Competitors
Microsoft has done a good job of integrating the need to track data about competitors with the need to track where you are seeing your competitors and how successful you are as you confront them.
Competitor records, pictured in Figure 7.15, can be set up under the Sales area of Microsoft CRM. With respect to Competitors, Microsoft CRM enables you to track
Key high-level data points
SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)
Opportunities where you are competing against the Competitor
Your Products that compete with those of your Competitor
Your Sales Literature that can be used to compete against your Competitors
Notes and Attached documents providing further information on your Competitors
Additional, custom fields added through system customization
Figure 7.15. The Competitors screen.
Because you can associate Competitor records to Opportunity records, you can easily see who your competitors are on an Opportunity-by-Opportunity basis. Likewise, you can also see all Opportunities where you are competing with a given Competitor. Perhaps most useful is the ability to group all information about each Competitor in a single area. For example, you can attach documents related to the Competitor directly to the Competitor record in Microsoft CRM.
One thing to consider when setting up Competitor records is that Competitors don't always come in the form of companies competing directly in your market space. It is just as easy to face competition from your prospect's internal resources or budget shifting to another priority. Consider setting up Competitor records for non-traditional competitive factors such as these.
If there were one thing we could change about the way Competitors are handled in Microsoft CRM it would be the inability to denote which Competitor won an Opportunity. Of course, you can always add a custom field at the Opportunity level to do this, but it would be nice to have an intersection between Opportunity and Competitor to define the outcome of the Opportunity.