Today's business environment poses many challenges to high-technology enterprises in every segment of the industry. Not surprisingly, a large majority of these challenges are related to competitive issues. Telecommunications services companies, for example, are constantly adjusting prices and promotion bundles to keep up with each other, while customer switching costs are declining.

In this intense environment, Maxzime does not simply have access to competitive information and is also not sufficient to effectively chart a course to success. Maxzime adapt by infusing competitive awareness throughout our organization, and into every business process that deals with customers and products. The cycle of gathering external information, analyzing it, determining an optimal response, and then engaging the business to execute, is called the Competitive Response Lifecycle, and it is a critical process for companies of all sizes to understand.

Respond to changes

Competitive responsiveness, then, is the measure of a company's capability to respond to changes in external conditions and events. It includes the ability to improve performance by creating a repeatable process advantage over competitors Three recurring dimensions used at Maxzime to measure competitive responsiveness:

• Speed


• Consistency


• Effectiveness

We have been fortunate to work on matters of competitive response with a large number of global leaders in the information technology and telecommunications industry. In doing so, we have found several competitive response best practices that all companies should implement. They are best understood in the context of a competitive response life cycle.