"Keep your friends close; keep your enemies closer." — Sun Tzu
Burrelle's Press Clipping Bureau was founded in New York City in 1888. For its first century, the service required employees to cut clippings from local newspapers, make copies, and hand-deliver them to clients. In 1984, the fax machine transformed the industry. In 1994, delivery moved to email. By 2007, more than 50,000 publications were being tracked through an online platform. Today, the number of sources is effectively infinite.
What that history illustrates is the dramatic compression of the innovation cycle. What once took a century now happens in five years. Your competitors are moving. You cannot afford to watch from a distance.
That said, your competitors' innovation should never be the sole driver of your own development decisions. For years, our sales team lobbied for features our media monitoring service didn't offer. We chose not to build most of them. In the end, we didn't lose subscribers because of those decisions. Meanwhile, several competitors went out of business trying to maintain feature-laden offerings that diluted their value proposition.
When we entered the D.C. market, I made a point of meeting the heads of every company we might compete with. I developed strong relationships with most of them and turned several potential adversaries into referral sources. The ultimate outcome was a partnership or two — and eventually the sale of our company.
Roadmap Considerations
◆ Get to know your competition's management. It is almost always worth the investment. ◆ Understand the single most compelling value proposition of each major competitor. ◆ Your competition should inform your thinking, but your own client-driven innovation should drive your growth.