A short document that compares you with your rivals and says what to do about it.
A competitive analysis that stops at the comparison table hands the hard part back to the reader. The two linked from this page each end in a recommendation. One is a strategist's memo for a client's leadership team, the other a feature matrix a product manager made for her own team. Every company in them is invented, so take the structure and do your own research.
Who it's for
Consultants and strategists whose client has asked a pointed question, such as whether to follow a rival's price cut. Product managers and founders who want their team to agree on what to build next.
Keep the raw material elsewhere: screenshots of rival sites, the review spreadsheet, your call notes. Nothing on the page updates itself, so a rival's new price means a new version from you.
What a good one contains
- The advice as the headline. The memo opens with "Don't match the price cut. Win the big dog." A leadership team may read no further.
- Three or four rivals, and yourself. Each gets a line on who it is, what it's good at and what it's bad at. The memo calls its own client bad at price.
- Prices in one unit. The memo's price table has one column each for a 20, 50 and 90 lb dog, per day, before discounts.
- The gap, drawn. The memo's bar chart shows nothing on sale between $3.10 and $8.96 a day. The matrix page's map shows one rival alone in the top right corner, at 4.6 times the price.
- Marks a reader can check. Each half mark in the matrix names its limit, and the map's two axes are sums of those marks.
- Evidence from your own customers. 26 of the brewery software's 58 lost deals named keg tracking or wholesale orders. A rival's website can't tell you that.
- What to do, and what to leave. The memo gives three moves in order. The matrix page lists three things to build and three to leave alone.
- What would change your mind. The memo names three events, such as the price cut lasting past January.
Where these go wrong
The usual failure is a matrix in which your own column is all full marks. Nobody believes it, and the team learns nothing. Score yourself first and hardest: the product manager gives her own product 1 out of 6 for selling.
Say where each fact came from and when you checked it. A price read from a rival's site on a named date is evidence. "I heard they're cheaper" isn't. Both examples end with their sources and dates.
How to send it
With a password. It names rivals' weak points and carries your client's own loss figures. Only the people in the meeting should have it.
Every page you publish gets one link that opens in any browser. You choose who can open it: anyone with the link, anyone with the password, or only the people and company domains you name, who sign in with Google or Microsoft. Change the page later and the link stays the same.
