We didn't want to just beat our competition; we wanted to end them.

I used to work in a highly competitive industry, with thousands of competitors targeting the same customers. So you can understand why I took such aim at defeating them. It was as much for my survival as anything else. We didn't want to just beat our competition; we wanted to end them. Meaning, we wanted them to shut down operations because we defeated them on service, quality, capability, and value. In three years, that's exactly what happened.

I started thinking less about increasing sales and more about winning a war in the marketplace between us and the competition. I asked, "How would a four-star general win a war against deeply entrenched adversaries?" First things first: know your enemy.

Who were we up against? What was their market position? What made them different? What would it take to defeat them? We needed intelligence on our competition to answer those questions. We could fight a war on assumptions, but we would rarely win one without verifiable answers.

So, we made a competitor target list before we made an account list. We wanted their client names, relationships, capabilities, scope of services, pricing, and much more. Every piece of competitor intelligence was captured and discussed. I had the entire team asking, "What do we not know about our competition?"

After three months of competitive intelligence gathering, a clear picture emerged. We learned that our competition had strong tactical relationships in place. Most of their sales volume came from transactional purchases rather than strategic initiatives around customers' business outcomes. We also learned that this was a mature space where pricing had been heavily discounted after years of RFP activity and contract negotiations.

But I found something else interesting, and once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. It was the evidence I was looking for: the value differentiation we would need to win. The intelligence pointed to a glaring gap in the competition's capabilities in a major section of the customers' business.

We didn't stop there. We stayed on the hunt, wanting proof. We met with hundreds of customer contacts in each target client, attended industry tradeshows and webinars, and kept learning where our competition was falling short in this one area. We validated that the upside was tremendous, but the service model to adequately support it would require a lot of upfront investment in time, resources, and new capabilities.

The more we learned, the more it became obvious why the competition struggled in this area and didn't prioritize it despite having a dominant hold in the marketplace. Delivery in this segment was more difficult and more expensive, and it required a real commitment. It was also hard for customers to compete in this area and maintain a solid brand reputation against their competition.

We saw this as a great big opportunity and a miscalculation from the competition—a critical error in their vision of what they could have meant to their customers. The service gap made them vulnerable to attack. Their current solutions did not address this area in a meaningful way.

The verifiable competitive intelligence we'd gathered turned into action and results. In three years, we built an internal community that became best in class in this niche, critical area and eventually became the #1 provider for all service areas in the largest accounts. It all started with knowing and focusing on the competition so we could know how to beat them and win the war for market share.

Competitiveness is one of 7 Partnership Domains we help our clients assess, build strategy around, and drive execution in with the Vitality Index, the Key Account Growth System. It's in the Vitality Index because this Domain is critical for winning, protecting, and growing key accounts. In this Domain, we help teams prove to their champions and executive sponsors that their value is highly differentiated and produces results the competition can't match.

One of the three Growth Drivers in the Competitiveness Domain is called Competitive Intelligence. For this Growth Driver, we handcrafted close to 50 separate plays for account teams to run across every level of partnership. Our system will diagnose and score you in this area, build the exact growth strategy the team needs now to improve, and help guide your execution until you become a Vital Partner.

Growing key accounts can be complex, so we distilled this type of work into a system everyone can use no matter what level of experience you bring to the table. It was built from the same approach we used to create some of the largest partnerships in our industry that have lasted decades and are still running.

Winning, growing, and protecting key accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. In the Vitality Index, we don't tell you what to do. We show you, because we lived it. This is the system we wished we had years ago. But now, it's here! If becoming a top-producing account team is important to you, then the Vitality Index can help.

We made a sample for you to try. This is not the actual system, but it will show you a practical plan for growing a live customer in your portfolio. This snapshot will give you a diagnostic, analysis, and an actual growth plan for where you currently sit across two of the seven Domains: Relationships and Competitiveness.