tools that you have available to you in order to keep on top of your competition and to uncover new opportunities? If not, then there really is no excuse considering all of the tools and technologies that are available to us today.
The best way to communicate this point is with a true story that happened today. First off, one of our clients is building a new electronic download/distribution solution. In essence it is a turn-key solution that will help small to medium sized companies to get their software, video, audio, documents, or data solutions hosted and downloadable/viewable from any platform including through the web and on mobile devices. Anyway, while doing some research to help connect our client with some real-world customers, I did a quick Twitter Search. What appeared was a bunch of tweets talking about how one of the current leaders in this industry recently lost a contract with one of their key customers (one of the largest software companies in the world). After sending out the information to our customer to make sure that they were aware of some of these developments, I then went to LinkedIn and did a search on the name of the person from the company which cancelled the contract that was quoted in one of the articles. I noticed that I did not have a direct connection with this person, but did notice that I had a two degree separation from one of the other executives. I then picked up the phone and called them, and then sent them a note through LinkedIn just to see if it would be possible to have a conversation with them. The goal of the conversation is not to "sell" them on using our customers solution, but rather simply to open up the dialogue with them to better understand what they liked...and disliked about the current market leaders solution. This information is extremely valuable to our client so that they can ensure that they deploy and market a solution that truly meets the needs of all of their clients including larger prospects like this major software company.
Although there is no guarantee that all of this will result in a meeting or conversation, the one thing that is guaranteed is that "You will always miss on 100% of the shots that you do not take". If I did not make the call....then it would be guaranteed that we would not have any type of meeting or conversation with this large software manufacturer. However, the point of all of this is that you have a number of different tools and technologies available to help you identify, understand, and contact potential customers. If you are not using them, then you may be missing out. This is a perfect example of how one of our customers potential competitors loss may result in a gain for our client. Make sure you are using all of the tools available to you to ensure you are gaining from a competitors loss and not the other way around.
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