Write Your Reply Before the Competitor Moves

Tuesday, twenty to ten. Someone on your team drops a screenshot into the group chat: the competitor across town has cut the price of its entry package. One person replies with a worried face. Another says you should match it by Friday. A third says to ignore it, and the owner writes "let's talk Thursday." By Thursday, two prospects have asked about the lower price, one of them in the middle of a quote you sent last week, and the meeting starts with everyone defending the position they took on Tuesday.

The monitoring worked perfectly in that story. Somebody saw the change within hours. What was missing was an answer written down before the change happened, so the team spent two days arguing about a decision that could have taken two minutes.

That gap is getting wider. Watching competitors used to be expensive, and now an AI tool can check their pages, reviews, job posts and ads every day and summarize what changed. The free guide to AI competitive intelligence shows how to build that kind of system, including a do-it-yourself version with no enterprise budget. More alerts arriving faster only helps if somebody knows what each one means for you. So before you build the radar, write the response sheet.

Watching got cheap and deciding did not

A competitor can do a limited number of things that affect you. They can change a price, launch or drop a service, hire, run a new campaign, change what they claim about themselves, open in a new area, or start collecting reviews that say something about them, good or bad. The list is short enough that you can decide in advance, calmly, what each move means for your business.

Deciding in advance matters because the moment an alert arrives is the worst time to think. It arrives with urgency attached, and the loudest opinion in the chat has usually set the tone before anyone has thought it through. A decision made weeks earlier on a quiet afternoon, when nobody felt threatened, is almost always better than the one made at twenty to ten on a Tuesday.

The response sheet

Make a table with one row for each kind of move and four columns. Keep it to one page.

• What we check first. The fact that would change the answer. For a price cut: is it permanent, and what did they remove from the package to afford it?
• What we do. One sentence, written as an instruction. "We don't match discounts. We call every open quote and restate what is included."
• Who decides. A name, not a team. If the answer is "the owner," say so, and say what happens when the owner is away.
• When we look again. A trigger for revisiting the row: two prospects mention the move within a month, or it is still in place after a quarter.

The second column is the one people find hardest to write, because it forces a position. That is the point. "We don't compete on price" sounds brave in a strategy meeting and evaporates the first time a competitor's lower number lands in your inbox. If it is true, write it on the sheet, and write what you do instead.

Rows for the moves you will ignore

Here is the unpopular part. Most competitor moves deserve no response at all, and the most valuable rows on the sheet are the ones that say so. A new tagline, a redesigned logo, a post about an award, a price cut on a service you do not sell, a job ad for a role you would never hire: none of it changes what your customers need from you this week.

Writing "ignore" in the second column stops the reflex. Without that row, every alert feels like homework, and a team that reacts to everything ends up copying the competitor's calendar instead of running its own. With it, the alert gets a glance and a shrug, and that shrug is a decision somebody already made, which is very different from somebody forgetting to act.

Ignoring a move is also the right answer more often for a business than for a large one. You have fewer people and fewer weeks. Every response you launch spends both, and the competitor may simply be trying something they will quietly drop in a month.

The few that deserve a same-day answer

A handful of rows should say "today." I would put two kinds of move there. The first is anything a prospect in an open deal is likely to ask about this week, because a salesperson caught unprepared by a question about a rival's new price loses more than the deal in front of them. The second is anything a competitor says about you that is false, in an ad or on a comparison page. Those need a calm, factual correction, written by a person, before the claim settles in.

Notice that neither of those same-day rows involves changing your own price or product in a hurry. The fast response is information: telling your own people what happened and what to say. The slow response is strategy, and it belongs in a quarterly review.

Test the sheet on last year

Here is a check you can run this afternoon. Write down every competitor move you remember from the last twelve months, the ones that caused a meeting or a sleepless night. Run each one through your new sheet. For every move, ask two questions: would the sheet have given an answer in two minutes, and is that answer better or worse than what you actually did?

If most of last year's moves land on "ignore" rows, that tells you how much of the past year's worry was optional. If a move lands on no row at all, add one. If the sheet's answer is worse than what you did, your instinct knew something the sheet does not, so write that down too.

Then build the radar

Once the sheet exists, monitoring becomes useful, because every signal arrives with a row waiting for it. That is when the competitive intelligence playbook is worth the download. It sorts competitive signals into seven categories with a source for each, compares tool options by budget from enterprise platforms like Crayon and Klue down to a do-it-yourself build with Firecrawl, Apify and Claude, lays out a daily brief format with routing and decision triggers, and ends with a quarterly review process that turns the signals into positioning decisions.

I will concede something the guide's ambition might hide. If you have two competitors in one town, you may not need a daily system at all. Twenty minutes on the first Monday of each month, reading their websites and their newest reviews, will probably catch most of what matters to a business. The sheet matters more than the frequency.

Whatever you build, start with the page of rows. Write the price-cut row first, since it is the one that started this post, and put a name in the "who decides" column before you close the document.

← Back to all articles