Most "competitor analyses" end with a beautiful table nobody opens twice. The problem isn't the table. The problem is that after it, nobody wrote the conclusion: where you're stronger, where you're weaker, and what to do about it.
I build competitor analysis as part of the audit — five parameters on the surface, twenty-plus columns underneath, the rival's funnel read from artifacts, and a mandatory analytical note at the end. Without the note, the table is dead. Below is how to do it yourself, plus a template you can copy.
In marketing and sales since 2008 · Worked at
Open any "guide to competitor analysis". You'll get SWOT, "study their website", "build a 10-point table". You'll build it. Look at it. Close it. Because the table answers "what do they have", not "what do I do about it".
The difference between a dead table and a live analysis is one line at the end. I call it the analytical note. It's not a conclusion like "competitor A is stronger on price, competitor B is stronger on service". It's a position: "at this stage we're in the lower price segment, our land per sqm is below market, our villa per sqm is average. So pushing on price is pointless — our lever is deal speed and guarantee."
The note is born from the table, but without it the table is just raw material in a pile. The rest of this article is about collecting the raw material so the note writes itself.
The mistake I see most often: take "all competitors in the niche" and compare them in one table. In B2B that's meaningless. A player with a $40M check and a player with a $15M check aren't competing — they serve different people, even if they sell "the same villas".
So the first step isn't the table, it's a filter. Two questions:
Define your price segment (lower / mid / upper) and geography. Put in the table only competitors who overlap with you on both. The rest are background, not rivals.
The client portrait sits right in the analysis table, not in a separate document. Gender, age, purchase motive (preserve capital or "for myself"), how many leads produce one personal deal. Without the portrait you can't tell whether a competitor is dangerous: they may be stronger than you in a segment you don't need.
In agro it works the same way: the "Segment" and "Direction" columns (distributor, manufacturer, supplier) come before any USP. First understand where they sit in the chain, then compare.
For the client and the report I package the analysis into five parameters — exactly the ones included in the marketing audit. But behind each parameter isn't one "what they say about themselves" cell, but several columns you actually have to fill. Here's the mapping.
| Parameter (surface) | What you actually look at (columns) | Where you get it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Online presence | Website, social media (VK, YouTube, Telegram, Dzen), company videos, domain ads, marketing tools | Open sources, search, ad archive |
| 2. USP | What they claim about themselves in open sources, slogan, first-screen promise | Their homepage, contextual ads, proposals |
| 3. Positioning | Direction in the chain, segment (price), geography, years in market, headcount, revenue, share, products, private label, price list, catalog | SPARK / list-org, open reports, price lists |
| 4. Channels | Where they advertise, how they sell (own network, agencies, partners), "who they work with" — public clients | Domain ad archive, "clients" section, partner pages |
| 5. Funnel | Payment stages, number and type of forms, how the first screen is built, reaction speed (from open traces) | Walking their site yourself as a client |
Note parameter 5: a competitor's funnel is read from artifacts, not their words. They can write "individual approach", but if the site has one form and no payment stages, there's no funnel — just "leave your contact". Conversely, payment stages spelled out with percentages reveal a mature process no slogan will show you.
Below is the structure I use in real work. Copy it into Excel or Google Sheets. Columns go in the order it makes sense to fill them: facts first (who, where, how much), then claims (USP, slogan), then your assessment (strengths, weaknesses, comment). Add your industry layer on top — for real estate that's payment stages and price per sqm, for distribution it's warehouse and regions.
