Competitive Positioning in Times of Change

How to gauge a company’s competitive positioning

If you‘re looking to develop new sources of revenue or strengthening your competitive edge, success requires aligning the tactics and execution in the field with your strategy. While talking directly with customers is important when assessing strategy, each customer can only share a limited perspective. You need more information to insure competitive success.

The collective knowledge of your team is a secret weapon. Use it to improve your organization’s ability to compete in the market.

The best information for gauging your competitive position is unfiltered and unbiased input from your team. They see your full customer life cycle. They see beyond just one customer or one type of customer. They know what separates a good vs. bad customer. They know what separates loyal customers from those that are just satisfied. Many of them also know the history and common tactics of your competitors.

Unfortunately, this candid information is difficult for leaders to obtain. The right tools haven‘t been available to get past the social and professional biases that make collecting honest and reliable opinions a near impossible task.

Use Behavior Science For Honesty And Precision

Below is a detailed example of how Survature can help you understand your team and see more than your team sees themselves. The design of these questions is based on the latest advances in management science. This entire behavior science instrument comes across as a user-friendly survey, but gets at a deeper psychological dimension than a normal survey.

  • Title: Internal Competitive Positioning Assessment
  • Organizer: Company Officers/Management
  • Target Audience: Internal teams/employees
  • Completion Time: 4 minutes
  • Analysis Time: Instant (analytics generated automatically by Survature data analytics suite)
  • Insight gained: Market conditions, purchase drivers, competitive tactics, internal priorities to compete

QUESTION 1

Involve Every Relevant Area

You can separate and compare the prioritized views held by various functional areas of your team.

Question asking team member's work roles

QUESTION 2

Baseline Market Condition

You can see and compare how the team views the current market.

Question asking team member's market assessments

QUESTION 3 (Behavior enabled AnswerCloud™)

Identify Customer Purchasing Drivers

This is the first use of our unique behavior based AnswerCloud question that will reveal your team‘s opinion and priorities regarding your customers purchasing drivers.

AnswerCloud gauging team member's opinions of purchasing drivers

QUESTION 4 (Behavior enabled AnswerCloud™)

Identify Tactics of Leading Competitors

This AnswerCloud will reveal your team‘s opinion and priorities regarding your competitor‘s market characteristics.

AnswerCloud gauging team member's opinions of competitors

QUESTION 5 (Behavior enabled AnswerCloud™)

Baseline Win/Loss Likelihood

This Net Promoter style question will score your team‘s opinion competitive position in the market.

AnswerCloud gauging team member's opinions on competitive positioning

QUESTION 6 (Behavior enabled AnswerCloud™)

Identify Action Priorities

This AnswerCloud will reveal your team‘s stated priority and, separately, their behavior-based priority regarding your company‘s priorities for competing in the market.

AnswerCloud gauging team member's priorities for competing in the market

QUESTION 7

Identify Friction Points

This open ended question will allow your team to provide long form opinions for improving sales.

Open-ended question

Using the series of questions outlined above is an example of how to obtain unbiased insight into how your team thinks about your organization‘s competitive position. The questions and responses are entirely customizable to fit an organization‘s unique profile and culture.

Click below to schedule a demo below for a complete tour of the Survature platform, including our automated analytics suite.