Write a Competitor Analysis Report in SmartSuite (Free Template)

When you're trying to evaluate where you want your offers or business to go, doing a competitive analysis can be a helpful tool for your toolbox. A competitive analysis is just doing some deep dive research into who else can solve the pain that you are trying to solve. The people who can solve that pain could turn out to be competitors or collaborators, but either way, they are in your marketplace and something you should be aware of if you're trying to develop your next whatever it is. Now, this concept of a competitive analysis report is something you're probably already familiar with, but if you're like most people, including myself, who's familiar with this term, I'm guessing you heavily rely on spreadsheets to make these competitive analysis reports possible. While there's nothing inherently wrong with spreadsheets, there is some challenges that come to making those spreadsheets actually something you can research as a group on and reference later on. The fact is, just earlier this year my team here at ProcessDriven did some competitive analysis. We put all the info in a spreadsheet and you know what happened after that? Nothing. The data is in a spreadsheet, but I don't think anyone has opened it or edited or did anything with it ever since that time. Today I'm going to be doing a tour of SmartSuite and their competitive analysis template that allows you to track all of the information around your marketplace, put it inside the tool you already use, and make it super easy to reference and relate back to when you're doing your day to day work. So your competitive analysis is isn't just a static report, but it's a living and breathing area of your workspace that can evolve as you and your marketplace does do. Yeah, to install this free and easy to use competitive analysis template, the first thing you're going to want to do is sign up for your free SmartSuite account so we have a link in the Description. Thank you SmartSuite for sponsoring this channel and also giving you guys an extra discount if you contact them after checkout. Once you have your SmartSuite account set up, we are ready for step one of our template installation process which is going to be creating a new solution using their handy Dandy template. You can find this by going in here, clicking plus, clicking Start with Template and selecting through the search bar the competitive oh Competitur Analysis template right here. When you find this template you can go ahead and click Use. This is totally free and included in your SmartSuite account whether you're on the free plan or not. Go ahead and click Use Template. When you click this, it will load into your account and give you a space to start customizing this to your own component competitive landscape. Before we go into step two of actually customizing this overall area, let's just do a quick tour of the competitor analysis template in SmartSuite. I should say that no matter what tool you're using, the same kind of practice will apply. But for our SmartSuite users who use that affiliate link below and support our sponsor today, you're going to find this super handy to just get up and go with very few clicks. You'll see how quick the customization goes. Let's just do a quick tour first. Here Inside our competitor analysis solution we have three apps. Each of these apps is like a database for a different type of information that we are tracking using unique fields. If I open up one record on this first competitors app, I could see details around the health habit competitor. So this is a company name and we track all of the information around that company inside this record itself. As you can see just from this example here, the default fields and the prompts that they have here are kind of geared more towards the tech and startup space. Depending on what exactly your business does, you might want to customize some of these fields. For example, funding round and total raise may not make sense if you're primarily working in a private space, but you could do something like niche or target audience or years that they've been in business, whatever those things are. You can edit and customize your fields directly from this record view here. So for example, if I wanted to add a new field such as the founding date, I could go in here and do a date, add the date field and call it founding date. Here we can see that added, we can choose how it is displayed. We'll do this one here and we will add that field in whatever fields are going to make sense for your business. You want to factor in here, especially if they're criteria that determine whether or not someone will work with you or where someone is positioned in the marketplace. So that's our general area inside the analysis area. We might also want to make some edits. If this was my account here, I'd want to modify this field to not be a text area which is just typing, but instead create this as a smart doc. This will give us more formatting, allow us to easily make some beautiful hyperlinks and just make things a little bit easier to look at as well as giving us more space. However, this is our competitors app in a nutshell. When we look inside of each of these competitors here, we can find more details filling in the same fields that we created in the first one. Inside this competitors area we come default with a few views to allow you to see things in different ways. We'll talk more about cleaning this up later on depending on what you want to see, but just some different options for allowing you to organize where things are actually at. Now beyond competitors we have Feature