| # | Column | What you fill in | Data type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Company | Name and legal entity | fact |
| 2 | Direction | Distributor / manufacturer / supplier / service | fact |
| 3 | Website | URL | fact |
| 4 | Geography | Regions of presence | fact |
| 5 | Headcount | Per open sources | fact |
| 6 | Revenue | Latest available year | fact |
| 7 | Market share | Estimate or "—" | estimate |
| 8 | Years in market | Company age | fact |
| 9 | USP | What they claim verbatim, from open sources | quote |
| 10 | Products | What they sell, list | fact |
| 11 | Private label | Own brand, if any | fact |
| 12 | Segment | Lower / mid / upper price | estimate |
| 13 | Social media | Links + active / not active | fact |
| 14 | Slogan | Verbatim | quote |
| 15 | Domain ads | Was / wasn't, per archive | fact |
| 16 | Positioning | Your observation: "product storefront", "expert longread", "pushing scale" | estimate |
| 17 | Marketing tools | What they use: content, mailings, events | fact |
| 18 | Company videos | Yes / no, links | fact |
| 19 | Who they work with | Public client list — the most honest parameter | fact |
| 20 | Strengths | Your assessment | estimate |
| 21 | Weaknesses | Your assessment — this is where your USP is born | estimate |
| 22 | Price list | Link or range | fact |
| 23 | Catalog | Link | fact |
| 24 | Comment | What caught your eye: form, first screen, oddity | estimate |
| 25 | Analytical note | Position from the row: stronger / weaker / lever | conclusion |
I bolded two columns because they separate live analysis from dead. "Who they work with" (19) shows a competitor's real level better than any slogan: if the client list includes federal agro-holdings, this isn't "another distributor". "Weaknesses" (21) isn't an insult, it's a map of your opportunities: a competitor's weakness becomes your USP (see the case below). And the note (25) is mandatory in every row: without it you collected a dossier, not an analysis.
You don't have to fill everything. In real work some columns stay empty for some competitors — that's normal, the table is alive and gets filled as research progresses. What matters is that by the end, columns 9, 16, 19, 21 and 25 are filled at minimum.
A corporate services company in the UAE: company registration, bank accounts, visas. I joined as Marketing Director. The first question I asked wasn't "how are we doing", but "how are they doing, and why do they drop out".
What the competitor table showed. In the "USP" parameter (column 9) everyone had the same thing — price: "registration from 3,000 AED". In "positioning" (16) — a service storefront with no guarantee. And in "weaknesses" (21) the main thing surfaced: competitors took on any company, then dropped out halfway — company under sanctions, owner fails verification, questionable source of funds. The client was left midway with spent money and time.
The analytical note (column 25) from that row. Price doesn't decide in this niche — the audience is business owners going international, they come for service and reliability. The client's main fear is losing money and time. So pushing "from 3,000 AED" is pointless: it plays on the competitors' field, and they drop out precisely because they lack a risk filter.
The position that was born from it. The USP was repackaged into a result guarantee: "We'll open your company in the UAE or refund double the payment". It became the anchor of all communication and the differentiator from competitors who take on everyone.
| Metric | Before | After (6 months) |
|---|---|---|
| Leads per month | 30 | 20 |
| Qualified leads | 4–5 | 9–10 |
| Conversion to deal | 10% | 30% |
| Lead qualification time | 7 days | 1 day |
| Revenue in last 3 months | — | $400,000 |
Notice the logic: the result came not from "ten competitors in a table", but from one line of the note turned into a USP. The table is the tool, the position is the product. The full case with channel and unit-economics numbers is in the UAE-Consulting article.
"A competitor analysis after which you can't say in one sentence where you're stronger and why — isn't analysis. It's a dossier you read and forgot."— Vyacheslav Gots
So as not to sell the method where it's useless — three cases where I wouldn't build the table.
30 minutes: I'll look at your niche and a couple of competitors live, and tell you whether you have a position or you're playing on their field. If competitor analysis isn't needed in your case, I'll say so straight and explain what to fix instead.
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Analysis of five competitors across 5 parameters is part of the audit, day 3-4. Output: PDF 15-20 pages + presentation + 1-hour call. Timeline 5-7 days, cost credited toward management.
Learn More →Where competitor analysis lives in a fractional CMO system: not a one-off table, but constant position monitoring inside management.
Read →The full walkthrough: how competitor weakness ("they take on everyone and drop out") became the USP guarantee, and what it did to the funnel and unit economics.
Read case →Competitor analysis tells you where you're stronger. Unit economics tells you whether that strength is worth money. We calculate CAC, LTV and the 3×CAC rule — with an on-page calculator.
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