Building Your Market Radar

Most small and mid-sized businesses don’t lose to a single dramatic punch. Instead, they lose to a slow, almost imperceptible drift. A competitor ships something slightly better. A customer expectation quietly shifts. A new channel starts working for everyone else. Prices change. Tech gets commoditized. And by the time you notice, you’re not “a little behind”, you’re trying to do a frantic catch-up lap with your shoelaces tied together.

That’s what a market radar is for: a simple, repeatable way to see what’s happening around you and respond while the changes are still small enough to steer around. A market radar has two essential parts:

1. A map (so you can see the territory).

2. A ping (so the map stays alive).

Let’s build both.

Part 1: The Map (Your Market, Made Visible)

A radar only works if it has a picture of the airspace. In business terms, that means you need a map of your market that shows:

• Where your customers are (and where they’re headed)

• Where competitors are (and how they’re moving)

• Where your offerings sit right now

• Where the “interesting weather” is forming (new entrants, substitutes, tech shifts, channel changes)

This does not need to be fancy. It needs to be useful.

Choose Two Axes That Actually Matter

A good map usually has two axes that reflect the forces shaping your business. I like two strong candidates:

1. Innovation lifecycle: From custom/bespoke → productized → utility/commodity

2. Customer proximity: From high customer contact (front-end, relationship-heavy) → low customer contact (back-end, B2B infrastructure, invisible plumbing)

Those axes give you a landscape where you can place:

• Your products/services

• Competitors

• Substitutes (what customers do instead of hiring you)

• Major platforms or intermediaries (marketplaces, partners, distributors)

Now you can ask smarter questions, like:

• Are we competing in bespoke work while the market is sprinting toward productization?

• Are we trying to “differentiate” in a utility zone where price and scale win?

• Are competitors moving closer to the customer while we’re drifting into back-end obscurity?

Example: The Printing Business

If you’re in printing, you might map things like this:

• Custom design services (high customer contact, bespoke)

• Print-on-demand storefronts (customer-facing, productized)

• Commodity print runs (utility, lower customer contact)

• Logistics and fulfillment (back-end, utility)

Then place your competitors and your own offerings on the same map. Suddenly you can see whether you’re building the next move… or defending yesterday’s hill.

Part 2: The Ping

A map that never updates becomes wall art. A radar is active. It sweeps. It pings. It detects motion. This is where most businesses stumble, not because they’re lazy, but because they don’t install feedback loops with a real cadence.

Your “ping” is the set of mechanisms that regularly answer:

• What changed in customer needs, behavior, and buying patterns?

• What changed in competitors, substitutes, and pricing?

• What changed in the underlying technology or delivery model?

• What changed in channels, partnerships, regulations, or platform rules?

You don’t need one perfect signal. You need several imperfect signals that you review consistently.

Practical Sources of “Ping” Data

Here are some ideas for some dependable ping generators you probably already have access to:

Marketing pings

• Which messages are getting clicks, replies, and conversions?

• Which topics are spiking in search, social, or inbound inquiries?

• Which channels are warming up or cooling down?

Sales pings

• What objections are repeating?

• What “no” reasons show up most often?

• Which competitors are appearing in deals you lose?

Customer pings

• What are support issues trending toward?

• What do customers request repeatedly that you don’t do well yet?

• What do they love that they can’t easily get elsewhere?

Product/service delivery pings

• Where are projects slowing down?

• What work is becoming repeatable (candidate for productization)?

• What work is getting squeezed on price (candidate for utility pressure)?

Each of these is a little sonar blip. Together they make a picture.

The Secret Sauce: Cadence

A radar’s power isn’t accuracy. It’s update speed.

In many organizations, the feedback cadence is effectively annual. They notice change once per year during planning, budgeting, or the traditional “strategic retreat.” That’s a lovely way to get surprised professionally.

If you’re starting from scratch, a realistic progression looks like this:

• Yearly (what most companies accidentally do)

• Quarterly (a meaningful upgrade, and a good starting goal)

• Monthly (where you start seeing movement early)

• Weekly (where you can actually steer)

• Daily (only for fast-moving markets and high-volume signals)

Quarterly is better than yearly, but it’s still slow. Imagine trying to race a boat by checking the wind once every 90 days. You’d learn a lot, mostly about regret.

Tune Your Radar to the Speed of Your Market

Not all markets move the same.

• Slow markets (some commodities, heavy regulation, long sales cycles) can be fine with monthly or quarterly radar checks.

• Fast markets (software, digital services, online channels, platform-driven ecosystems) demand weekly or even daily signals.

The point is that the goal is not “the fastest possible.” It’s the fastest necessary to respond before the change becomes a crisis.

What Happens When You Do This Well

When your map is visible and your ping is reliable, something magical happens: Your daily decisions start making sense again. Instead of debating in circles, you can point at the map and say:

• “Competitors are moving from bespoke to product. We should too.”

• “Customer expectations are shifting toward self-service. We need a front-end move.”

• “This offering is sliding into commodity territory. Either we differentiate or we exit.”

• “This repeatable work should become a package, not a custom proposal every time."

That’s strategy showing up in the real world, not just in slide decks. And yes, this is one of the foundations of what people call business agility: the ability to respond coherently to market change without needing a dramatic event to wake everyone up.

A Simple Market Radar Rhythm You Can Start Next Week

Here’s a lightweight operating pattern that works well for SMBs:

1) Build the map (once, then iterate)

• Pick two axes

• Place your offerings and top competitors

• Add substitutes and major platforms/partners

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2) Define your “ping” inputs

• Marketing: top signals

• Sales: top signals

• Customers: top signals

• Delivery: top signals

3) Hold a recurring Radar Review

• 45 minutes monthly (start here)

• Move toward biweekly or weekly if your market demands it

4) Update the map live

• Move dots, don’t debate philosophy

• Capture “unknowns” as questions to investigate

  
  

5) Decide one action

• One experiment

• One repositioning move

• One message change

• One product/package adjustment

The win condition is simple: the map changes and your decisions change with it.

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