Competitive Market Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Aug 27, 2009
- Account Manager Surveys – You can survey your company’s sales staff about which competitors they run into, how often, how often you win or lose and why.
- Bias: The results are filtered through account-manager perceptions.
- Benefit: This is a cheap and fast method that sums up what your sales force sees. It’s great to do once a year, as an added input to planning exercises.
- Won-Business Surveys – You can send a follow-up survey to new customers asking them about their purchase process, who else they considered and why, and then why they bought from you instead.
- Bias: Even more biased than your lost-business sample.
- Benefit: Such surveys help identify the differentiating messages you should be emphasizing in your marketing and provide an ongoing stream of competitive intelligence.
- Lost-Business Surveys – You can survey prospects who haven’t purchased in X months (where X equals whatever makes sense given your sales cycle). Ask them if they purchased elsewhere, and—if so—find out who they purchased from, why and how satisfied they are.
- Bias: you are only surveying your competitors’ customers who considered you – since many of your competitors probably have vertical markets or functional niches where you might rarely be considered, you are not getting a true picture of their customer satisfaction.
- Benefit: You are getting a picture of competitors’ performance where it most directly hurts you and on an ongoing basis.
- General Market Research Surveys – If you have high market share, then rent panel of your appropriate target demographic from a company like eRewards, Greenfield Online or SSI. Top avoid having your brand bias the results in any way, do not give away your organization’s identity: host your survey elsewhere, such as on the panel provider’s systems, on your survey software platform (if you don’t have a custom domain name) or with a third-party market researcher. If you have low market share, then you will probably need to rent the list from a magazine or newsletter.
- Bias: Every panel has its own bias, as does every periodical; your survey will really only be representative of the magazine readership or panel membership.
- Benefit: This is far less biased than your lost- and won-business surveys but is typically only an annual or biennial point-in-time survey.
Since your
survey response rates are proportional to your relationship with respondents, you will get the lowest response rates from lost-business surveys and general market-research surveys. To boost those response rates, make sure to send out
survey reminders and consider offering a
survey incentive.