A marketing strategy is only as good as the information on which it is based. Therefore, a well-founded industry, market and environmental analysis is essential. In times of increasing competitive pressure, the observation of competitors is of increasing importance. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM important information on the competition can be collected and made available to the sales and marketing team. With "Sales Literature", documents with information about the competition, such as brochures or price lists, can be uploaded and published. Users can also document and manage competitor profiles. The "Competitor" form contains the most important information about the competition, i.e. contact information, address data, as well as strengths and weaknesses - providing you with a meaningful Dynamics CRM competitor analysis.
Microsoft Dynamics for Sales also offers the option of assigning competitors to a sales opportunity. This can be done either via the "competitor" form or the "opportunity" form. The "opportunity" form contains an area called "competitors". Competitors that are already saved in the system can be attached here or new competitors can be added. In this way, sales and marketing employees can see within the "opportunity" form which competitors are also competing for the favor of this customer. The strengths and weaknesses of these competitors are also visible. This information helps the employee to find better sales arguments.
Next steps for Dynamics CRM competitor analysis
By associating an opportunity with a competitor, employees can see who they are competing against in terms of that specific opportunity - without having to leave the opportunity form! Employees can also see that specific competitor’s strengths and weaknesses – again all within the opportunity form. This information is extremely useful when looking for good sales arguments.
Once a customer has informed himself about products and prices he will take a look at what the competitor has to offer. Should he decide on buying the competitors’ products, one will miss out on that opportunity. For analysis purposes it is important to find out why that lead opted for the competition and how much potential turnover one missed out on. In this case one will mark the opportunity as “lost”. To do so, click on “close” opportunity and chose “out sold” as the status reason. Within the „close opportunity“ action field user can also give in information on the loss of profit and the competitor the customer opted for. Within the description field one can also type in the reason for the customer’s choice. Remember that the loss of profit will automatically be given in by the system if the opportunity field contained information on the estimated budget, price lists and product lists
This information is very useful for future analyses when it comes to adapting the marketing strategy to the constantly changing market and competitive situation. With the analysis functions, you can easily carry out Dynamics CRM competitor analysis, for example to identify the biggest competitor.
For data visualization and thus for the simplified analysis of data sets, Microsoft also offers powerful tools such as Power BI. For more information on the application areas and functions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, please browse our website.
