Note: This article is based on a lightly edited transcript of a video conversation. The language has been kept conversational to preserve the speaker’s original tone and flow.
This blog explores how to create and use a competitor tracker. It may seem like overkill at first, but once you see how it helps you stay ahead, you’ll realise it’s worth the effort.
The truth is that a competitor matrix is an incredible source of insight. It can help you make informed decisions, validate gut feelings, and empower your sales strategy.
So why track your competitors? Why collect competitor intelligence at all? The simple reason is that everything around you, your clients, your competitors, and the market itself, is constantly changing. This includes market trends, environments, people, systems, and technology.
In today’s world, where things evolve at breakneck speed, it’s critical to stay ahead and understand the real impact these variables have on us, our clients, and our competitors. That’s why collecting as much intel as possible is so important.
As salespeople, we’re uniquely positioned to do this. We’re in constant conversations with customers, whether in diagnostics, discovery calls, solution presentations, or at conferences and events. We’re always receiving information about the market, the competitive landscape, our clients, and our competitors.
The challenge is finding a way to capture all of that information and store it in one place where it can be put to meaningful use. And that meaningful use is key because it helps you preserve and grow the value you deliver to your clients and to yourself.
The Value Concept in Competitor Intelligence
Our role as salespeople is all about collecting information to enhance the strategic decision-making process.
When we collect that information, our goal is to figure out how best to position ourselves so we can showcase our value wedge.
In a competitive market where everyone looks the same, sounds the same, and uses the same messaging, how do you actually differentiate yourself? That’s exactly what the value wedge helps you do.
Collecting competitor information enables you to ask: How can we reposition ourselves? What can we do differently to truly showcase our uniqueness? Not just on paper or a website claiming, “we’re different,” but in a way that is meaningful to clients and prospects. That’s ultimately the end goal of collecting all this competitive information and maintaining a tracker.
The key to value lies in focusing on what the client or ideal client really cares about. What will help them decide whether to stay with you or move to you from a competitor? That value wedge is what drives change.
Parity, on the other hand, is something we don’t want to focus on. Not because it’s unimportant, it’s essential, but it’s also where everyone looks and feels the same. These are the table stakes: what clients and prospects already expect you to deliver.
Value is always in the eye of the client. The better you understand their perception of value, the easier it is to uncover it and play it back to them in a compelling way.
Connected to this are value drivers. Value is the only thing that motivates prospects or clients to move from where they are to where they want to be. Whatever their current situation, if you can show them a better future and the value they can derive from it, you give them a compelling reason to act. Without that reason, they’ll stay where they are.
So how do we capture all this? The best way is through a tracker by gathering the intelligence we collect in conversations every day. By analysing that market intelligence (including loss information), we can inform the rest of the business about the direction we need to go:
- What product development might be necessary
- How to improve our service
- What clients and prospects are thinking about that we may not have considered
This isn’t just about repositioning ourselves against competitors. This data and intelligence can inform strategy across departments, marketing, product development, and beyond. It ensures we continue supplying solutions aligned with where our clients and prospects are heading.
And this is more important than ever for competitor segmentation.
Right now, everything seems to be about AI. You’ve probably noticed how much marketing copy sounds identical, generated by ChatGPT or another large language model. Everyone has the same polished websites and landing pages that say all the right things.
In that environment, the intel you gather from real conversations with real people becomes even more valuable. That’s why this process matters so much.
Four Stages of the Competitor Tracking Process
There are four stages to the competitor map and tracking process, and each one will be explained in detail.
A spreadsheet can also be used to capture all the information. It may seem old school, but the advantage of a spreadsheet is that it can be easily recreated in a shared folder on Google Drive, SharePoint, Excel Online, or any platform the team uses. The key is that it must be accessible to everyone and open for contributions to analyse the competitive landscape.
Stage 1: Build Your Competitor List to Understand the Competitive Landscape
Analysing competitor data and conducting a competitor analysis is a crucial part of building a sales growth strategy. Building a competitor list is the first step, and it has two parts:
- Known competitors: Start with the companies you regularly come up against in pitches and client conversations. For example, in market research, even when several products were sold, there were about five or six competitors that consistently appeared. List these first.
- Broader competitors: Go beyond the obvious. Who else is considered a competitor—even if they don’t feel like a direct threat right now? In a market research role, selling into industries like finance, food, government, academia, and technology meant facing smaller, niche competitors in each sector alongside the major players.
By the end of this step, you’ll probably have 20–30 competitors listed. That’s manageable, and the key is to make it as complete as possible. This is why a shared document is so valuable: everyone on your team can add new competitors as they come up. Your sales teams, in particular, are the best source of this information since they’re constantly speaking with clients and prospects.
Stage 2: Research Competitors
Once your list is built, the next step is research. Your spreadsheet should include:
Competitor name
Background and history
USP and focus
Headline product, service, or solution
Performance statistics (e.g., managed service providers often publish their Net Promoter Score on their websites)
Sector focus
Relevant frameworks or certifications (such as government frameworks in certain industries)
Essentially, capture anything related to their positioning strategy, including products, services, solutions, and how they compare to yours.
