What do you know about your competitors? Why does it matter? If you want the answers to those questions and so much more, you've got to join us for this edition of the Inside BS Show. Hey now, I'm Dave Lorenzo. I'm the Godfather of Growth and we're here every day with another show to help you increase the value of your business so you have more options when you're ready to exit.

If you want to run your business like an investment, this is the place for you to be. Now, competitor intelligence is extremely important for you for a number of reasons. Number one reason why competitor intelligence is important for you is from a sales and marketing perspective.

Every customer that you come in contact with will want to know why you're different and how you're different from your competitors. This is essential. You being able to differentiate yourself and differentiate your business from your competitors is essential in a sales and marketing process.

It's essential from the standpoint of messaging for lead generation. It's essential from a standpoint of closing deals. It's essential so that you can describe to your prospects why they should do business with you instead of your competitors.

In order to be able to articulate that, you got to know everything there is to know about your competitors. The second reason why this is important is because you need to know how you're doing related to market share. Do you currently have 10% of your market, 20% of your market, 30% of your market? Are you number one in market penetration? Do you have access to the most people in the market? These numbers, this information is important because it demonstrates not only to someone who may want to buy your business down the road, but to you that your marketing is effective, that you have substantial marketing reach.

The third reason why you need to know everything there is to know about your business is because you're building your business as an investment. If you decide you want to sell that investment in the future, you're going to get the highest price from people in your industry who want to buy your business to grow their market share or who want to buy your business because it fits in with the business that they have. The only way you know who these people are is by doing your homework, is by investigating your competitors.

So what do you do in order to make sure you're doing your homework and you're doing your competitive intelligence activity? Well, the first thing you should do is at least once a year, you're going to do a strategic plan. Many of our clients become our clients because they engage us to do the strategic plan for them. And part of your strategic plan should include a SWOT analysis, S-W-O-T, SWOT analysis.

This is something that you learn in business school and it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. What are your company's strengths? Where are you really, really good? What are your weaknesses? Where are you vulnerable? What are the opportunities that are out there in the market? What are the external opportunities, the external factors that you can take advantage of to grow to advance your position? And then what are the threats? What potentially could hurt your ability to continue to do business or what could hurt your ability to grow your market share? Strengths and weaknesses are internal. Opportunities and threats are external.

Now when we look at the opportunities and the threats, that's where your competitor analysis comes in. You want to look at competitors and match their strengths with threats to your business. And you want to match their weaknesses with opportunities for your business.

And if you're doing your homework on a regular basis, you should be gathering data. You should be collecting information about your competitors on a daily basis. So here are four things you as the CEO can do every day to keep up with your competitive intelligence so that you have an accurate competitor analysis.

The first thing you should do is a news scan. So you should go into Google or into your favorite search engine and search for your competitors and see what's in the news using the news tab. If you're smart, you'll set up a Google alert for all your competitors and you'll group all those together.

And you can batch read the information about your competitors on a daily basis. You're not doing this to steal ideas. You're doing it to understand how your competitors are positioning themselves in the The second thing you should do is you should do social listening.

Social listening. Now this is easier than ever. Used to be you'd have to make friends with the sales people from your competitors and go out for drinks or coffee with them and pump them for information and see what was going on.

These days, follow your competitors on LinkedIn. Simply go into Sales Navigator and create lists of people who work at each competitor. Make each competitor a list in Sales Navigator.

And then all the people who work there, sales people, executives, operations folks, supply chain folks, even down to the person who sweeps the floor. If they're on LinkedIn, put them on those lists. And then on a daily basis, just scan through and see who's posted new information and skim those posts.

You will be amazed at how people spill the beans on social media. So doing social listening is incredibly valuable. If you're the CEO and you don't have time for this, you should be assigning someone on your team this task to do every day.

And they should aggregate the information and send it to you so that you can find the most important information. The third thing you should do is look for deal alerts. So your trade publications, industry-specific websites, industry-specific newsletters, whether they're online or hard copy, will contain deal notifications.

You need to stay up to date on who's buying whom, who's going out of business, who's moving into a new market, who's leaving a market, who's divesting themselves of business units. These deal alerts are announced in industry trade publications. You got to stay on top of them.

Finally, there's the fourth element, and that's field feedback. This is you calling your clients and asking them what they're hearing about the competitors. This is you talking to prospects and asking prospects who they're using and why they use them and who their top salespeople are and what they like about the salespeople, what they like about the company they're working with.

Ask questions of your prospects about your competitors when they tell you they're using someone else. And then if you're the head of sales or you're the CEO, go directly to the salespeople and talk to them and ask them what's going on in their company. You can assign a recruiter to recruit the salespeople so that you can potentially swipe them from a competitor.

This is all field research, field feedback that can be done in order for you to understand what's going on in your industry and in your geographic area. Now, I want to caution you that you shouldn't be stealing trade secrets. You shouldn't be taking any proprietary information.

You should only be using publicly accessible information and talking to people who are part of that company with complete transparency, helping them understand that you're a representative of a rival company and you're just talking to them to talk about industry trends. When you talk about industry trends with a competitor, they will invariably reveal things about the company that will help you and your competitive positioning. This is how you can do competitor intelligence.

Put this into practice now and your company will be better off and more valuable as a result. I'm Dave Lorenzo. This is the Inside BS Show.

We'll see you back here again tomorrow.