Amidst fast-evolving and dynamic markets, evaluating and analyzing your competitors’ moves has become the foundation for any business strategy. Those responsible for driving sales growth across markets constantly seek to understand their rivals’ route-to-market (RTM) strategies. This article explains the need for and advantages of carrying out this exercise.
Owing to a lack of insight and visibility into customer needs and the competitive environment, sales leaders often find it difficult to discern effective routes to acquire customers and increase market share. This leads to reduced efficiency of sales and operations teams, increased risks and workloads. The result? Sales teams are found running headless without proper direction into where to target their efforts for maximum ROI. Here’s where analyzing your competitors’ route-to-market strategies comes in. It helps sales leaders accomplish two very important goals:
Understand various customer acquisition approaches in your market
In a complex market, identifying the best approach to reach target customers can be daunting. Also, depending on the kind of product/service you are selling, the dynamics of your distribution channels would differ. A competitive RTM analysis can provide answers to questions like:
- Which customer segments are your rivals targeting?
- What are their pricing strategies?
- Which channels are they utilizing and how effective have they been?
- Which partners, vendors, or suppliers they work with to improve market penetration?
- What is the competitor’s messaging at each step of the customer journey?
Identify gaps in your route-to-market strategy
Once you have a granular view of your competition’s route-to-market strategies, the next step is to compare your approach with theirs. Conducting a GAP analysis will help:
- Identify areas for differentiation
- Uncover new and effective sales and distribution channels
- Evaluate differential aspects in sales and operational structure: either positive or negative
- Align your sales strategies for a more focused approach
A successful RTM strategy focuses on the right customers, is innovative, and aligns your organization’s offerings with the target customer’s needs. It clearly defines the focus customer, sales channels, value proposition, and messaging. A targeted route-to-market strategy further enables to optimize cost allocation processes for sales and distribution, aids in customer retention and generates higher revenues.
To provide customers with distinctive value while increasing profit margins, firms need to first glean the most lucrative channels to meet them on. A unique value proposition and innovative messaging will be crucial in keeping them hooked.
But in highly complex and competitive sectors, uncovering features that set yourself a class apart can be quite challenging. One of our clients in the Telecom industry wanted to know how its top three rivals were increasing their sales. It sought in-depth insight into how their competition was maneuvering the market in terms of:
- Sales and discounting strategies for customer acquisition and retention across geographic tiers
- Value proposition and communication for target customer segments
- Channel-based partnerships for cost-optimization and to deepen market penetration
- Prioritization of resource allocation based on anticipated business goals
- Efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability of each route-to-market
A competitive RTM analysis provided the telecom major visibility into these aspects and more. A GAP analysis helped them further uncover untapped customer concerns and map them to their lesser-known strengths to formulate a distinctive value proposition for various target segments. Armed with these granular-level insights into their rivals, the firm’s sales force could discern exactly the customers to go after, with razor-sharp messaging across the preferred customer channels.
In a dynamic marketplace, sales teams need to adapt their RTM strategies to fast-changing markets and competitive threats. Netscribes allows them to do so by providing timely and continuous market and competitive insights. As a result, your sales team can spend more time developing new sales and markets than gathering information.
To know how we can offer a deep-dive analysis of your market environment and help support your route-to-market strategy with accurate, reliable, and timely competitive information, contact us.