Stage 3: Deal Analysis
On the far right-hand side of your spreadsheet, track examples of deals you’ve won or lost against each competitor. Ask:
- Why did we win?
- Why did we lose?
- Was it price, service, product, or something else?
If possible, include pricing insights: were they significantly cheaper, or was the decision not price-driven at all? This intelligence is gold.
Don’t be afraid to ask clients directly for feedback when you win or lose a deal. Simple questions like, “What made you choose us/them? Was it product, service, or approach?” can reveal powerful insights.
Stage 4: Analyse Your USP
This is where the value wedge comes in, comparing your USP against competitors to see where you win, where you’re on par (value parity), and where you might be losing. Capturing and maintaining this data ensures you can reposition effectively.
Remember, much of this information already lives in your head or your team’s heads. But if it’s not written down, it’s not helping anyone. Getting it on paper (or in a shared file) means your entire organisation benefits — from sales to marketing to product development.
One extra benefit: this spreadsheet is invaluable for onboarding new hires. When a new salesperson joins, instead of asking, “Who are our competitors?” they’ll have an up-to-date, detailed resource ready to go.
As a leader, encourage your team to keep this tracker updated. When someone says, “We’re up against X competitor, and they do this better,” your response should be: “Great, add it to the spreadsheet with the date and details.”
That’s the key. Consistent, ongoing updates turn this into a living document that continuously strengthens your positioning strategy.
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Segmenting Competition
At the start, it was suggested to collect between 20 and 30 competitors, or however many are on the list. Now, you’ll know there’s a core group of competitors that you come up against more often than not. Every time there’s a competitive pitch or a proposal to submit, you’ll see the same names appearing — those are your Category 1 competitors.
The next step is to add a column to your spreadsheet to rank each competitor. The ranking aims to show similarity to your brand by assigning a percentage. This number can be quantified by combining simple criteria, and that criterion is very straightforward. It isn’t about the service itself, but about how your clients and prospects view you.
Do you offer all of the same products, solutions, and services? If yes, the number should be close to 100. If you provide unique services they don’t, or vice versa, that percentage adjusts down. Naturally, there will be some things they do really well that you don’t offer, and vice versa.
For example, although accountants are generally thought to offer three or four main services, in reality, most accountancy firms provide between 100 and 140 different services.
We rarely see accountants going through that entire list with us, because we focus on those three or four core services. The same applies here: accountants choose to specialise in certain things and outsource or deprioritise others.
So the more we understand who our core competitors are and where we’ll proactively come up against them, the better we can position ourselves. That’s the whole purpose of this exercise: identifying Category 1 competitors. You’ll probably find you have four to eight at most.
Now, there are a couple of additional layers to consider. You might be a locally reliant business, in which case your Category 1 competitors will be the ones closest to you.
The issue today is that technology has made geography less relevant. In the past, being in London meant I only had competitors in and around London. That’s no longer the case. You could be in Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool and still compete directly with London firms by offering the same services and solutions.
The key is to think about size:
- Do you have the credibility?
- Do you have the revenue?
- Do you have the team to support and service clients beyond your local area?
So you need to think about how you measure and compare yourself against each of those competitors. Technology has removed many geographic barriers, so you may find yourself competing with firms across the UK or even internationally.
The second category you want to focus on includes all the smaller competitors — the ones that aren’t direct, but still in the background. You may not encounter them often, but they’re there. Maybe they’re too niche (focusing on enterprise while you serve SMBs), or maybe they specialise in a vertical you don’t target.
Whatever your criteria, segment them. And if you need to, create a third category as a “watch list” of emerging competitors.
Benefits of Maintaining a Competitor Tracker
Over time, as you collect this information, it becomes gold dust. It informs your strategy, your pricing, how you service clients, and even how you segment your service levels. And if competitors suddenly start raising more awareness in the market, you need to be nimble, flexible, and adaptable so you can react.
A great example from experience: in market research, there was one particular product considered extremely valuable. There was also an element of confidence — it was believed to be very difficult to copy. But then technology completely changed the market. What once took hours or days to collect in terms of insight and information has suddenly moved online.
That shift meant a competitor could now use web crawlers to collect the same information automatically. It’s critical to constantly evaluate and review who your competitors are, because you never know where the next competitive threat will come from. The only way to stay nimble and flexible is to keep adding to a tracker like this.
Whenever we do a review, have a conversation, or run a kick-off meeting with a client, we always come back to this tracker. Why? Because it’s a great source of intelligence. If someone is feeling that pain, the more information the team can add, the better equipped we are to develop strategies to overcome challenges with that competitor.
We can also inform senior management, which in turn influences the direction of our products, services, and solutions. It also helps guide what other departments do. So while it may not be the most glamorous topic, it’s an incredibly powerful one that keeps delivering value behind the scenes.
The amount of insight and value it provides for your business and your teams is immense. If you’re not already tracking competitors in this way, with this level of rigour and detail, it is highly recommended that you start, because it truly is a game-changer.
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– Real-world competitive strategy frameworks
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