10 Tips on How to Research Your Competition

rackAID’s Jeff Huckaby was interviewed by Inc. Magazine about how to spy on your competition.

Keeping tabs on your competition is a great strategy for growing your business. Follow these tips, from fellow small business owners, on which tools are best and how to get started. Jeff’s tip is below but check out the full article for more.

9. Conduct a survey. If you’re interested in getting a comprehensive report of all the players in your industry, you might consider conducting a survey. “A year or so ago, I hired someone to e-mail several of our competitors and ask them the same questions about their services,” says Jeff Huckaby, CEO of RackAid, an IT management business in Jacksonville, Florida. “We looked at price, response time, how the sales request was handled, etc. By doing this, we learned how to clearly differentiate our sales process from that of our competition.” While Huckaby says he learned a lot from the process and plans on doing it again, he does have one caveat: “I am a big fan of outsourcing this. You don’t want to run into someone you were spying on at an industry conference.”

Check out Inc.com for more.