Tag Archives: competitive analysis

Know Your…Everyone

It all started with “Know Your Customer,” a shorthand phrase used by financial institutions and related entities who need to know who their customers are.

But then various governments, industries, and entities got into the act with their own variants, such as “Know Your Business.”

I was curious about how many of these “know your” variants I’ve discussed in the Bredemarket blog. Here’s what I found:

I’m sure I’ll come up with some others.

In the Long Run, Can Your Company Be Saved?

Effective product marketing usually won’t help you make your numbers this quarter. But it can provide long-term benefits…if properly executed and maintained.

A Cautionary Tale

In a down employment market such as the one the tech industry is experiencing right now, the common wisdom is that if a company isn’t hiring new employees, it can definitely use independent consultants.

Sometimes the common wisdom is faulty.

One of Bredemarket’s former clients (whom I will not name) illustrates the gaps in the common wisdom. I had worked on projects for this company several times…until I didn’t.

  • Because of a company reorg, my contact at the company changed, and the new contact sent a project my way.
  • Halfway through the project I was asked to stop work with no explanation.
  • When a direct report to my new contact reached out to get to know me, the report assured me that the stop work order had nothing to do with me. 
  • My contract was about to expire, but the direct report said it would probably be renewed. (Admittedly the direct report had no decision-making authority).
  • A month later, I found myself unable to log in to the company’s contractor website.
  • I reached out to a third party (not employed by the company) who managed its contractors. The third party confirmed that my contract had not been renewed.
  • I executed my offboarding process for removing confidential company information and informed my company contact. I received no response. (Not surprising. Many people, rather than delivering or confirming bad news, will say nothing at all—ghosting.)
  • I subsequently learned that the company was performing multiple rounds of layoffs, in a “the layoffs will continue until morale improves”style.

If Properly Executed

If I had provided said company with top-notch content-proposal-analysis work, would those laid-off people have kept their jobs?

Probably not. Content, proposal, and analysis work is not a quick fix.

  • Content, for example, often takes as many as 17 months to bear fruit.
  • The proposal process is only part of a long-term effort, which may start years before a Request for Proposal (RFP) is released, and may not end for years after a proposal is submitted in response to the RFP.
  • And analysis itself is just the first step in a long process. After you analyze something, you have to decide what to do with the results.

While not a quick fix, doing the work now will benefit the company in the long run. Even in the short term, setting the strategy communicates to everyone, including both internal and external stakeholders, the direction in which your company is heading.

If Properly Maintained

But you can’t just treat this as a one-time oroject and be done with it. Looking at the content portion alone, you have to regularly revisit your content and update it as needed.

This is a trick I learned back in my proposal days. Some of my former employers used proposal management software packages, many of which used a “timeout” feature on standard proposal text that required someone to review the text by a certain date. 

Does your proposal text state that your software supports Windows 10? Perhaps it’s a good idea to mention Windows 11 also. 

Or you may need to revise your standard proposal text to mention that new feature…or new benefit. Any proposal text for a health application that was written in December 2019 definitely required an update in December 2020.

What this means for your company

If you haven’t laid the groundwork for your company’s product marketing, Bredemarket can help in a variety of ways. After asking questions (starting with “Why?”) about your needs, we can jointly decide on the most critically important things Bredemarket can do for you and your company.

To find out how John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket can serve as your “CPA” (Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional), go to my CPA page.

Postscript

And no, I’m not going to share an Eagles song. I’m going to share a Madness song.

(AI wildebeest “Keep Moving” image from Google Gemini)

Repurposing My Competive Analysis Analysis

I recently wrote a non-published document explaining, among other things, how I would perform competitive analysis as a product marketer for a particular firm.

Since the firm elected not to use my product marketing services, I will now publish a very small portion of my document, with proper redactions, explaining how Bredemarket (or I as an individual) could perform competitive analysis for YOU.

Background

I recently applied for a product marketing position with a firm outside of the identity/biometrics industry (“Firm X”). This required extensive research on the firm and the industry.

Objectives and Key Results

I framed this research using a tool that I learned about through Phyl Terry’s Never Search Alone program. Specifically, the “Job Mission with OKRs” tool.

You draft your OKRs (objectives and key results) yourself, while you are still interviewing for the job. Sure they may be off—when I performed a similar exercise in early 2022, I assumed I would have to create social media content, but subsequently discovered the firm had a very talented social media manager. But even OKRs that are only 25% accurate are better than no OKRs at all.

