Competitor Products

This function is used to maintain a watch over the competition and provide an operational benefit to the sales team during negotiations and the quoting process.

As and when available, by obtaining competitor information from the commercial relationships/press articles/benchmark studies, the product or marketing teams can load items of information that over time will constitute a veritable market knowledge database for use on a daily basis.

Prerequisite

See also Refer to documentation Implementation

Screen management

 

Chrono 

This field is by default associated with an automatically functioning sequence number counter. Consequently, the user should not normally concern him/herself with its contents.

Site

This field identifies the site which will mainly manage the updates of the information relative to the competitor product in question.

Tab General

Brand

Depending on the market nature, this field contains either the competitor brand name or the name of the company that markets the product. This is one of the Miscellaneous table 415 values.

Reference

This field contains the precise reference of the competitor model corresponding to a level of product line and the characteristics likely to be equivalent to one or more of the company's products.

Description

This field contains the current commercial name of the competitor product.

Average selling price

This field must contain the average selling price either directly by the manufacturer or by their distribution network to its normal customer base. A currency must accompany the entry of this field in order to allow the valuation of the amount.

Description

This field must contain a summary description of the standard characteristics of the competitor product.

Tab Characteristics

This tab is used to enter the summary description of the strengths and weaknesses of the competitor product with respect to the company's equivalents.

Tab Competitor for

This tab is used to enter the product(s) extracted from the database that could be considered as competing with the current competitor product.

These associations can be carried out in two ways:

From the competitor product records, it is possible to associate the corresponding product records (current case).
From a product record, it is possible to associate competitor product records.

The list of associations can be viewed either from the product objects or the competitor products depending on the desired view.

Error messages

In addition to the generic error messages, the following messages can appear during the entry :

A currency must accompany the average selling price.

This message appears when the user confirms the creation or the modification of a product record containing an average selling price and where no currency code has been entered.

This product has already been entered.

This message appears when the user attempts to associate the same product more than once with the competitor product.

Tables used

See also Refer to documentation Implementation