How to Keep an Eye on Your Competition

The message is this: if you’re not up-to-speed on what your competitors are doing, you’re reacting way too late.

The best way to stay close to the latest real-world information is to continually stay close to your existing clients and your competition’s efforts to sway them away from you. But there are also two great tools I’d like to highlight for helping as well.

One is Google Alerts. I’ve posted about this service previously, but in a message about pre-appointment research. You can use this just as effectively to track news, blogs, and other sites’ references to your competitors. It’s crazy not to set one of these up–it’s simple, as unobtrusive as you want it to be, and if you set up the search correctly, spot-on in terms of relevance.

The other service is Competitious, which I’ve not mentioned here before. Competitious is a free online tool that lets you easily track news and information on your competitors, compare features and services, share and discuss any information you pull into the system with others on your team.

Competitious’ emerging service is pretty powerful whether you’re a resourceful sales professional or sales manager looking for ways to stay on top of your foes. You can customize all sorts of information in the system, and your team can add whatever bits and pieces they’d like.

Very powerful stuff in the making here. Besides visiting their site, you can learn more about them here, here and here. Check them out as you look ahead to 2007…