Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

For public companies, the information is easily obtained. For private companies, it's much harder.
But if you're trying to compare yourself to your competition, perhaps you might be better served by talked to a sampling of potential clients to understand their perceptions and decision-making process.

It very much depends on the industry, the nature of the businesses involved and the level of detail you're looking for - it's very unlikely you'll find perfect data, and in many cases you won't be able to find anything. The main sources are the competitors' financial reports and filings. As Jay said, for public companies these are easily available, for private companies you may need to see if DnB or other credit agencies have information. Smaller business data tends to be less good or useful (no detail and often too far out of date). Bigger business data is normally just broad headlines. You won't find sales by product line for instance (put it this way, would you release that information?)

Next up are analyst houses - they may have supplier share data either from the suppliers direct, or from the channel (eg channel or retail audits). The analyst houses normally report changes and not absolute numbers so you that can't fix specific quantities to individual businesses. Sometimes industry associations also provide this type of data.

Next you can carry out surveys of customers, and use what customers say they are buying to estimate share and sales - customers aren't always accurate, but the trends can be instructive.

Finally, if you monitor news stories, PR, blogs, investor presentations etc as companies like to brag with good numbers and new investments. The difficulty sometimes is picking out the spin and double counting.

There are also dubious and unethical methods for trying to get data but you really should steer well clear as this can lead to accusations of spying and lead to large financial penalties.

You might start though by asking yourself what you would do differently if you had this data about your competitors? - customer data is much more useful - and then do some scenario planning.

Beyond the publicly available data (as mentioned above), it pays to do in-depth interviews. For my master's thesis 20 years ago, I followed the model of Jean-Jacques Lambin and went to interview key decision makers within competing companies: how do they see the industry? who do they consider as their competitors? how would they react to actions by these competitors? A great job for a graduate student....

Unless your competitors freely refer business to you when they're overbooked (and you to them), or until the day comes that they're the ones paying your bills, making your payroll, and filing your taxes, forget about your competition.

If every business in North America spent as much time focusing on its customers as it wastes focusing on its competition, there would be no "economic crisis" or "down economy"—both of which, by the way, are largely created and perpetuated by the media.

Instead of fretting about which firm in your niche is doing what, instead, invest your time and effort into figuring out what your customers appreciate the most about doing business with YOU.

Find out what matters most to them about your products, delivery efforts, goods, services, and staff. Most of what you will learn will, I suspect, have little to do with price, quality, or customer service.

By focusing your efforts on using the points you unearth in your research in your marketing and customer interactions, you'll create experience-based message actors.

You then use those anchors in all your sales calls, in all your one-on-one discussions, and in all your marketing. You revisit each of this anchors on a regular basis to make sure they're still true, accurate, and reliable, and you course correct accordingly.

Forget your competition: instead, connect with the people most in a position to help your business grow: your current customers, your past customers, and your future customers.