How can you evaluate the competitive landscape in new B2B markets?

Your target audience behaviour is the best thing to understand. If you don't know your audience it will leads to wrong path which end up nothing. That is why user personas are so important. Creating value from your audience needs is going to be good strategy for any business or product. Creating demand of need is going to challenging if you don't know why you are building this product or offering this service. Understanding your end customer is the toughest part for many business because they rush in sales and not spending time to analyse their user behaviour. Don't focus on sales, first focus on needs and give them what they required at the moment.

It’s all about your audience! The B2B market is huge, diverse and fragmented. Understanding them, finding them and who is serving them is key for narrowing down your competition.

Many companies overlook indirect competitors when evaluating the competitive landscape, which can be a costly mistake. Think from the perspective of your prospects—what other approaches or options are available to them? If you help them navigate this (obviously highlighting your unique value), you’ll stand out. Helping is selling.

Applying the 'job to be done' framework is a strategic way to identify and assess competitors in any market. Instead of solely focusing on who your traditional rivals are, this approach looks at the functional or emotional 'jobs' that customers hire products or services to accomplish. By understanding the specific tasks, needs, and pain points that customers are trying to address, you can uncover competitors that might not be immediately apparent. This method encourages a holistic view of competition, allowing you to identify both direct competitors and alternative solutions that customers might consider.

Doing competitor research always fruitful if you are know your right competitors. Find the right competitors is also challenging in which most of business fails to succeed. Either it is direct or indirect, doing competitor research is atmost priority.

Starting with a competitor analysis is a crucial step in evaluating the attractiveness of a new market. My preferred approach is to identify the top competitors and add them to a spreadsheet. The next step is to decide which information is relevant to you (marketing channels, pricing strategy, value proposition, market share, ICP, etc.) and add it to the raws. Market reports, competitors' websites, or tools like SimilarWeb can be used to fill in the gaps. This analysis will give you a comprehensive overview of your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, as well as how you can differentiate your value proposition.

In B2B the status quo is often your biggest competitor. Whether it’s contracts, budget cycles and decision making processes at Enterprise or spreadsheets for SMBs and mid-market, uncovering real pain points and demonstrating how you solve them better is how you break through.

Nobody will opening showcase their weakness but with the help of experts you can find out. And once knowing your competitors strength and weakness will be cherry on the cake indeed. But knowing their USP and making your USP better than your competitors will be game changing for you.

Let's take an example: The T-Shirt Store Scenario SWOT: Action: Scout competitor T-shirt stores. Strengths: On-the-spot custom designs. Action: Highlight & offer promotions. Weaknesses: Off-center location. Action: Enhance online sales/delivery. Opportunities: Town festival ahead. Action: Roll out festival-themed tees. Threats: Major brand's imminent opening. Action: Initiate loyalty scheme or ally with influencers. Value Proposition: Action: Use feedback box & online reviews. Value: Eco-friendly tees. Action: Promote green USP. Customer: Trendy teens/young adults. Action: Refresh designs; work with local artists. Fit: Eco, stylish tees align with target market. Action: Host pop-ups at youth-centric venues.

Join events and network, join LinkedIn discussions, and approach your customers - this will give you first-hand insights about what people like and don´t like. Hint: Crawl through platforms like glassdoor or kununu - often you will find additional insights there. It´s time-consuming - but many times it´s worth the efforts. If you´re into B2C, have a first look at Trustpilot and other review platforms - very valuable insights.

Having an overview of how your competitors position their products and what they are up to is helpful but watch out not to rely too much on that. Monitor the landscape while still making your own choices regardless of what competitors do. Especially if you are new to that specific market, you have the opportunity to set yourself apart by doing things differently, so I would look more at companies that excel in specific areas rather than your competitors.

Ofcourse, monitoring the competitor behaviour is equally important as user personas. But you need more careful about what is your USP and you should not use the same copies on the social media or SEO. You need to be different and unique and also you get the ideas and make it yours by add value in it.

Google Alerts and/ or Feedly are your source of truth for low efforts but great insights. If you need in-depth information, consolidated, researched on specific triggers - a deep dive via secondary research and expert interviews is a great way to stay up to date.

Use this information to create talking points for sales and make sure to create easy communication paths (ie Slack) to get any new info from Sales.

By proper analysis it is become very important to know the strategies and end goal of your competitor and plan your strategy according to that. Analysis help you to avoid mistakes your competitors did and adopting those things which your competitor achieved it.

Having a comprehensive competitor analysis will certainly help you when entering a new market by delivering a general understanding of your competitors’ marketing strategy. However, don't stick to copying what established competitors do - focus on your USPs and experiment with different marketing campaigns to differentiate yourself in the market.

One of the most important things to do besides desk research: talk to your ICP. Make it a common practice to talk to your market and ask what their pain points are, what kind of content they like to consume, what competitors they have top of mind (and why), etc. Soon you'll find out what you need to do to become competitive.

The key here is to understand what problem your customer is trying to solve for THEIR customer and then help them deliver a solution that just happens to involve your product or service. By digging down a level or two in the supply chain, you are no longer just selling a product or service, but you become part of your customers' solution team. It's also important to be very clear on the points of differentiation you offer across the whole transaction process, and not just the product or service. There are many tangible and intangible aspects to marketing one's company in order to develop strategic long term relationships.

Competitive analysis is time intensive and often falls to the bottom of the list of to dos. Do the low hanging fruit like daily alerts to stay abreast of new developments and make it a priority to do a deep dive at least once a year (I aim for quarterly).

To evaluate the competitive landscape in new B2B markets, conduct thorough market research to identify key players and their market share. Perform a SWOT analysis of competitors and gather customer feedback to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Analyze pricing strategies, partnerships, and online presence. Study product differentiation and attend industry events for insights. Stay updated on emerging trends to anticipate competitors' moves. This holistic approach provides a comprehensive view of the competitive scenario.