Competitive Analysis

An important step in understanding your selected market is knowing its various players. Stage One constructs brief market profile documents that summarize who buys and sells in your markets and how they might affect you. In most cases, Stage One segments its analysis into profiling prospective customers, partners and competitors.

Competitive Profiles

Knowing your competition is one of the best ways to ensure market success, and doing so begins with identifying and understanding who you must battle for business in each of your target market segments. When formulating your market strategies, Stage One summarizes major competitors—including their products, distribution strategies, alliances and business models—in a three- to six-page document that focuses your team on its enemies. With this basic understanding, you can tune your strategies and tactics so they have maximum impact in each of your chosen markets.

Competitive Matrix

As a quick reference and competitive analysis tool, Stage One creates a matrix of major features and benefits based on claims made by you and your competitors. The checklist helps shape product plans and positioning, and lays the foundation for in-depth product research and testing to verify competitors’ claims, expose weaknesses and benchmark their performance. Stage One produces a version of the matrix for internal use as well as one for public consumption on your website and in sales presentations.

Competitive Product Analysis

The best way to know your competition is from the inside out. So to lay the foundation for positioning and product planning efforts, Stage One can perform head-to-head technical analysis of your product versus competitive offerings. Such in-depth analysis identifies your strengths and exposes your weaknesses so you can direct your technical teams to improve your product and arm your sales team with the information they need to exploit competitors’ shortfalls. Stage One prepares competitive analysis results in the form of white papers, some of which detail shortcomings and are written for internal consumption, while others stress your products’ strengths and are written for public consumption.

Competitive Bulletins

One of Stage One’s signature services delivers competitive bulletins, which summarize competitive differences in easily digested one- to six-page documents. These bulletins educate and rally customer teams around your competitive strengths and give salespeople powerful weapons that can eliminate other vendors from consideration at new accounts. Over the years, the competitive bulletin has been praised as one of the most successful tools ever used by salespeople in their careers.

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