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This Week's Theme: Competitive Analysis Tips

The competitive analysis discussion in last week's column introduced a big topic which deserves some more detailed followup. So this week I am going into more details about such things as: how do you use Linked In to put together a competitor's org chart? How do you glean information from legal filings? How could you find out how much a company was purchased for? How would you find information on a competitor's pricing?

Today's column provides a number of tips and tricks for digging up competitive information.

Putting Together the Org Chart For a Competitor

Dear Readers

Here's some more detail about how Linked In can help you put together an org chart of a competitor. Many times a private competitor doesn't provide much information on their management team. Other times you may be competing against a specific division of a larger company, and that division's management and structure may not be spelled out in the annual reports.

In Linked In, you can list out all individuals from a given company. The most accurate way to do this is to go to the profile of an individual who you are certain works there, and click on their company (it doesn't appear to be a hyperlink unless you hover over it). This gets you to a description of the company and three tabs, each one a separate list of individuals at the company. The first list shows those contacts within three degrees of connection to you on Linked In. If you have worked in the same industry as the competitor you're investigating, and this is a large corporation, chances are you'll find people on this list who are in the division which directly competes with you.

The second list (on the second tab) is new hires. This is great information, worth coming back to every month, to look for patterns and trends. It can tell you where a competitor is ramping up (services, development, sales, partnerships, you name it). Without Linked In, this was always the kind of information I wish I knew but could only get partially through press releases announcing new hires at the strategic level. If your competitor preferred to keep mum about such things, you were out of luck.

The third list is all employees found in Linked In. Here you get job titles but not full names. But guess what? If you click on an individual profile, there's a section further down on the right called Viewers of this profile also viewed where you can see full names. This section will often show you bosses and direct reports, to help you build your hierarchy. Click on a name in that section, and the new profile may show the full name of the previous profile in the also viewed section.

This work can feel time-consuming and tedious. You need to poke around, work your way step by step through the list, and above all, note down every name and title you find. To put the names into a hierarchy, you can rely on titles (Director of Services and Director of Training report to VP Services and Training, for example) and find bosses and direct reports in the also viewed list. Hierarchical levels may become apparent when you look at individual profiles to determine years of experience and previous levels of authority. The profiles also tell you where whether your competitor is promoting and developing from within or whether there are common companies they are hiring from (including your own). By noting such information down systematically, for example on a spreadsheet that includes columns to track such factors as inernal promotion vs. external hire, total years of experience, years of industry experience, experience working at other competitors, you can begin to get a good feel for the organization, its culture and its human assets.

Once you pull together the names and positions, you can also google individuals to find events where they have participated or presented. If the presentation is up on the web, it usually provides good information about the company.

By the way, this level of knowledge of the organization is helpful when you are evaluating potential takeover or merger targets.

— Signed, Product Manager

Getting Information From Legal Filings

Dear Readers

Documents from legal proceedings are usually public records, and more and more of these are now available over the web. If you have a competitor who in the past has filed for bankruptcy, the extensive documents are worth looking through from start to finish to locate great facts that would never surface in a marketing or sales presentation. Be prepared to thoroughly read the document in order to find the gold nuggets. I have been able to find the exact number of a competitor's customers on a given date, and even the exact dollar amount of license fees. This kind of information cuts through all the marketing hype and gives you a clear idea of the real customer base, revenues and profitability at a company.

Lawsuits and other legal proceedings also have filings and documents that are posted on the web. While I might not go so far as to create an account to access certain court records, or use a paying site, I have found it quite helpful to pore over those documents that are available online for free.

Google terms to use would be the company name combined with words such as bankruptcy, lawsuit, plaintiff, or defendant.

Legal documents may also exist that are associated with the names of one of the owners or members of the management team. It's worth digging around to see if any of the documents on individuals turn up pertinent facts about the business. By googling a name and the term contract, I have even stumbled across what looks to be the official offer letter — an employment contract, really — of the CEO of the company where I worked at the time, from the company who offered him his previous job. Knowing the compensation of executives gives you a further window into the scale, strength, and financial stability of a competitor.

I recently came across an intellectual property lawsuit that told me that a certain company, portrayed officially as a technology partner of a competitor, was actually being sued by the competitor for improper use of the competitor's intellectual property. A simple public document listing all the parties to the lawsuit (combined with a site showing the ownership relationships between all the companies involved) helped me understand that the technology partner was probably siphoning off an entire segment from the competitor's prospective business.

Again, the type of facts you get from legal documents cut through the marketing hype and the exaggerated and non-verifiable numbers that appear in sales presentations.

— Signed, Product Manager

Information On the Purchase Price of a Company

Dear Readers

If a competitor has been purchased by another company, and the purchasing company is publicly held, then you can get this information from a financial filing with the SEC. You may have to wait until the next annual report, but the purchasing company may include the information in a quarterly or other type of filing as well. I recently was able to get a decent idea of the acquisition price of a company I was investigating through the annual report. The price of the acquired company was lumped together with that of two others, but after understanding the likely value of the other companies, I was able to get a clear estimate. In this case the amount was well below what the acquired company's marketing efforts might have you believe.

Purchases between private companies may also wind up as official transactions available on the web. I would look for matches of both company names and words such as agreement, contract, acquisition, purchase, or transfer.

— Signed, Product Manager

Finding Accurate Pricing Information

Dear Readers

Pricing information is the most zealously protected and confidential of all. While you may be able to get a pal to obtain a quote from a competitor and pass it along to you, that is either a lucky break or unethical behavior, depending upon how you feel about it. Much feedback is available from prospects to give you a general idea of your competitor's prices. For example, you may hear that they came in lower or higher than you, or that their license price was lower but the total was higher than yours once services were factored in.

Here are some ways I have gotten detailed prices on competitor's products:

• For public bids (to federal or state governments, for example), you usually have the right to see all bids submitted once a contract has been awarded. This is well worth the effort by your company to obtain. This is the best way to obtain an apples-to-apples comparison between your pricing and your competitors for the same organization, number of user licenses, etc.
• Internet message boards where users or prospective users swapped information, often very specific, about the prices they were paying. These boards are set up to enable people in the same vertical industry or horizontal function (like Finance) to seek and give advice based on their experience. Often people are asking for technology or software product suggestions. And they may very well discuss price.
• Quotes that took the form of PDF documents posted on the web. (Note to self: DON'T let your company's sales reps post quotes on the web!). This was the full quote, on letterhead, signed, and scanned into a PDF. Believe me, it was worth the time to search and click through to the tenth page of Google results for that one. I found it by searching for license, fee and the product and company names.

— Signed, Product Manager

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