What Competitor Insight Means for Your Business
Access to comprehensive company profiles and fresh news is a win for sales reps and the entire business.
Gaining Competitor Intelligence and Putting it to Use
You want to book meetings with executives and win deals, but where should you start? Possessing the right intelligence allows you to enter conversations with relevant information that will make prospects stop and listen. After you've identified the right tool to gather and analyze information, the final step is acting upon the knowledge you've obtained.
Owler Max is a comprehensive sales intelligence tool that tracks trends within industries, sets sales triggers, and provides company insights that ultimately help grow your pipeline. You can smoothly incorporate Owler Max into your company workflow with multiple integrations available.
Research Can Make All the Difference
Consider that buyers constantly get sold to, and there is the potential for things to come across as impersonal. Too often, companies fill inboxes with cold emails that do not strike a chord or even place calls without the necessary preparation. Proper customer research is one way sales teams can gain an advantage over others. When prospective customers recognize that you did the work to understand their business better, it gives you legitimacy. It places you ahead of the crowd of others who have not customized their approach based on their audience and what they prioritize.
Using Competitor Intelligence to Identify Competitive Advantages
Sales teams with access to intelligence tools can speak to prospects’ pain points effectively. Tangible evidence of the research done in advance of a meeting with leadership will improve the effectiveness of the conversation and can help avoid complicated interactions that go nowhere.
Identifying strengths and weaknesses is another important aspect of having access to competitor intelligence. Knowing what areas others are succeeding in versus the places where they need improvement allows you to conduct comparisons to strengthen your productivity and prevent or resolve any issues that may occur within your organization. Analyzing strengths and weaknesses can also reveal opportunities to connect with your competitors’ audience. Now that you know how your product stands up against the competition, you can speak to the differentiators that set your product apart from similar offerings, making it the right fit for prospective customers.
Tactfully Talking About Competition
After the information gathering and analysis phase of your research, you will walk away with an awareness of your prospect’s competition and how you can help them stand out in their space. Mentioning competition in a tactful manner can be an effective method of inspiring the prospect with opportunities for them to gain an edge with their audience.
Mentioning a prospect’s competitor could look like referencing their success before transitioning into how you can offer your prospect comparable success with the use of your product and the positive relationship building that accompanies your partnership.
Another advantage to this type of conversation is the potential to highlight your expertise. It establishes your authority by displaying your product’s potential with a real-world success story.
Competitor Intelligence is the Basis for Success
Knowing both your audience and your competitors yields multiple benefits and can help spell success for your business. These are essential factors that apply to businesses large and small. When various stakeholders are involved in the decision of whether or not to introduce new technology, knowing the roles that individuals play and what their priorities are is essential. The ability to show what makes your product unique from other brands will also aid in the decision-making process.
“People buy by committee,” says Sarah Brazier, Mid-Market Account Executive at Gong. She suggests reaching out to members of a prospect's company at multiple levels to gather intel that sets you up for success in a meeting with leadership. You will have gained perspective on how your product can be used to improve areas such as efficiency. There is also the potential to find new sales opportunities as you become aware of your prospect and competitors in their market. Possessing competitor intelligence can be the entry point for a conversation and make the difference as to whether the prospect is receptive to discussing solutions to their present business challenges.
Among the many capabilities of Owler Max, the platform allows users to track industry trends. Staying abreast of changes is the perfect way to demonstrate your knowledge and attention to a prospect’s needs.
“…That is the whole goal – is to make that information readily available at your fingertips so that you are informed,” Owler CEO Tim Harsch said when asked about the dynamics of how a sales rep can use an intelligence tool such as Owler to speak from a place of expertise when talking to a potential customer.
For practical examples of just how effective access to the correct information can be, watch this recording of last week's webinar featuring Tim Harsch, Sarah Brazier, and Jason Bay, CEO of Outbound Squad. During the webinar titled Competitors: The Secret Elite Reps Use to Land Meetings with Executives and Close Deals Faster, the trio discusses the importance of accurate, timely information needed to equip sales teams to make an impact when meeting with decision-makers.
The interactive webinar presented viewers with the opportunity to pose questions as the featured industry experts shared their insights and best practices for selling their prospective products. At the heart of the conversation was a correlation between obtaining knowledge, creating a positive sales experience and the likelihood of companies choosing to purchase a product.