Not a fit

Returning to 2024, I started drafting my “Job Mission with OKRs” for Firm X’s product marketing position before I went to my first interview, and iterated it through the second one, creating OKRs for seven key areas.

I planned to iterate my OKRs through subsequent interviews with peers and non-marketing executives, then present them to the hiring manager before my offer.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance. One day after my second interview, the Firm X recruiter sent a personalized letter to me.

While we really enjoyed getting to know you, and after careful consideration, we have determined that there is not a fit at this time, and we will not be moving forward in our process.

I know its not the news you were hoping to hear, but we appreciate your interest….

Have you ever written something and then found out it’s not needed any more? Well, now I had these seven OKRs and no immediate use for them…

…except for one of the OKRs that ties into something I’ve discussed before.

I excel at competitive analysis

One of my seven OKRs dealt with competitive analysis. And I have a lot to say about that.

Tips from the wildebeest

Earlier this year I started a LinkedIn newsletter for Bredemarket called “The Wildebeest Speaks.”

The July 12 edition of the newsletter was entitled “Three Tips That Show Why Bredemarket Excels at Product, Market, and Competitive Analysis.”

From The Wildebeest Speaks.

As you can probably guess from the title, the tips in question are Excel-specific and relate to how I format my investigative workbooks. So they’re more nuts-and-bolts than high-level.

Despite this, early this morning I reshared those Bredemarket tips on my personal profile, just in case someone from Firm X happened to take a look at my LinkedIn profile. (They didn’t.)

Sadly, my wildebeest discussion of competitive analysis confined itself to nuts and bolts, and I needed a higher level discussion of how Bredemarket performs analysis for its clients.

It turns out I had already written it, when I described to Firm X how I intended to perform competitive analysis for them.

Competitors. By Dr Bob Hall – https://www.flickr.com/photos/houseofhall/6000668660/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130630400.

So here’s a redacted version of the competitive analysis OKR I prepared for Firm X, last revised yesterday, but never shared with the firm.

Using techniques developed at IDEMIA, Incode, and Bredemarket:

  1. Identify true competitors (approximately 20 possible competitors identified as of 11/26/2024).
  2. Perform feature comparison to indicate closeness of competitors, [FIRM] strengths, and [FIRM] failures.
  3. Identify key collateral required for each competitor (SWOT analysis, one-page battlecard, messaging/positioning document).
  4. Identify key competitors (high, medium, low).
  5. Complete collateral for high competitors.
  6. Complete collateral for medium competitors.
  7. Complete collateral for low competitors.
  8. Revisit collateral on a regular cadence, revise as necessary.
  9. Identify new competitors as necessary.

Now that I have the chance, let me elaborate on two of the points.

Identify true competitors

Have you ever heard a company say “we have no competitors”?

Bull.

Every single company that sells something ALWAYS has one competitor: “do nothing.”

And many companies have competitors that are not always apparent at the surface. For example, your average U.S. satellite television network (CBS, Fox News, Game Show Network, whatever) doesn’t only compete with other satellite television networks, but also competes with YouTube, TikTok, and other sources of information.

But no company has a truly infinite number of competitors. Yes, one could argue that a View-Master is a legitimate competitor to a U.S. satellite television network…but how much market share will View-Master steal from CBS?

By ThePassenger – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6487250.

So you need to identify the POSSIBLE competitors to your product, and then see if they TRULY compete.

Perform feature comparison

One way to do this is to compare the features of your product against the features of other firms’ products.

But you have to do it right.

If you are completely enamored with your product, you may choose to ONLY list the features that YOUR product has, and compare only those features against possible competitors. By definition, your product will have every feature in the comparison, and therefore it’s the best product ever.

Perhaps you can start with this…but then you need to look at your competitors’ features and determine which ones your product DOESN’T have.

For example, your product may be the best on-premise solution ever, but if your competitors offer SaaS implementations and you don’t, that’s one way in which your product sucks.

Once you have a true feature comparison, you can proceed with ranking the competitors as high, medium, or low, then with enunciating your benefits and closing your weaknesses.

How do my competitive analysis strengths benefit you?

If your knowledge of your competitors is lackluster, perhaps I can help.

  • Even though my consulting contract didn’t explicitly allow it, I regularly fed one of my consulting clients information about its major competitor. This allowed the client to respond to questionable statements the competitor made.
  • Two of my employers directly benefited by my competitive analysis, not only by identifying key strengths and weaknesses of their competitors, but also by knowing who their competitors actually were. One company’s worldwide sales force competed against dozens upon dozens of competitors, and the headquarters had no idea…until I asked the salespeople.

