In preparation for my talk next week at CSB, I wanted to share with you one of the simplest parts of a well-rounded analytics solution.. which is to take account for the competition. I talk about this a lot because it’s often one of the most overlooked.

So, lets say we work for an events management company and we are going to set up a training workshop on business analytics. We need to provide our marketing team with some data to help them in their efforts. To help ensure the program will be a success, there are several data points about the competition we can source to see how we stack up in comparison.

First let us look at pricing. How much are we going to charge for the workshop? We need to make money, so first of all we need to account for expenses and determine an ideal profit margin and then set a target ticket price. That’s simple. However are there other workshops out there that offer similar content for a lower price? Or can we raise our ticket price to be more in line with the market?

To get the data we need to survey the marketplace and gather the intel and put in a simple excel file just to see where our desired price points compares. It may take a few hours of calls, web searches and online inquires, but it all pretty much public data and easy to get.

Second, we can look at format. How long is our workshop? How many speakers? Will there be a panel of experts? We can gather these data points at the same time we capture pricing data, so let’s just add a few more columns to the excel file. This way we can see with some certainty about the number of competitors we have and how our workshop will measure up.

To give a different type of dimension to our landscape, let’s look at reputation. So let’s add one more set up columns to capture year established, number of public training offerings a month and number of cities/provinces used. And then add a final column for general notes. The idea here is we are going to add analysis to how credible a competitor they are. We can see who has been around awhile and who is new to the game, who has a narrow scope and who is everywhere. This way we look at more than just raw numbers.

SO, you take your spreadsheet, you fill it out and then you add a row for our own company and then we can see where we rank in each of the categories (columns). It’s not a 100% scientific, but it will give us a good idea of where we stand in the grand scheme of analytics training options out there.

Based on this analysis we can help the marketing team by showing our relative value to attendees as compared to other options. We can distinguish what it is about our format that gives us an edge. And we can advise marketing on what parts of our credibility we want to promote.

For example, a tagline marketing can use based on our data could be something like Join DMAI, the Philippines most well established name in Analytics, for an innovative approach analytics training next month at a very affordable price.

There you go! 🙂