Comparison. This feature comparison app allows us to highlight general and specific things between our offers and services versus others and see how we measure up. Some common things to put here would be things like branding, reputation, value, pricing and so on. You could also put specific features on this as well. Say you're doing a SaaS product and you want to see who has the better scheduling feature. You could have scheduling as a feature on this comparison. So by way of example, let's dive inside recurring order function and see how our recurring order function stacks up to planties. So if we look in here we can see our feature name is recurring order function. That's what we think about it. In our orbit the feature that the competitor has is what they call product subscription. Kind of the same thing, but good to have those two different terminologies spelled out in case we need to Google search this or stalk Planty's documentation. Over here in the side we specify which competitor we're comparing ourselves to for the purposes today. So we could switch between any of the other options we had in our other database because this is a linked record field that is connecting the two together. So you can see all of our values from the other app showing up here almost like a fancy dropdown. In this case we're comparing just to Planty. Below this we have score us versus them. How well are we doing compared to them now? I think for me at least this is a little bit of a confusing field name because it's not clear who you're scoring. Are you scoring them? Are you scoring us? So what we're going to do is go to modify field settings and we're going to add some help decks, some informative tooltips and or subtitles to let us know what exactly this means. So in this case I'm going to write up the following help text and I'm going to put it below the field name. So it's super in my face. You might not need this, but I'm someone who gets a little bit of mixed up with those kinds of details. So I just want to clarify this for my future self. We can See right here how that help text shows up in this case right below as a little subtitle and it makes it clear for me what the heck this is referring to. Below here we have comparison summary. This is where we can write some of the information as to why they got the score they did. What did we find? What's the research? All these general things are going to go right here in the comparison summary. Below this we have follow up task. This is an intersection once again inside this record. But here we have checklists. So these checklists give us a space to keep track of how we will take action on our findings. Remember at the beginning where I said how competitive analysis can be great and then it's ignored? Yeah. By having follow up tasks here you, you can delegate out responsibilities for re reviewing, making changes and just kind of keeping on top of this competitive analysis area. Data does us no good if we don't make time to actually review and learn from it. And so this follow up tasks area is our opportunity to take specific actions, whether that's adding ideas into our product backlog, signing up for their own program so we can find out more about what we've got going on, or all sorts of other things. To view all of the example action items in this template, be sure to install SmartSuite. Install the template and explore it for yourself. Now, the last thing I'll say about this overall feature comparison area is this connection up here is what drives the connections we saw in the last app. Okay, so let me go back for a second and show you. If I click on Health Habit and I go back over to that record and I scroll all the way down to features, do you see this? Remember how I said this would make more sense later? Yeah. This is just showing us the rollup or the summary of all connected features. So all of those features we have in app number two, any ones that are connected to Health Habit will show up in this section right here under Key features using the Linked Record field. Notice you can also see some key fields from this overview area, such as what action items need to be completed and how far along they are. I could add more features from this view and I can even expand this area to see in greater detail all of the different key features that are connected while getting rid of all of the other noise. That's how the featured comparison app connects to the competitors 1. If that seems a little tricky to you, don't worry about it. When you install this template, you don't have to set up anything on your behalf. It's all right in there. All you really need to do is just click on this little plus and connect them. Pick whichever one it is. That's all you need to do and you are good to go. At this point though, I don't think there's too much more we need to talk about on this feature comparison area. You can break down your views just like you can Everywhere else in SmartSuite by whatever layout suits your brain. The powerful thing here is that we're able to connect everything together and have one area for all of the data that directly connects to where we drive action. When we assign out these action Items inside of SmartSuite, we know that those tasks will directly show up inside someone's my work task list for the day. They don't have to remember to go look at the spreadsheet. Nothing. It just shows up and it says, hey, take action. Making it much easier to keep this competitive analysis actually front of mind versus having it in some kind of far off spreadsheet that no one checks. The last app we have is Market Landscape and here's where we're going to want to define