With a single glance you can see where your market is.
Matrices are a very popular way to illustrate a competitive landscape because of the perspective they give. With a single glance you can see where your market is, and your place in it according to the criteria.
In this guide, you can learn about different frameworks and get started with provided templates. We are going to order this guide in a simple manner:
Now, there are many ways to show a matrix in this way, but at its core, a matrix is quite simple to visualise. Just like a SWOT analysis, you are spending your time thinking instead of being an artist. Here is an example of a blank SWOT matrix, and don’t worry, we got a link for a full template here.
Looking at the above grid, you can see that we plotted by “Innovation” and “Market Presence”. Based on these, let’s break this into four quadrants and give them some names. Highly innovative companies with a low market presence are niche, but high innovation and high presence are market leaders. This grid is also now broken down into a 1-10 score (10 high), allowing us to apply a score to each rival.
This matrix format is used to show that scoring in Gartner, G2Crowd, Forrester and many other market reports.
You probably heard me harp on this in other articles and podcasts, but competitive matrices, SWOTs, battle cards and other analysis tools are not “achievements to unlock”, these are powerful visualizations displaying research and competitive intelligence that should be kept current all the time. Rival’s “Reports” section does just that, where you can score each of your rivals and have any number of dynamically updating matrices.
Ok, let’s talk about doing your first matrix outside of Rival. Here is a template pack that you can use as a base.
You should do a competitive matrix to visualize:
“…Competitive matrices, SWOTs, battle cards and other analysis tools are not “achievements to unlock”, these are powerful visualizations displaying research and competitive intelligence that should be kept current all the time. “
While a competitive matrix appears simple, it is a lot of research to properly plot the market. Depending on which of the above situations I put together above (as examples of when you should do an analysis), there are different factors to plot.
Plot your win/loss ratio against the number of head-to-head encounters for each competitor. If you win 50% of 4 head-to-head situations, then you have a 5 on the win/loss. You can create an opportunity measure by taking the highest number of head-to-head situations and dividing each number by them. For example, if you have gone head-to-head against someone 23 times, then 2.3 opportunities is the scale for each square on the grid.
Depending on your analysis of features, you can use the Kano model (link) of drivers to evaluate that. For example you can map out innovation and market penetration, or other drivers.
G2Crowd’s reports use satisfaction and market presence based on the reviews on their sites, and Gartner uses “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute” as some of the ones they use. Those are both very valid ways of evaluating competitors, but I prefer to use “Innovation” and “Market Presence”. It allows you to see who are smaller potential disruptors, and also who are the ones closely surrounding you in both innovation and size.
Mapping out the competitive landscape on legacy products vs new products in your pipeline, and visualising the competitive edge of different sectors of your organisation (like customer success) are two final suggestions. Mapping out the competitive landscape of your features and product are often the same in classification. The same is true for mapping our sectors of your business, this can be done the same way as your overall competitive analysis, but with a focus diving down into the context of that specific department. You can also map out multiple factors on the same matrix using colour coding. For example, you can colour code legacy competitors a different colour or to differentiate the size of business (small, mid, enterprise).
“The average time it takes for a company to go from birth to compete with established players is under 3 years.”
To start, review each of the categories and evaluate the following:
We have now mapped out the current position of your business and product, as well as the competitive matrix, we can dive into using that knowledge to determine our “Blue Ocean” or the market space to dominate. That takes place in the next chapter.
To help you get started, we have put together free templates for doing both SWOT and competitive matrix exercises!
Share this article:
