Analyzing Competitors

Run a Black Hat competitive assessment: figure out who else will bid, how each of them will bid, and what to do about it. The core technique is perspective — stop thinking about the team's own proposal and instead bid the job as each competitor would. A competitive assessment that only lists competitors and their revenue is a directory. A Black Hat predicts their offers.

When to use this skill

Use this skill during capture, once an opportunity is being pursued, to assess the competitive field. It supports the bid/no-bid decision, the price-to-win analysis, and (most importantly) the win strategy, which needs to know what it is differentiating against.

Re-run it as intelligence improves, especially after a draft RFP clarifies scope and after customer engagement sharpens the read on the incumbent.

This skill does not set the team's win themes (developing-win-strategy) or estimate the price target (estimating-price-to-win) — but both depend on it, so run this first.

Inputs

Preferred upstream artifacts:

• 00-opportunity-profile.md: the opportunity facts, including any known incumbent and competitors.
• 02-capture-plan.md: customer intelligence that informs how competitors are positioned with this customer.

Without them, run the intake below.

Read ../../shared/glossary.md and ../../shared/pursuit-workspace.md if not already read this session. Read references/competitive-intelligence-ethics.md before gathering any competitor information.

Intake

Ask these as a numbered list. Skip what upstream artifacts answer.

1. The opportunity. What is the requirement, customer, contract type, estimated value, set-aside, and vehicle? (Set-aside and vehicle bound the field — only qualifying firms can bid.)
2. Known and suspected bidders. Who does the team already believe will bid? Is there an incumbent, and who is it?
3. What is known about each competitor. For each likely bidder, what does the team know — size, relevant past performance, customer relationship, typical technical approach, typical price posture, recent wins and losses?
4. The incumbent's standing. If there is an incumbent the team is not, how is the customer's relationship with it — strong, strained, fatigued? Any known performance problems?
5. The team's own position. Briefly — where does the team believe it is strong and weak relative to this field? (Used to assess exposure, not to set strategy.)
6. Information sources. What public or properly obtained sources are available — past award data, published past performance, market research, prior debriefs? (See the ethics reference for what is in bounds.)

Where the team does not know something about a competitor, that is an intelligence gap. Record it; do not invent the answer.

Workflow

Black Hat Competitive Assessment:
- [ ] Step 1: Read upstream artifacts; complete intake; review CI ethics
- [ ] Step 2: Confirm the competitive field
- [ ] Step 3: Profile each competitor
- [ ] Step 4: Bid the job as each competitor (the Black Hat)
- [ ] Step 5: Build the comparison and most-probable-winner read
- [ ] Step 6: Derive counters, ghosting opportunities, and our exposures
- [ ] Step 7: Write the assessment (03-competitive-assessment.md) and validate

Step 1: Read, intake, ethics. Read upstream artifacts and the CI ethics reference. Use only properly sourced information throughout.

Step 2: Confirm the field. List the credible bidders. The set-aside and vehicle constrain it — only qualifying firms can bid. Distinguish likely bidders from possible ones, and treat the incumbent as its own case.

Step 3: Profile each competitor. Using references/black-hat-method.md, profile each: size and qualifications, relevant past performance, customer relationship and incumbency, typical technical approach, typical price posture, and recent relevant wins and losses. Mark each item known or assessed.

Step 4: Bid the job as each competitor. The Black Hat itself. For each competitor, switch perspective and answer as them: How would we bid this? What solution would we propose? What are our win themes? Where are we strong, and where are we vulnerable? What price posture would we take? Be genuinely adversarial — give each competitor their best plausible bid, not a strawman.

Step 5: Comparison and most-probable winner. Build the comparison matrix from black-hat-method.md, scoring each competitor (and the team) across the factors the customer will evaluate. Then state who is most likely to win today and why — including, honestly, the cases where it is not the team.

Step 6: Counters, ghosts, and exposures. Derive three things:

• Counters: for each competitor's likely strengths and themes, how the team's proposal should respond.
• Ghosting opportunities: competitor weaknesses the team's proposal can highlight by contrast, without naming the competitor (see the method file for how to ghost legitimately).
• Our exposures: the team's own weaknesses that competitors will ghost. Each exposure is something the win strategy must address.

Step 7: Write and validate. Write 03-competitive-assessment.md using templates/competitive-assessment.md. Run its validation checklist: every competitor is bid as themselves (not strawmanned), every claim is sourced or marked assessed, ghosting opportunities are real and legitimately framed, and the team's own exposures are listed as honestly as the competitors'.

Output

One artifact: 03-competitive-assessment.md in the pursuit workspace.

Present the user with: the likely field, the most-probable winner and why, the two or three strongest ghosting opportunities, the team's most dangerous exposures, and the biggest intelligence gaps.

References

• references/black-hat-method.md: competitor profiling dimensions, the "bid as them" technique, the comparison matrix, and how to ghost legitimately.
• references/competitive-intelligence-ethics.md: which competitor information may and may not be gathered and used.
• templates/competitive-assessment.md: the assessment artifact template and its validation checklist.

Guardrails

• Properly sourced information only. Use public and legitimately obtained information. Never use, seek, or speculate from a competitor's proprietary information or any source-selection-sensitive material. See the ethics file.
• No strawmen. Give each competitor their strongest plausible bid. A Black Hat that makes competitors look weak produces dangerous overconfidence.
• Mark assessed vs. known. A predicted competitor approach is an assessment. Label it. Do not state predictions as fact.
• Be as honest about us as about them. The team's exposures must be listed with the same candor as competitors' weaknesses.
• Predictions, not certainties. This is a structured forecast to inform strategy, not intelligence about what competitors will actually do.