the major sectors in our marketplace and put our competitors into them. Okay, so those sectors might be what you see here of personalized nutrition versus plant based supplements. Or it could be something more like delivery vehicle. You could have your done for you people, you're done with you people, your coaching and training people. It could be local, regional, national chains. However you want to break things up for your business. This Market Landscape will give you a space to do this. Now the default view here for Market Landscape is to show all of the different sectors grouped by the competitor. So if Health Habit was in three different sectors, they'd all show up under this Health Habit Habit sector. Likewise, if Planty was in a few different sectors, it would all show up under there and so on. Personally, I don't find this view or this connection or layout too helpful because it reminds me a lot of what we already have in the competitors view. So for me, and what I would recommend for you is actually deleting this view here and focusing in on the second view that's already laid out, which is Market Landscape listing. This essentially shows you in a nice consolidated grid view I all of the sectors, all of the categories those sectors have and which company is in which one. What I like about this is it makes it very clear what each sector is and we're focused on sector above company. If you want to make these groupings more pronounced, if you have a lot of sectors Grouping by that sector can be a nice choice too, especially if you keep it collapsed so those sectors are tucked away and you just open the ones you need to see. Generally speaking, a smartsuite is pretty snappy, but by having that collapsed option right here, you're going to make sure that this particular view loads super fast and you can find exactly what you need without loading a bunch of unnecessary information you're not looking for. To just show you around the details of this sector area, we have some default fields you've already seen from the overview, such as sector categories in the sector, description of the sector and opportunity areas, what things you see might be changing in that sector. You may also find it helpful to expand beyond just opportunities, depending on what tools and what frameworks you're using for your competitive analysis. Finally, at the bottom of this section we see another Linked Record field. By now you are super familiar with these, I bet, but this is just connecting us back to which company we're talking about. So which company is in this space? Which one's a leader in this space? We want to make sure we make that link right here. Notice I do have the option here to add all of them if perhaps all of these competitors were in this given arena and it would show up like so inside this view here. Oh man, that was a lot, wasn't it? Yeah, sorry about that. I wanted to make sure you had all the details. So if you are someone who needs me to go through these things a little bit slower and break down some of these SmartSuite features we more so glossed over today. Head up here and check out our playlist all about SmartSuite so you can learn more about the key features that roll in to this template here. But for the rest of you, we are ready to finally finish the implementation of this template by going on to step two, which is remove demo data. This is a super fast one, which is good because I spent a lot of time on the first step. What we're going to do is go up to our solution settings here and click Delete it to delete all demo data. When you do this you are going to lose all of the records that are in there, but give you space to add your own records and customize these fields based on your own needs. So what we're going to do is go in here and click Delete it, delete the demo data and voila, we've got a nice empty account ready for us to add our own information into. Speaking of which, that brings us to step three. We're finally cruising now step three of using this competitor analysis template is going to be to add your competitors into it. You might also want to add your market landscape and features here, but I think at a bare minimum we want to get our competitors in here. So we're going to go ahead and click new record in this given area and we're going to call this chaos driven. ProcessDriven's our enemy and we're going to fill out as much information as we possibly can, add what analysis we need to do here, and click save. This will add this competitor into our area. If I'm someone that does not use the VC fields that are in here, I might also choose to delete or reuse these at this time. So for example, I might delete the funding round, which is not relevant to me, and delete the total raised because that's not relevant to me either if I'm in the private sector. Well, not private sector, but the non venture backed sector. There we go. Save. Given that, I'm also going to delete this view about funding rounds because that's not very insightful to me as someone who's not looking at funding rounds. Here we go though. We have Chaos Driven right here, ready to start going. I'm going to repeat the same process for the feature comparison and the market landscape. I'm going to fill in what features I care about most to compare myself to. I'm also going to fill in what are the major sectors I'm competing in. And when I'm done, I should have a fully populated app in each of these areas to let me get ready for the next step. Once you have a lot of these areas filled out, it might look something like this where you've started to fill in some of the notes. This will take time though, which, you know, competitive analysis stuff does. Now, as our final step of our competitive analysis journey, we want to find a way to get this information in front of other people, even if they're not assigned action items. One way to do that in the old method of using spreadsheets would be to create some kind of time consuming PowerPoint that once again no one would ever update. Rather than doing that though, we can actually use the features built into this template to allow us to visually represent our information without without having to export it and keep a whole other PowerPoint up to date. The way we're going to do that is by using views which SmartSuite has already drafted for us in some of these areas. When it comes to creating these kinds of reports and Views. There are generally two stakeholders we want to keep in mind. First are internal team members, folks that we want to be able to find this information but don't necessarily need to be responsible for creating it. To share these areas with your teammates, your colleagues, and so on with we can go up to our overall solution permissions and make sure that our teammates have access to this solution. You might want to give them full access, or slightly less than full access where they can just view information instead. If you don't want to give access to the entire solution in SmartSuite, but you just want to dive in on one particular area, you can also choose to do that by adjusting permissions at the app level instead. For example, maybe I want my whole team to be able to see competitor analysis, but only the people on our product team to be able to edit the feature comparison area. I can do that right here by having some people have full access and some be comment only. Beyond these layers here, we also have the ability to hide certain fields from our team for some reason. If we don't want them to see the feature name, we could do that here. And we can also hide certain views from our team if we don't want to confuse people. Generally speaking, that wouldn't be the case for competitive analysis, but you do have those options in case there's some sensitive information that may not be appropriate for all viewers. Now, beyond your team though, there's also a second category of stakeholders that may care about this competitive analysis information. I'm talking outsiders, your potential investors, your bankers, your consultants, folks that you have that are not Maybe inside your SmartSuite account, but who want to learn and see the information you're working on. For those folks, how we want to accomplish this step is by creating publicly viewable areas in SmartSuite. To do that, all we need to do is go to a view that that has a Share View button. Not all view types at the time of recording are compatible with this public sharing, but when you see one such as this, you'll see this little icon right here. When you click on this icon, you'll have the option to get a shareable link for a particular view. This will allow someone to go to this link and see all of the information that's visible subject to the settings you choose here. Once we have all of this set up, we're going to toggle on the share view. That'll cause a little yellow icon to show up here and in the view settings itself. And when we actually go to that view in a new tab we will see exactly what our external stakeholders have. So here I'm going to type our password, click Enter and I can see this view here. Anytime you have a stakeholder who wants to stay up to date on SmartSuite information in nearly real time, but maybe doesn't have the level of commitment or desire to go into SmartSuite every day. Maybe because they're just a mentor or consultant or some kind of external stakeholder that's not in the weeds. These public views can be a great way to go about doing that. As our final step of this overall competitive analysis set up here, make sure you create either these public views or just share areas with your internal team members to make sure that you have the right way of reporting on and seeing your competitive analysis. All of the options I've demonstrated in this section are going to be updating in real time, so no worries about exporting and having version 1, version 2, version 3. All this will stay in sync to ensure whoever's going to the link or going to the destination will see exactly what is the most up to date info. So, long story long, if you are someone like me who has been in the bad habit of using spreadsheets for all of your competitor analysis and brainstorming, it's time to make a change. Use the free Competitor analysis template inside of SmartSuite. We'll put a link below to sign up for SmartSuite with our affiliate link so you can get that free template. And once you are inside a tool like this, ditch those spreadsheets, ditch those PowerPoints, make competitive analysis something you can do and continually learn from, rather than some kind of artifact that you spend lots and lots of hours on and then just leave it to collect dust. Preaching to the choir here, I know. If you have any more questions about SmartSuite or how to get through the learning curve, please do drop me a comment and check out the link to our how to SmartSuite training course inside the description below. But otherwise, if this is all feeling pretty good, be sure to check out this video. Next, where I'm going to go over some key features inside of SmartSuite that you can combine with this template to allow you to get through all the things I just showed you a little bit faster and a little bit more efficiently. Thanks so much for watching. Thanks SmartSuite for sponsoring this video and until next time, enjoy the process.