August 2010
Competitive pricing research can be difficult when your competitors are B2B companies who don’t list prices for products and services on their websites. To help you complete this research with less effort, look into using the three resources listed below. They may help streamline your research process and uncover the pricing intelligence you’ve been looking for.
If you haven’t heard of the GSA, it’s a federal agency with a program to establish contracts between commercial firms and the government. The contracts allow government agencies to procure products and services at specific pre-negotiated prices listed in the GSA Schedules. GSA Schedules list prices for multiple product and service configurations from your competitors so it provides an exponentially greater amount of data than a “regular” contract.
Use the GSA Advantage site to search for current contracts featuring your competitor’s products. Go to the e-Library tab to access the GSA schedule search function. From there, the advanced search settings allow you to search by category or keywords like product name, manufacturer, contractor, or schedule ID number.
CI Radar specializes in providing competitor intelligence tools for business. Its Document Radar tool provides an alternative to endless Google searches and filters competitive pricing information straight to a personalized dashboard. Document Radar automatically collects and sorts documents by category (i.e. price lists, contracts, etc.) and delivers new documents every 24 hours. It also provides a set of filtering tools to manage search results easily.
Document Radar requires no complex setup beyond providing targeted competitor names to CI Radar. Once the initial competitive intelligence scans are complete, relevant documents are continuously added to your user dashboard. From there, you can easily log in to view competitor documents without wading through the irrelevant results you get from search engines.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) stipulates that anyone can request access to specific non-classified and public record information from government agencies. This means that the FOIA request process can be a golden ticket to copies of your competitor’s bids and proposals for government deals. Be aware that FOIA requests become a matter of public record—so it is possible that your competitor become aware of your attempts to access their pricing information via this method.
Each government agency deals with FOIA requests internally, so you may have to do the legwork to find out which agencies hold the pricing information you’re hoping to access. Pay attention to submission guidelines from the individual agency and if necessary, search for online examples to guide your drafting process. Make sure your request is as specific as possible to expedite the processing of your request. If you find the process to be too daunting, there are consultancies and law firms who offer FOIA request drafting and submittal services.
Take advantage of these resources for competitor research. Don’t let publicly available competitive pricing information remain undetected and out of the hands of your key decision makers.