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Building
a Competitor Profile
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Sooner
or later, somebody in your company will ask you to build a company profile.
Where to start ? This article will outline the steps in building a good
customer profile and the questions that you should ask yourself.
Article
By Competia.com
This article was used with permission.
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Sooner or later, somebody in your company will ask
you to build a company profile. Where to start ? This
article will outline the steps in building a good customer profile
and the questions you should ask yourself: What is this
profile for?; What should be included?; What format is most
appropriate?; What sources can I use?; What do I do next ?
(article continued below ...)
What
is this profile for ?
First, you need to understand why the profile is
needed. Too often, one builds a company profile that then stays in
your files and that none ever looks at.
First question you should ask when asked for a
profile is: "What decision needs to be made that will
require this profile ?" Two cases can happen:
-
First, no immediate decision needs to be made, the
profile is just for "reference". In this case,
run away and try as best as you can to postpone building
the profile. This is exactly the case where the profile is
likely to sit in the files, will take a lot of time to be
built, and then even more time to get updated, but is
actually not serving a real purpose.
-
A clear decision can be found where the profile will
be needed, and then you have indications as to the type of
profile you need.
What should be included ?
Profiles can take various shapes and forms
depending on the decision that needs to be made.
In green is the information that will usually not
be readily available, but needs to result from your analysis.
These are a few examples of the elements to include in a company
profile based on the type of decision that needs to be made:
|
Type of
decisions
|
Profile
includes
|
| To help senior
management prepare for a field trip |
- Last news
about the company (useful for chatting as an
introduction)
- Profile of
the people who will be met
- Key
information about the company visited
- Historic of
relations with your company (speak to customer service
also)
|
| To investigate
the opportunity to acquire a company |
- Summary of activities and split by product and
region
- Financial information
- List of customers
- Strengths and weaknesses
assessment
- Estimate of company value
based on previous offers and own analysis
|
| To build
awareness internally about a competitor |
- Description of activities
- Business system
- Prices
- Bidding policies
|
| To understand
opportunity for partnership |
- Markets by product and region
- Profile of key management and background
- Historic behavior of management
- Example of existing partnerships
- Analysis of synergies or
overlaps
|
| To assess
viability of a supplier |
- Credit rating
- Profile of key people and background
- Historic of relation with customers
- Product benchmarking
|
Once you have defined the elements you want to
include, be very specific about the level of detail of the
information needed. For example;
-
If you are showing financial numbers, how many years back do
you want to go ?
-
If you are using market size numbers, what currency will you
use ?
A few tips: every time you can, add insight:
-
"What does it mean for our company" section
-
Cheat: if you need general financial numbers or rations, use
ratios that might already be calculated in your sources of
information, you'll save time
-
Benchmark: compare information about the company with your
own company, or with industry average
What format is
most appropriate ?
One principle: have an executive summary or an index, and add
the background information or back-up separately.
Be creative when you decide which format to use for
your profile. it does not have to be a paper document. These are
some of the formats that are mostly used:
-
Paper or text document using Word with hyperlinks to
sites on the Internet
-
Intranet (html) format
-
Floppy disk (especially for people who are traveling
and want to reuse some of the information for their own
report
-
PowerPoint presentation: for the ones like me who do
not like to write and believe in the power of graphs and
images .. You can also link to your PowerPoint document
external sites or pages on your Intranet for immediate
reference
-
Discussion: some company profiles are best explained
in a rapider briefing meeting. You can use 5 minutes to brief
an executive about the key questions to ask at a customer
meeting. It is often most appreciated by people who do not
have the time to read briefing notes. Some analysts I know
take a trip to the airport with the president to brief him
before he takes-off to visit customers
-
Post-it notes: their size is a sure indication that
you will not overload your "client" with too much
information, but rather give only the insight needed
-
Email message: for those who read their email, but
not their in-basket
What sources can I use
?
Sources can be as varied as the types of profiles you can
build. These are the broad categories:
Internal
:
l
:
start with information readily available
internally. Chances are, this profile was already build sometime
ago. Don't forget to speak to customer service (who will have a
track record of historic with the client), and sales
Financial information. We will elaborate next month on
sources of information for financial information. For the time
been, there are some hints:
-
If you are looking for quick and dirty key financial numbers
and ratios of US public companies, and large non-US
companies, try Hoovers
-
If you need to complete balance sheet and income statement
of publicly traded company, try Edgar
in the States, and Sedar
in Canada. Yahoo! Finance
is also a good source for other non-US public companies
-
-
IPO Central offers
Free Initial Public Offering site, searchable by company and
industry.
-
Internet Bankruptcy gives
you Troubled Company Resources, including news, discussion
groups, resources, and a listing of U.S. companies filing
for bankruptcy.
Strategy, products: Check the company websites at Presenceweb
, read the company capsule in Hoovers
(again !). You can check also CompanyLink,
an excellent low-cost site with hyperlinks to valuable corporate
information: news, press releases, SEC filings, company profiles
from Hoover's and CorpTech, company home pages, competitors and
more.
Company's competitors: Hoovers
gives you the names of the key competitors of a company you are
profiling in its company capsule
People: check Egosurf to
find what speeches management might have given. Edgar
will also allow to search for specific people to find who is
sitting on which board and get a brief background of corporate
officers. Some industry specific sources will also have people CVs
such as ATI for aerospace.
Trademarks and patents: you can check individual
trademarks and patents site in each country. But for a rapid list
, but also check Companysleuth
who has an easy way to display those patents which are often hard
to find for non specialists. For those in biotech, check Knowledge
express to find key contacts, potential partners, market
information, patent information, new products concepts.
In principle, see how far you can go with Internet free resources,
then you can start looking into the more expensive sources. You
will often reach a wall, where no information is available any
more. This is when you have to use analysis to obtain the missing
information:
- Extrapolate a market size when you have the
history but not current numbers Use comparable data in an
industry when financial information is not available (ex:
for a company in biotech, the approximate revenue by
employee is x, so this company estimated revenue is x)
- Use comparable data in an industry when financial
information is not available (ex: for a company in biotech,
the approximate revenue by employee is x, so this company
estimated revenue is x)
A few tips:
- Check if profiles already built on the web or internally
can answer the question asked
- Ask for feedback, even as you only have a draft of the
profile
- If you feel the profile is useless, say it !
- Think about having sales people updating part of a
customer's profile for example
What do I do next ?
-
Update: define who will update the profile, and at which
frequency
-
Check if the profile has been used, and refine the format if
you need to
-
Ask for feedback
-
Make sure the profile is accessible for later use.
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