The Competitive Profile Matrix

The Competitive Profile Matrix (CPM) is a strategic evaluation that lets you examine your organization to your opponents, in such a manner as to reveal your relative strengths and weaknesses.

Similarly to a Competitive Analysis Template, a Competitive Profile Matrix once completed provides you with the perception you should:

Inform your strategic decision making.
Spotlight the relative strengths and weaknesses of each your opponents and your own organisation.
Uncover potential opportunities within the market.
Make it easier to articulate your worth proposition, in addition to highlighting the worth proposition of your opponents.

Whereas a Competitive Evaluation Template is a phrase document describing the differences between you and your rivals, a Competitive Profile Matrix scores you in opposition to your rivals, every space of competitive importance (called essential success factors).

Clearly, completely different organizations may have completely different strengths and weaknesses, for instance, while one organization might have one of the best price base because of its superior supply chain, another might have the very best quality product, while yet another organization might have the most effective customer support. The advantage of a Competitive Profile Matrix is that it permits you to rank you and your competitors in opposition to one another when it comes to the “total package” you deliver to {the marketplace}.

An instance of a CPM is shown below:

Competitive Performance Matrix: Key Elements

There are Four key elements to a CPM:

1. Critical Success Factors
2. Weight
3. Rating
4. Score & Total Score

Let’s look at every in turn.

1. Crucial Success Components

Typically referred to as Key Success Factors (KSF), these are the important key attributes that matter or decide success inside your business. Essential success factors will differ from business to business and be made up of both internal and external factors. The more important success factors included within your CPM the more reliable your competitive analysis will likely be.

As talked about above, vital success factors will fluctuate from business to business, however some quite common ones include:

• Innovation
• Advertising and marketing
• Brand Popularity
• Product Quality
• Buyer’s Service
• Price Competitiveness
• Technological Competence
• Cost base
• Product Range
• Geographic Reach
• Customer Loyalty
• Management Competency
• Types of Critical Success Elements

Critical Success Factors are the factors which might be most related to the success of your organization and its rivals. One other approach to take a look at that is to determine all the components which might be most essential to your current and potential customers and then rank how your organization compares along with your competitors. This attitude will make it easier to determine your core competencies, uncover your weaknesses, and differentiate your services and products out of your rivals.

There are 4 attributes of Critical Success Factors that you need to take note of:

Qualitative – these factors are based mostly on visible and linguistic properties; there are two approaches to think about:
Answer with yes or no to point whether or not a factor is present
Provide a brief explanation for each competitor

Internal Environment – these pertain to factors within every firm’s inside environment, together with:Marketing Effectiveness,Target Markets, Manufacturing Efficiencies,HR Practices, Financial Positions, Product Development, Research & Growth

Quantitative – these factors are numerical; there are two methods to approach any such issue:
Assign a rating versus your rivals on a scale of 1 – 5
Use actual numerical values when relevant (Examples: costs, variety of products, spec measurements of products, and so forth.)

External – these are factors that occur in your trade and even exterior of your trade in some circumstances. These components are under the PESTLE framework, they usually include: Political,Economic,Social,Technological,Legal,Environmental

To indicate how important success factors differ by industry think about the example of a neighborhood comfort store. For a convenience store an important vital success issue could be Energy of Location, measured by how high a footfall the shop will get. The factor would obviously be irrelevant for a web-based retailer, where a more vital metric is likely to be Share of Search Outcomes for key search terms related to key product lines.

2. Weighting

Every important success factor must be assigned a weighting from 0.1 to 1.0, with a lower weighting which means that factor is not notably important in determining the success of a enterprise, and a better score which means that issue is critically necessary in figuring out the success of a enterprise.

We give each critical success factor a weight because of various factors have an effect on enterprise success more than others. If we take a look at our comfort retailer example once more, you may see that Location is a way more essential issue than Price Competitiveness.

An important point to notice is that the sum of all the person weights within the CPM should total 1.0.

3. Score

Now that we now have our important success factors outlined and their importance it’s time to assign a rating to every one to point out how properly an organization for every factor.

You’ll be able to choose any scale you want for scoring, however it’s usually best to stay with something easy like a rating between 1 and 4, outlined as follows:

4 – major strength/industry leader
3 – minor strength
2 – minor weakness
1 – major weakness/industry laggard

Scoring rivals is usually subjective. After you have completed scoring each competitor for each important success issue, you should multiply the weight of every attribute by the rating given to every competitor within the CPM. The results of this calculation provides you with the weighted score for every competitor.

4. Total Score

The final step to finishing your CPM is so as to add values of all essential success components for every competitor. Doing this provides you with a complete rating for every competitor.

The corporate with the very best whole rating is the corporate that’s strongest within the market (relative to the other competitors). The larger the rating differential between one firm and one other, the larger the competitive benefit.

Competitive Profile Matrix Template

Competitive Profile Matrix Disadvantages

The scores which can be assigned to important success factors are subjectively assigned. This implies they’re more likely to suffer some degree of inaccuracy.
It may be troublesome to measure decide the scores of opponents important success components, just because this will not be public data.
When using a CPM a weak spot in a single area can have an effect on your total score, nevertheless, it could be advantageous to intentionally have a low rating in a single area because of the advantages that low score gives to another area.

Summary

A Competitive Profile Matrix (CPM) can be used to compare one firm to a different across a range of things important to success and is another strategic instrument which will be helpful in serving to you to outline your technique. The whole score for a given firm exhibits how aggressive that firm is within the market relative to different corporations.