Does your firm want to employ me to spearhead your analysis services? Contact me on LinkedIn.

Or, if you only require my services on a consulting basis, contact me through Bredemarket’s “CPA” page. Unless I’m employed by one of your competitors.

Why Do Enterprises Become Dust?

Hardly anything is permanent. And this applies to boxing AND to B2B sales.

Mike Tyson and legacy

By Super Festivals – https://www.flickr.com/photos/superfestivals/53161465181, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136938246.

Perhaps you heard what Mike Tyson said a few days ago.

I don’t know, I don’t believe in the word “legacy.” I just think that’s another word for ego. Legacy doesn’t mean nothing. It’s just some word everybody grabbed onto.

It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through. I’m going to die and it’s going to be over. Who cares about legacy after that?

We’re nothing. We’re just dead. We’re dust. We’re absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing.

With the life that Tyson has lived, it’s understandable why he’s echoing Ecclesiastes in this interview.

But you don’t have to have had Tyson’s experiences to realize that legacy does not last.

Neither wanted nor needed

In business (and in life), there are companies (and people) who don’t need you or want you.

This may be temporary. The company that doesn’t need you today may urgently (and importantly) need you tomorrow.

By White House – Eisenhower Presidential Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3025709.

Or it may NOT be temporary. There are companies that will NEVER need you or want you.

I recently ran across three such companies that will never need Bredemarket.

Six weeks (now less than six weeks)

Six weeks, the still image version.

Perhaps you noticed Bredemarket’s “six weeks” promotion over the weekend. It was addressed to companies that may have a final project that they want to complete before the year ends in six weeks. (Now 5 1/2 weeks.) I emphasized that Bredemarket can help companies complete those content, proposal, and analysis projects.

The promotion included a blog post, a LinkedIn post, a Facebook reel, an Instagram reel, a YouTube short, and appearances in other online locations. Which is probably overkill, since the promotion is already outdated and can’t be used again until possibly November 2025.

I also included email in this campaign, targeting prospects whom I haven’t worked with recently, or whom I’ve never worked with at all. I didn’t go overboard in my emails; although I have over 400 contacts in Bredemarket’s customer relationship management system, I sent the email to less than 40 of them.

As of this morning, none of the recipients has booked a meeting with me to discuss their end of year needs.

  • Some explicitly told me that they were fine now and did not need or want Bredemarket’s services for end of year projects.
  • Some didn’t respond, which probably indicates that they did not need or want Bredemarket’s services either.

And I discovered that three companies (four contacts) will NEVER need or want Bredemarket’s services.

Delivery incomplete

How did I discover that?

Via four “delivery status notification” messages.

Delivery incomplete.

So I visited the web pages in question, and they no longer existed.

This site can’t be reached.

I’ve been building up my CRM for over four years, so it’s not shocking that some companies have disappeared.

But one of the companies (“Company X”) DID exist a mere eight months ago.

I know this because I prepared a presentation on differentiation (see version 2 of the presentation here), and two representatives from Company X received the presentation in advance of a conference.

After the conference organizer distributed the presentation, I offered to meet with the companies individually (no charge) to discuss their content and differentiation needs, or anything else they wanted to discuss.

While some conference attendees took advantage of my April offer, the representatives from Company X did not.

And now in November, Company X no longer exists.

A tumbleweed on a fence.
Tumbleweed image public domain.

Could Bredemarket have created the necessary content to keep Company X afloat? Who knows?

But EVERY company needs content to differentiate it from its competitors. Otherwise the competitors will attack you. And your competitors may not be as merciful with you as Jake Paul was with Mike Tyson.

If you need Bredemarket’s help with content, proposal, or analysis services, book a meeting with me.

Bredemarket’s CPA: Content – Proposal – Analysis.

Don’t Miss the Boat

Bredemarket helps identity/biometric firms.

  • Finger, face, iris, voice, DNA, ID documents, geolocation, and even knowledge.
  • Content-Proposal-Analysis. (Bredemarket’s “CPA.”)

Don’t miss the boat.

Augment your team with Bredemarket.

Find out more.

Don’t miss the boat.

Do You Know Your Identity/Biometric Competitors…And Yourself?

Do you need identity/biometric analysis from an informed analyst with 30 years of identity/biometric experience?

Do you need:

  • Competitor and competitor product analysis?
  • Industry analysis?
  • Use case analysis?
  • Analysis of your own company?

Book a free meeting with Bredemarket and discuss your needs. Click the image below to drive informed analysis with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

Drive informed analysis with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services