Direct Competitor (Glossary Definition)

A direct competitor is an alternative to your company's products or services. It’s a company that your prospects or clients considered at the time they decided to do business with you.

They're the obvious alternatives that you bump into at the bottom of your sales funnel and at the end of your buyer's journey. The complication is in a digital-first world, your direct competitors are not your only competitors. There are also indirect competitors and there are non-business model competitors.

If you're analyzing your competitive position and the competitive landscape, start by studying your direct competition.  Try to figure out everything you can see externally about what it is that they're doing with their digital presence for traffic generation, lead generation, sales cycle acceleration, closing new clients, and delighting those clients over time.

There's a tremendous amount of information that you can get to better understand whether your company is positioned to compete effectively in a digital-first world and attract the right people, in the right places, at the right time, and in the right context to be relevant in the modern buyer’s journey.