Keeping an Eye on the Competition: Go Beyond Google
by Sue Anderson, Writer, SoftwareCEO
Do you wish you could be a fly on the wall in your competitor’s office? You don’t need to wish anymore, you just need to know where to go on the Internet to find publicly accessible (and totally free) information about them — salaries, financials, product strategies, positioning, and sales presentations included.
No, we’re not talking about performing a Google search, because truth be told, Google doesn’t do the best job of indexing this type of information. During Software University’s October 15th seminar: “Keeping an Eye on the Competition: Go Beyond Google,” competitive analysis experts Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell of Cascade Insights revealed 24 different websites software executives can use to uncover competitive information.
Included in this list were the usual suspects, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Indeed, but there were a surprising number of sites that were unfamiliar to most attendees. If you want to know what your competition is up to, here are two sites that are worth your while to peruse.
Free competitor information-for-the-taking site #1: Glassdoor.com
Here you’ll find a wealth of information — salary details, company reviews, and interview questions — all posted anonymously by employees and job seekers.
If you’re new to the site, you’ll be able to take a quick peek to see what you’re missing, but to completely unlock the information that you’re after, you’ll need to share what you know. If you're interested in seeing salaries, simply post an anonymous salary for your current or former job and you'll get access to salaries for all companies. The same holds true for reviews and interviews.
If you search for salaries at Google’s location in San Jose, California, for example, you’ll find they pay their software engineers an average, annual salary of $96,610 and another $49,914 in bonuses.
Want to know how much a senior sales engineer at Oracle makes? According to Glassdoor.com, they earn on average a base pay of $142,830 and $42,938 in commissions.
Prefer to see what the going rate is for a senior sales engineer anywhere in the country? Use Glassdoor.com’s advanced search capabilities, and you’ll be able to search by title across 37 industries and 100 countries.
While our natural tendency is to look at the high and low data points, Swigart believes you’ll get a better picture of company culture and morale if you examine the Glassdoor.com reviews that fall in the middle of the road.
Free competitor information-for-the-taking site #2: SlideShare
Slideshare considers itself a business media site for sharing presentations, documents, and pdfs. Companies upload their slides to the site so that their ideas can be found and shared by a wide audience, but as Swigart points out, these same slides often contain valuable competitive information such as product roadmaps and partnership strategies.
If you drill down to the technology category on this site, you’ll discover an Oracle Fusion middleware application server infrastructure roadmap authored by a senior Oracle product manager, and a presentation from Salesforce partner Callidus describing the benefits each partner brings to each other, and to their customers.
During the class, Swigart and Campbell also offered up a handful of Google-specific search tips, including two tips to uncover organization charts and other PowerPoint presentations hidden on the web.
Get these tips and the details behind 22 other websites you can mine for competitive intelligence, when you download a copy of the October 2009 Software University seminar slides from our Downloads Library.
The entire course — full audio, video, and Q&A — can be obtained by purchasing a recorded copy of the seminar online. Paid site members will save up to 50% when they buy this course.
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