Project Objective

A successful project will provide information necessary to identify uncontested market spaces in verticals we can access and provide innovative value. Our objective is to acquire, organize, visualize, and decide on the who, what, when, where, how, and why of a new market.

Approach

We are investigating value drivers common to providers of Accounts Payable software and service providers at an industry level. There are many differences between vendors, as well as many common elements that are described in their marketing material, including websites.

Using a Blue Ocean Strategy Framework, our intent is to develop a strategy canvas based on 7 - 12 elements common to the industry.

This effort is in support of

• new market creation
• market segmentation
• competitive positioning
• product development
• value innovation
• message differentiation

It’s important for us to have a better understanding of how existing markets are being under served, served poorly, over served, or not served at all. It is also important for us to know what value driving product elements need to be Eliminated, Reduced, Raised, or Created in order to define a new market segment.

Recent developments in business intelligence (BI), machine learning(ML), artificial intelligence(AI), application programming interfaces(API) , blockchain (BC), together create the potential to build a new class of payment decision support controls.

This project will include:

• An identification of our current competitors
• Classification of competitors as focused on Value Innovation (Pioneers), Value Improvement(Migrators), or Value Imitation(Settlers).
• An identification each competitor (or competitive group) as being either service focused with some tools added, or tools focused with some services added
• Identification of competitor target markets served - by revenue size - small, medium, large, mega
• The creation of a matrix good, better, best package offerings for each of the top 5 competitors per segment, including pricing information.
• The creation of a matrix identifying features shared across the companies and those that are different.
• A summary of 2-4 paragraphs describing our value differentiators relative to the competition identified. This will be done in the context of a Strategy Canvas and and ERRC Grid. A Buyer Utility Map may be used to further support the research and classification exercise.
• We will give you access to organizational assets to support this project such as personnel, website analytics, sales and brand collateral, and more. We can suggest names of competitors to research.

Desired Outcomes

We hope to gain a comprehensive understanding of the competitors in our space, in a vertical, and how we can innovate value to differentiate ourselves through our product/service offering, and our messaging. This output could subsequently be applied to other verticals using this process template.