Don’t Just Respond—Compete: How to Use Competitive Analysis to Identify Strengths, Weaknesses, and Differentiators

 

Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators before responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP) is critical because it enables your team to position strategically, respond persuasively, and compete effectively. A realistic view of your position relative to competitors helps your team determine whether to pursue an opportunity or walk away. And understanding where you’re strong and where you’re vulnerable supports smarter investments of time and resources.

When you understand your strengths, you can emphasize them throughout your proposal response. Highlighting relevant capabilities and past performance helps build trust and show that your team is low-risk and high-value. Beyond strengths, identifying your differentiators is key to standing out. Whether it’s a unique technical approach, proprietary tool, past success with similar customers, or unmatched talent, identifying these elements early ensures they are woven throughout the proposal in a meaningful and convincing way. When your proposal strategy is built around validated strengths and customer-relevant differentiators, it creates a consistent and compelling message across the entire response—technical, management, past performance, and pricing.

And acknowledging your weaknesses early gives you time to address them—either by strengthening your team (e.g., subcontractors or key hires), repositioning the narrative, or providing mitigations that reduce customer concerns. If you wait until the writing phase, you risk being reactive and less strategic.

In this article, we’ll walk through how to conduct a competitive analysis and then use that insight to identify strategic strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators (see Figure 1 for a sample competitive analysis chart). Identifying strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators early in the process helps your team build a more competitive, customer-focused, and credible proposal—and increases your chances of winning.

Figure 1. Sample Blank Competitive Analysis Chart


How to come up with hot buttons and issues

Last week I talked about how, in an ideal world, your business development or capture team identifies opportunities well before anything ever hits SAM.gov (you can read that article here). Your team has proactively reached out to potential customers, built relationships, and shaped requirements well before the Request for Information (RFI) stage. During those early business development and capture efforts, your team had discussions that identified the customer pain points, the things that keep them up at night, and the true drivers of the upcoming opportunity. However, for a variety of reasons, sometimes our teams don’t find out about an opportunity until after the RFI has been released.

But don’t worry! You can still use the RFI documents to pull out customer issues and hot buttons and then use those identified issues and hot buttons to generate questions to address during follow-on customer discussions (check out last week’s article for more on this). During those discussions, you should validate the issues and hot buttons you have identified. Once you do that, you can use those validated issues and hot buttons to drive your competitive analysis.

Now you know the issues, but how do you identify the competition?

The competitor you’ll likely learn the most about from your customer is the incumbent—the things they are happy about and the things they are not happy about with their current contract should become clear during your customer discussions. But how do you know who the other competitors are? Often you have a pretty good sense of the major players in your specific contract space. If the opportunity is coming out under a specific Multiple Award Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) or similar contract vehicle, the awardees under that contract will be the potential competitors. You can also take note of who is showing up to talk to the customer (if you’re meeting in person), and who is showing up to any industry days or site visits.

How to complete the competitive analysis

Filling out the competitive analysis chart  (Figure 1) is fairly straight forward. Fill out the far-left column with your validated customer issues and hot buttons. Complete the weight column to prioritize each of the identified customer issues/hot buttons. The total weight should add up to 100%. Then for each issue/hot button, rate your company on a scale of 0–10, with zero being a complete weakness (no past experience or capability, without the ability to fill the gap through subcontracting or teaming) and ten being a complete strength (same or similar past experience, strong capability, strong past performance). Use the rationale column to include notes as to why you rated yourself this way. Multiply the “Points” by the “Weight” to fill in the “Score” column for each issue/hot button. Repeat this process for each identified competitor (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Sample Completed Competitive Analysis Chart

How to use the competitive analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators

Once you complete the competitive analysis, you can use the scores and notes to identify strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators for you and your competition. The issues/hot buttons with the lowest scores are the weaknesses, the ones with the highest scores are the strengths. Those areas where your team scores a strength and the competition has a weakness becomes a potential differentiator if your solution includes something that your competitors cannot claim. Looking at the example above, we can note that the incumbent’s poor performance is driving much of the future solicitation. Our company is slightly better positioned to win than Competitor 2, but it would not take much for them to strengthen their score to be better positioned than us. Our team has a noted strength and potential discriminator in automation and orchestration across systems, performing better than our competition with strong proof points leveraging custom suite of AI tools to achieve efficiencies. We also have a noted weakness in security that we will need to mitigate through teaming and in our technical approach.

Final Thoughts

Identifying and validating customer hot buttons and issues is a critical part of building a winning strategy—regardless of whether you’re months ahead of an opportunity or jumping in after an RFI drops. When used effectively, these insights can shape more meaningful customer conversations, guide your competitive positioning, and uncover true differentiators that matter to the customer.

By taking the time to understand the customer, track competitor behavior, and complete a thoughtful competitive analysis, you not only sharpen your understanding of the opportunity but also equip your team with the tools to respond with confidence and clarity. The result? Smarter bid decisions, more compelling proposals, and a stronger chance of winning.


Written by Ashley (Kayes) Floro, CPP APMP
Senior Consultant and President
Proptimal Solutions, LLC
proptimalsolutions.com
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