Competitive Edge for Sales Executives: How to Use Competitor Intelligence to Close More Deals

If you’re a sales executive, there is no need to tell you that Sales has become a tough gig. It is highly competitive, with sales managers from each company vying for the same customers and trying to edge out their competitors.

Not to mention that you have daily proof that the sales cycle has become longer AF.

In this cutthroat environment, having access to valuable information about your competitors can give you a significant advantage in closing deals.

But adding yet another task (and perhaps software) to your already hectic work schedule may seem overwhelming. However, with the right approach and tools, using competitor intelligence can be a seamless and integral part of your sales strategy.

In this article, we’ll see how to incorporate competitive intelligence into your already busy work life and use it to your advantage.

Let’s get to it!

Why Competitive Intelligence Matters to Sales Executives

But why should you care about competitive intelligence as a top sales manager or leader?

Simply put, understanding competitors’ market share, offerings, pricing strategies, and sales tactics is crucial. Competitive intelligence (CI) provides the insights necessary to understand these critical market landscape components and identify patterns, enabling you to craft compelling and agile sales strategies.

Day in and day out, you face constant pressure to enable your team to meet quotas and close deals. With CI, you gain insight and a clearer view of what competitors offer, how they price their products, and their tactics to attract clients and identify emerging trends and market conditions.

This knowledge allows your sales teams to position their offerings strategically, highlight your product’s unique selling points, and develop tailored pitches that resonate with your potential buyers’ needs.

Let’s now look at how you can implement CI in your sales approach.

How Sales Executives Benefit from Competitor Analysis [A Step-By-Step Framework]

After the ‘why,’ let’s see the ‘how.’ This framework outlines a step-by-step approach to effectively leveraging competitor analysis for sales leaders.

Step 1: Understanding the competitive landscape

Understanding the competition’s strengths and weaknesses is crucial to outmaneuvering them. Start by identifying key competitors in your industry. This will give you a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape and help you identify opportunities to differentiate yourself.

This will also help you gather and analyze data about external factors such as market size, industry trends, and other relevant data.

Step 2: Analyzing competitors’ online presence and activities

If you are here, your competitors are here, too. This includes their website, social media profiles, reviews, and search engine rankings. Analyzing these aspects of your competitors’ online presence can give you valuable insights into their digital marketing strategies and help you identify areas where you can improve your business strategy.

Real-time alerts and notifications can inform you about new product launches, marketing campaigns, or strategic shifts. By setting up these alerts, you can swiftly adapt your strategy to remain relevant and proactive in the marketplace.

Step 3: Identifying gaps in the market

Competitor analysis should focus on understanding your direct competitors and the broader market landscape. By analyzing customer needs and pain points, you can identify potential gaps in the market that your competitors may not be addressing. This can allow you to develop new products or services to meet those needs and gain a competitive advantage.

Another aspect of gap analysis is identifying areas where your competitors may have a weak presence or low performance. By targeting these areas, you can capitalize on their weaknesses and position yourself as a stronger alternative in the eyes of consumers.

Competitive intelligence tools provide a comprehensive view of your rivals by aggregating and analyzing data on their offerings, pricing strategies, and sales tactics. With this information at your disposal, you can make informed decisions that align with market demands and anticipate competitor moves, giving you a strategic advantage.

Step 4: Crafting personalized pitches and messages

Sales pitches are perhaps the most challenging code to crack. CI can help there, too.

Yes, you should always use language that resonates with your (segmented) target audience to address their unique pain points. But what CI can bring to the table is the knowledge about your competitors’ weaknesses (and advantages, too!).

Let’s take weaknesses: by knowing your rivals’ weak spots, for example, you can tailor your sales pitch to highlight specific pain points and how your product or service can fill those gaps and offer a better solution. This will make your pitch more compelling and persuasive to potential customers.

On the other hand, CI also helps you identify your competitors’ advantages and strengths. By understanding what they do well, you can adjust your messaging to differentiate yourself and showcase how you provide unique value.

Acknowledging your competitors’ strengths gives you another benefit: you’re not dodging the elephant in the room. Customers are likely to research and compare different options before deciding, so addressing these comparisons head-on is better than ignoring them.

Recommended Tools and Resources to Get Started

Disclaimer: Here at Unkover, we live and breathe competitive intelligence and have built a competitive intelligence tool specifically designed for sales executives. So, adding images of Unkover in action throughout the framework was only natural.

The next step would be to recommend a free 14-day trial of Unkover (completely free, with all premium features available and no credit card required).

Yet another sales pitch, you may rightly say. But before you go, if any of this

• are already doing some CI in a very fragmented way
• don’t have the time to set up a fully-fledged competitive insights system (and to actually look at a myriad of insights, having to decide which ones are the most important)
• just need to monitor key information on your already busy work life
• are ready to grow with us as we develop more features based on your needs

… then we are a good fit. 😉

All good, but what does Unkover do right now?

1. Identifies the websites of all your competitors and the specific pages you want to track (not sure? We’ll give you some suggestions)
2. Shows your competitors’ email marketing flows
3. Analyzes your competitors’ content marketing strategies
4. Collects your competitors’ G2 reviews and gives you an in-depth analysis of the most loved/hated/requested features and pricing insights
5. Notifies you via Slack or email, so all the information gathered is available to you (and your team) directly where you can see it
6. Starts sending you competitive insights instantly

Plus, setting up Unkover is quick and easy–it only takes 3 minutes!

Sign up today to start your 14-day FREE trial
No credit card required

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Conclusion

As a sales leader, your job is to enable your team to close deals, and you and sales managers are often under pressure to meet quotas. Regular competitor analysis can help you with that by giving insights into competitors’ offerings, pricing strategies, and sales tactics.

CI helps you:

• Understanding your competitive landscape and market trends
• Getting information on competitor activities and campaigns
• Finding gaps in the market
• Crafting personalized pitches based on competitors’ weaknesses

Use Unkover as your CI enabler. You’ll be notified about the most critical competitor changes and trends directly in your inbox or Slack, where you can see them anytime. After setup, Unkover starts sending you competitive insights instantly.

Say goodbye to manual research and stay ahead of the game with Unkover.

Sign up now to start gaining a competitive edge in your sales strategy.