Creating a competitive binder

- One of my favorite tools is the competitive binder. And I've been using a competitive binder for years. Every time I conceptualize a business, I want to start a business, or I actually start a business, I go and I start building a competitive binder right away, because what it does is it gives me a way to assemble lots of competitive information in one place, right? So, let's take a look at our competitive binder, and this is a real competitive binder that I put together. And what I like to do is I like to put different things in the competitive binder as I'm gathering things. So, for instance, packaging information, photos that I might have taken, then also taking screenshots from their website and being able to kind of look down, and deep into the different products. In fact, I organize my competitive binder by individual company. So I take an individual company, and I take a look at their social media, I might take a look at their home page, their product pages, and other things, to glean lots of information. Now, one of the nice things is a competitive binder is a living, breathing organism, so you're going to continue to add information to this throughout your entire business, right? And you're going to reference back to this binder, so it's very, very helpful. A couple things that you can do, in fact, if you don't want to actually print out a competitive binder as I've done here, you can go digital, right? And so there's some tools out there that will allow you basically to do the same thing I'm doing here, but you can do it in a digital format. One tool that I recommend is Evernote's web clipper, and it makes it really easy as you're cruising through the websites, to actually just click a button, and you grab the page, right? And then you can store it off digitally and refer back to it, so it's kind of a nice tool. We'll have that tool, and a link to that tool, on our website as well. What I recommend as you're putting together your competitive binder, you start with picking maybe five to ten competitors, get them on the list, the most important competitors that you want, and then we can start to dive in and take a look. Now when I'm working with my competitive binder, I like to look at, I like to look for certain things. So, one of the things I look for is positioning strategy. What's the positioning strategy, based on what's going on on the website, I can kind of start to tell what the positioning strategy, what's their target market? Who is their ideal customer? Who are they going after? Are they high end, or are they low end? Are they high-priced, or low-priced? What does their social media strategy look like? Do they have any social media strategy? We want to look at all that information, in addition to like their product, I want to see how many products they have. How do they describe their products? How do they show ingredients, in this particular case? What locations do they have? Is another thing that I look for, and I might look for other things like About Us sections. And I start to glean from all of this their strengths and weaknesses as well. I can kind of pick out, "Wow, this seems to be "really strong for them, they really have a great product, "or great packaging," or I might say, "Their packaging is really weak, "it doesn't resonate with me at all." And so I'm going to log all of that information into our competitive grid, which we're going to go through in just a little bit. So now, this gives you an idea, as you put together this binder, of really how to work with your competitors overall. And you're going to love, once you do this, you're going to love this. So other things that I want you to take a look at as you're analyzing your competitors, and really putting together all your competitive information, the first thing I suggest is visit the business, right? So go into the business, actually go and buy something, which is always a good thing to do, talk to the employees there, talk to customers, hopefully you won't get in trouble, or get thrown out, take pictures. Any time that I walk by a store, when I was researching my chocolate business for example, I would take pictures of every chocolate window around the world, any time I saw a window that was selling chocolate, I'd take a picture of it. Talk to customers, see how they like the experience, as I mentioned earlier. Also, observe how they sell. Like see how they interact with you, as well. And then I also recommend that you return something, so that's always important to see how they handle that return process. What level of customer service are they really offering you? And in addition to returning something in the physical store, or a physical experience, you also want to do it online as well, which is really important. The next thing I recommend is actually calling the business. Calling the business and seeing, well, how fast they pick up the phone. How long do you stay on hold, perhaps? And then when they answer the phone, are they friendly, or are they not friendly, what's their attitude? Now I always like to look at how well they're trained, like how knowledgeable are they, right? Ask them some trick questions or some in-depth questions, and see if they actually know the answer, and that will tell you how much money they're really investing in training and investing in their employees. It also might tell you even how long their employees have been there, if they're really experienced, right, which is always a good thing to know. And then look at how they're selling, like how aggressive are they selling, if they're on the phone and they're wanting to sell you something, are they really aggressive, or are they kind of laid back, and they're just kind of answering, and they're just all about helping you and giving you great information, right? The last thing I think you should do is go to a trade show. This is a great way to get all your competitors in one room, and start checking them out. Go to their trade show booth, see how much space they take, right? Even write that down. Do they take a 10 by 10, or a 20 by 20? How much do they spend on graphics? Do they have a really elaborate booth, or is it really kind of a scaled-down and junky booth? And then how do they interact with you inside the booth? Were they really friendly and open, or did they try to sell you really aggressively at the trade show? So look at how all of that happens, how they position their products, all of that. By pulling all this information together, you're really gauging how you're going to really analyze and keep up with your competitors over time. Very important.