Competitive Intelligence is the art of staying one step ahead of the competition by gathering information about their operations. You have to know what they are up to, so I am going to show you how to check out your competitors' products and marketing schemes without them even knowing you are there. In other words, this lesson is about how to spy on the competition without getting caught.

Assuming that you have less than five direct competitors, you should always buy their product to determine their sales process (and service) and get on their mailing list to see future promotions. The relatively small price you pay for their product will pay for itself many times over in the knowledge you gain by finding out what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Some of your competitors may process orders manually and could recognize your name as their competition. Use your spouse's name, a fictitious name, an employee's name, or an alternative company name (if you have another company) that will allow the mail to get to you without revealing who you are. Also, make sure you use an alternative email address and phone number.

I do this with all of my competitors and find out exactly what they are doing, who they are dealing with, and how they are doing it... all by their email and snail mail correspondence.

Also, by purchasing their products you will be able to experience exactly what a regular customer would go through and you can then judge their product, service and operations against yours. This gives a great advantage to all of your customers because you will know the pros and cons of your competition and can more effectively sell your product or service.

Important Tip: You may even want to have one of your employees or friends call your competitor. They could pose as a satisfied customer wanting to see what products or services the company is working on for the future.

Where Do You Start?

An absolute must is to go to http://www.netwatch.ca, it will search for specific keywords (i.e. your personal name, company name, product name... or your competitor's personal name, company name, product name) in over 280,000 newsgroups.

As a side note, we used to recommend Reference.com, which was a great service with a ton of features, and most of all, it was totally free. Their site is now down for an unknown reason, but this should only be temporary. If you want to go with these guys, check their URL whenever you have the chance and see if they have any updates listed.

Another free service which you may have heard of, DejaNews, offers a very limited version of what Netwatch.ca does and what http://www.reference.com used to do. Through DejaNews, you can perform a search for keywords in specified newsgroups to find out if your name, or any other information about your company, is being used without your prior knowledge or permission. This service is a great start, but Netwatch.ca will provide you with the full details automatically (as listed below) without requiring you do to any work whatsoever.

Netwatch.ca will email you within hours of one of those keywords appearing in any of the 280,000 newsgroups on the Internet. This is critical, since you will know exactly what people are saying about you and your other competition within moments of them mentioning it. It gives you the opportunity to defend yourself or solve customer service problems before any damage is done. This is a very powerful tool, so don't take it lightly.

Let me go over three powerful uses for this service:

Imagine anytime a competitor tries to "badmouth" you in any newsgroup or public forum... or even compare your products/services unfairly, within hours you are there to reply to the post and deliver the truth (or your account of the situation).

Now, put yourself in the competitor's shoes. Imagine if anytime you wrote something, your competition was right there - as if they were watching over your shoulder all the time. Wouldn't you be very careful in the future as to what you say... and wouldn't you be dumbfounded as to how your competition was always one step ahead of you?

Remember the old customer service rule... bad news travels ten times faster than good news. One dissatisfied customer will tell ten other people, while one satisfied customer may tell one or none. All it takes is a few postings of dissatisfied customers to lose a lot of business. Can you imagine how powerful it is if you are right there to publicly take care of any customer service problems when a dissatisfied customer posts anything negative about your product or company? This will impress the thousands of people who read newsgroups but don't post on them.

I go out "looking for trouble" and find dissatisfied customers instead of them having to hunt for me. It is so easy that I am astonished no one else is doing it.

Netwatch.ca can also be a great source for sales promotions and an enormous time saver. We talked about promoting your business on the newsgroups by not only posting to them, but monitoring them looking for posts where you can offer your advice and get your SIG file posted as well. You can get Netwatch.ca to do most of this work for you!

For example, if you sell something that has to do with international investing, you could have it search for keywords such as "international", "overseas", "Japan", "Britain", and other countries. You want to search for keywords specific to what you have to offer. If you search for keywords such as "investing" or "financing", you will get thousands of results a day. You want to be very specific to narrow your results to only posts that are potential business for you. Netwatch.ca will email you every time a post is done on that subject. It could be someone asking for advice or giving their opinion… so you have an opportunity to reply and offer your assistance (and get your name, SIG file out there). Or the post you are notified of could be your competition trying to promote something (you can monitor what they are doing). This will save you from scanning the newsgroups daily, and is a BIG time saver!

Let me repeat what happens here (it is that important!). Netwatch.ca can save you the time of scanning through newsgroups daily and alerts you anytime there is something worth replying to in over 280,000 newsgroups online.

Are you starting to understand how powerful this resource is?

You can even go the extent of having Netwatch.ca search for all of your competitors' email addresses on newsgroups. That way anytime your competitors are promoting their products/services or saying ANYTHING online, you will know about it.

You can also pay for "competition" monitoring services. Companies such as:

eWatch MarkWatch

They will monitor domain names, URLs, newsgroups, and websites for activity by your competitors. Both services offer free trials so you can compare them before you commit. But note that you will spend a minimum of $100 per month for this (it can be much higher depending on what specialized services you are interested in). There is a big price difference between these two companies to watch for as well, MarkWatch being the less expensive of the two.

As a side note, there are about 50 websites and resources that will help you investigate and monitor your competition online (including a lot of other neat resources for locating "sensitive" information) that comes with my course. These resources will allow you to find information about your competitors that you would not normally have known about.