Understanding Competitors
To effectively sell products and services, you must be able to demonstrate to potential customers why an organization's products and services are better than those of competing organizations. To accurately compare an organization against the competition, you must have an understanding of the products and services the competitors provide, their pricing structure, and their business processes.
Using the Competitor Find Browse program (P90CA061) and the Competitor Detail program (P90CA060), you can track information about competitors. You can attach products to competitor records, and enter information about those products, such as the competitor's price, shipment policies, special product features, or known defects and issues. When you enter a competitor into the system, these tables are updated:
F90CA060
F0101
F0111
F0116
F0115
F01161
F01151
F90CA06A
You can also associate a competitor with sales opportunities with which they might be involved. This enables the sales representatives to know who they are competing against when working on a sale. You can then view the pipeline for the competitor. The pipeline gives you an at-a-glance view of the potential revenue that is associated with the sales opportunities in which the organization is competing with a specific competitor.
Lastly, you can use category codes to enter and track information that is specific to the organization's needs. Because the type of competitor information that an organization might want to track varies greatly, we provide you with thirty user-defined category codes that you can configure to track information that is specific to the organization, and the competition. For example, you might want to track how long the competitor has been in business, whether the competitor attended specified marketing events, or if there are internal employees who have worked for the competitor. You can use category codes to track all of this information.