Tracking your competitors within Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Stuart Haynes, 13 April 2012

One of the features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the ability of tracking your competition.

I have been working on a project recently which needed me to be very aware of what my competitors were up to and decided to utilise this to the full.

It was suggested to me that I firstly build a central base of all our competitors and went to the rest of the sales team to ensure all of our competitors were included in the list.

To add a new competitor to a list is a simple task.

1. In the navigation pane click sales and then competitors
2. On the ribbon at the top of the screen click New

 

3. This is the screen you get, enter the information and click save and close.

Once this list was completed it was a simple task to associate any of those competitors to the project I had been working on.

As this project had multiple opportunities within it, it was imperative that each opportunity had the precise competitor/s associated to it.

As soon as we learnt who was competing we just had to associate that competitor to that opportunity.

1. Open the opportunity or create a new one.
2. On the left click the Competitors link under Sales
3. At the top left hand corner click Add Existing Competitor

 

4. In the Look up Records add any existing competitors and click OK
5. If the competitor is not in the list you can create a New Competitor just by clicking on the NEW button.

Once you have completed these simple tasks it is then easy to enter competitive information as you get it and share it amongst the team.

Needless to say with this information easily to hand we were able to professionally pitch against our competitors with an abundant amount of prior knowledge.

We didn’t win all of the opportunities presented to us but it did educate us in how to approach any future opportunities from now on.