If there’s a will, there’s a way — your competitors might be scoping you out right under your nose
Industrial espionage is a large and concerning issue in the corporate world. But it’s not just restricted to enterprise-level corporations. A number of countries have laws that protect businesses from theft of trade secrets and business plans. But none of these laws can prevent a competitor from legally snooping on your business with the help of publicly available information.
Businesses routinely leave behind trails that can help competitors gain valuable insights about the overall health of their company. Additionally, they might inadvertently be exposing information about their business strategies and potential trade secrets. While not everything can be hidden from competitor snooping, it is important to acknowledge that these tricks exist in order to be better prepared for this possibility.
Invoice receipts and helpdesk tickets
One of the easiest ways to know the average orders processed by a competitor each month is to look at their invoice receipts. For instance, if you are in the coffee shop business, competitors could be buying a cup of coffee every day around the same time to process the number of orders you have received (if it is indicated on the receipt). A more diligent competitor could perhaps buy a cup of coffee every hour to know the purchasing patterns among your customers. Randomising your invoice numbers is a probable solution, although this needs to be done according to the laws of your country. In countries like Germany, for instance, it is mandatory for a business to issue sequential invoice numbers.
There are minor workarounds that can make the job of your competitor tougher. For example, you could randomise the increment on your invoice numbers. However, your organization must make sure that this is legal in your country and also maintain a record of these increments for auditing purposes.
Besides invoice receipts, competitors may also try to get a general sense of growth of your business by checking on the number of helpdesk tickets raised every day. Since there are not many laws surrounding this, businesses could randomise helpdesk tickets to avoid them being used as a yardstick to measure business growth.
Also read: How to maintain a strong reputation and protect trade secrets
Google Alerts and backlink checkers
A significant chunk of marketing resources today are spent on online campaigns including SEO, content marketing and social media marketing. A competitor interested in knowing your marketing strategy could easily do this by setting up Google alerts for your brand name as well as periodically checking services like Moz to know what kind of backlinks you have been building. Online tools like Spyfu go a step further and tell your competitor the different variations of ad copies you are serving over Adwords.
Such online tools can give your competition everything they want to know about your marketing strategies. Together with an analysis of your brand name searches gleaned over tools like Google Trends, it is also possible to know if your PR strategy is helping you get visibility or not. If your competitor were to use this information with the invoice receipt details mentioned earlier in this article, they may also know how this is impacting your business growth.
While this strategy may give away your business strategies, this is also by far the most ethical way to study competition and it is highly recommended that your team too keeps a track of your competition through these strategies. You could make use of tools like Segment to integrate all your internal business data and benchmark this against competition data extracted with the help of tools like Zapier and Mention.
Bill of materials (BOM)
BOM essentially refers to the list of all parts and subparts necessary to build a product. Many times, simply breaking down your product to its bare components is sufficient to know the manufacturer or supplier of each of these various components. From there, it is simply a matter of calling up the vendor for a quote. This can give your competitor an idea about the kind of margins you are currently enjoying on your products.
In addition to this, if you are in an industry with just a handful of players in your geography, questioning your supplier on their production capacity and utilisation could answer your competitor’s questions about your production figures. A lot of this information may be protected from competition by drafting the right contract with your supplier. If you are an influential business, it is also possible to seek exclusivity with the supplier so that they do not work with your competitors’ business.
Employee interviews
By far, the sneakiest and the most unethical way competitors regularly steal your business strategies is through job postings. This is done by targeting gullible employees on your payroll under the pretext of a job opening and interviewing them on the various tasks they have accomplished in their role at your company. The only way to protect your business from such tactics is by sensitising your employees to the possibility of this happening. It is also important to get your employees, contractors and third party vendors to sign an NDA that forbids them from sharing business secrets with any third party.
No matter how protective you are of your business secrets and plans, it may still be inadequate to stop a prying competitor from knowing what you are up to. From that perspective, the only way to stay alive in the game is to keep innovating and making sure that you offer a product or service that is better than what your competitors offer.
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