June 6, 11:52 am
Investigate your industry competition, but please—use some tact
Most every marketing guru will tell us we need to investigate our competition (Tim Berry has a good article on this at Entrepreneur.com). One common recommendation is to shop your competitors. When you’re doing the shopping, that seems fine. But when you’re getting shopped, well, it’s kind of annoying.
As a business owner I get shopped from time to time, but never with the boldness displayed in an email I received the other day.
First a quick bit of background: My focus is Train the Trainer – teaching trainers to be at the top of their game, and teaching managers to be more effective by thinking more like trainers (example: my upcoming workshop on this).
I’m also creating an entire online Train the Trainer course so individual managers or trainers who can’t travel / can’t afford to bring me to their company can still get the training they need. This is a cutting edge product that’s getting a LOT of interest.
So yesterday an email arrived with the following request:
Please send detailed outlines of all your TTT courses.
I get many similar requests, but this was from a competitor! Usually when someone shops me they get a little creative. This one was just plain bold.
I don’t know about you, but if you were a business college and you received a request from another college saying Please send detailed outlines of all your business courses, you’d probably respond with something like “buzz off.”
So you know, I called the company, clarified they also provided Train the Trainer, and then described the email. The person acted surprised. (LOL) I told her that if they wanted to collaborate on something I’d be happy to talk, otherwise they should not expect any outlines of my courses.
The woman took my number and told me she’d have her boss contact me.
I haven’t heard anything yet .… and doubt that I will.
Bottom line, research the competition. But use a bit of tact when you do it. Tim Berry’s article has some very good suggestions.
Filed in Work, Business, Training, Management, Sales, Leadership, Selling, Workplace, Train the Trainer, Corporate Culture
Thanks Dan, this is an excellent follow-up to my piece that you cite.
At least you caught it when the blatant “what were they thinking?” request for detail came in from your competitor. I wonder how often these things go in a company to somebody in sales who just answers them automatically, without realizing that this is a competitor going over a line.
Tim