Understanding which and how many competitors you have can help you on various fronts: you can eliminate the costs for strategies because someone has not had results, you can increase turnover because you notice “unbeaten paths” that must be distinguished from “forgotten cemeteries”, you can have ideas on how your company can do better because you have some parameters of comparison, and you have to be careful not to compare pears with apples.
The following procedures takes Italy as example, and not all countries could reproduce it.
The quickest but least accurate way to figure out the quantity of customers is to look up your SIC code in, for example, company registry. We can try using the importXML function of google spreadsheets to load company name, city, turnover, but as pointed out elsewhere, that function, if used in more than a number of cells, gives problems. In fact, the spreadsheet template I created, which you can copy and modify with your industry code if you wish, has problems.
We can extract the data from that page with fewer problems using the free version of Octoparse. By doing that we have quantities of companies, turnover. You don’t do much with it, because even if you add up all the turnovers, you get a misleading market capitalization. Which you could still get from the summary page from the spreadsheet or the page itself.
Why not precise? Because like all classifications or taxonomies, not necessarily those who have the same SIC code as you do the same things as you. For example, there is no exact SIC code for those who do Turkish catering. Or those who do statistical programming only with the SAS language and therefore address a super niche. In the latter case, you can find up to 4 different SIC codes. In fact, other SIC codes can be your direct competition. This is why I prefer a semi-automatic approach to find competitors. However, you also risk finding “noise” of indirect competition.
If you search google or maps.google.com for a description of your company in up to 5 words, you will find companies that are much closer to you in terms of job description. By opening their website, if they have one, you can confirm this. At that point you can use their VAT IN to automate the extraction of some of their data, such as those mentioned above. Other quantitative data: from the Chamber Office site , if you enter the VAT IN of a competitor, you can see the number of employees. If you divide its turnover by the number of employees, you get an interesting indicator, which at this point you can compare with what you find on dati.istat.it (your national bureau of statistics), by going to Economic Results of Enterprises -> Performance Indicators-> Turnover -> clicking on variables in the table, selecting on “turnover added per employee 2nd quartile” (or median)
This indicator gives you two comparison meters: one towards the competitor, the other towards the aggregate of the SIC code. Obviously in the first case it should also be weighted for the years of activity, total number of employees. If it is higher than yours, their site could give you some clues as to why, especially if they have a blog. If it is lower, it is probably a company that still works a lot through paper. As you can see, quantitative research (numbers) and qualitative research (texts) merge.
Collecting competitor turnover data allows you to build a historical series, which in aggregate allows you to understand whether the market is growing or not. This cannot necessarily be confirmed with the macro ATECO code. That is why the above, manual search allows you to have a more selective look. If the market is not growing, it can become painful to make certain types of investments (advertising investments deserve a separate discussion) unless we can show that your company’s results turn out to be linked to market trends.
Other qualitative data to add to the competitors’ report: have they been advertising? If yes, do they continue to do so? If no, how much did they spend before they stopped? If they spent more than two cents (an unfortunately common situation), and they stopped, you’ve probably discovered a strategy that ended up in the graveyard.
What do their reviews say? Do they come only from employees/staff? Is there a common theme in that of customers, either positively or negatively? If you don’t have the negative themes, you have a communication cue to increase your revenue.
Based on their website, blog, how similar do you think they are to what you offer? Legend has it that there are at most 10 competitors, meaning very similar to us.
Is there anything that differentiates them from what you offer? Do you observe anything in particular? For example, a competitor of mine has a voice that I really like. These last free texts deserve a separate column in the overview, which you would lose with a purely automatic approach. Not even a statistical linguistic model (LLM, like GPT) can help you on this front, because it does not have your “eye” (and ear) and training it would become an extremely risky investment.
For very particular companies, there are very particular quantitative fields: how much money did your competitors raise to be able to start? Or how many capital partners do they have? Or how many shareholders?
If you see that most of them had significant sums to start, know that the so-called “bootstrap” (getting the company up with your own strength) will probably make you spit blood.
For other particular fields, you need companies that do market research. Because they can access data at a lower cost.
If you are interested in doing such research and enhancing it together with someone who works with you, we can get in touch for a free initial call.