Competitor Targeting: Winning the Battle for Market and Customer Share Book

Understanding and beating competitors is more challenging today than ever. The battlefield is complex, the adversaries are plentiful, and competitors are increasingly fast, flexible, and difficult to analyze and predict. In today's crowded marketplace, everyone seems to want loyalty from the same customers. Many companies have taken their eye off the ball of competition in recent years and have instead invested heavily in Customer Relationship Management and related CRM technology. While this strategy of putting the customer at the center of the organization is valuable, it is equally important to keep a keen eye on the competition. In this environment, being focused on customers alone may not be enough to help the company succeed, and it may even be perilous. It is still possible— in fact, essential— to identify who to beat and how. Just as a rising tide raises all ships, so does strong marketplace demand mask a company's competitve weaknesses. But when the economy softens, the absence of a meaningful competitive strategy can become all too apparent when competitors try to grow at your expense. Competitor Targeting: Winning the Battle for Market and Customer Share is where competitive intelligence meets CRM. It shows you how to target competitors and increase your share of the customers you value most by combining customer relationship management and competitive intelligence principles. Winning in today's market means beating the competition not just at the traditional things such as price, or securing an order. Now beating the competition involves creating superior relationships with your customers— better, faster, and more enduring than your competitors can do it. Competitor Targeting shows: how to choose the right competitors to beat how to plan to beat or collaborate with them how to move beyond traditional competitive intelligence gathering and monitoring, to make competition central to your business strategy how to integrate strategies for bonding with customers and beating competitors how to ensure that your competitors lose so that you may win, customer by customer. A company needs to satisfy its customers better than its competitors do. Doing this allows the company to win customers over, one at a time. Doing this repeatedly and for many customers helps a company not only gain customer share but market share.Read More