Not every competitor publishes revenue, margin or customer figures, but that doesn't mean there's no evidence. It just requires different evidence: behavior in the market, statements from customers and staff, and signals that a company does put out into the world without meaning them as figures.
An annual account filed with the Chamber of Commerce, a press release about revenue growth, a stock market update: that's the kind of evidence most management teams look for when they think of competitive intelligence. At a non-listed company with 50 to 300 employees, that often doesn't exist, or it's outdated and filtered. What does exist: job vacancies that show where a competitor is investing, reviews that show what customers complain about, tenders where the same party keeps showing up, and price lists or quotes that leak out via customers or former employees. None of these sources gives a percentage, but every source gives a signal that can be traced to a concrete statement, on a concrete date, from a concrete sender.
A vacancy text is one of the few documents a company writes itself about its own direction. If a competitor is looking for three senior implementation consultants, it is investing in execution capacity, not sales. If it is instead looking for account managers with experience in a particular segment, it is shifting its focus there. LinkedIn profiles of employees who have just switched jobs often give more detail about role and team than the vacancy itself. At a company with 50 to 300 employees, staff turnover is usually visible enough to recognize a pattern over a few quarters, even without anyone giving an interview about it.
Reviews, case studies on the competitor's own website, and what salespeople say about it in a tender, together form a picture of where it is strong and where it is weak. A competitor who is praised in three recent reviews for speed of delivery but criticized for communication thereby shows two dimensions on which it scores, without a single figure being needed. Anyone who combines that with their own sales conversations, in which prospects explain why they approached that competitor or rejected it, gets a second independent source on the same dimension. That is exactly the moment when it makes sense to look at what you actually win on, because the dimensions on which your competitor is weak are often the same ones on which you yourself are strong, or just barely not.
Tenders, trade associations, patent registers, import statistics and Chamber of Commerce extracts contain no revenue figure, but they do contain hard facts: who bid on which tender, who applied for a patent, who expanded with a new location. A production company with 120 employees that loses a tender to the same competitor three years in a row can often already deduce from the published evaluation criteria of that tender which dimension makes the difference, delivery time, price, or technical specification, without the competitor having said anything about it itself. This kind of public source is exactly why it makes sense to look at how to benchmark your company against competitors: the method determines whether scattered signals become a score or remain loose anecdotes.
The problem is usually not that there are too few signals, but that no one systematically puts them side by side. A vacancy here, a review there, a tender result from two years ago: on their own, they prove nothing. Brought together on the same dimension, with source and date attached, they form a score that can be accounted for. That is also what much of this signal ultimately points to: not an overall picture of the competitor, but one or two dimensions where the deals are decided. Anyone who notices that competitors are structurally offering lower prices without this showing up in an annual account can use the free loss-on-price check with eight questions to find out which dimension is actually leaking, before a more extensive investigation follows. And anyone who suspects that a competitor is leaving part of the market unserved will find in what a white space analysis is a way to test that suspicion against the same kind of indirect evidence.
The first step is not to search for more sources, but to bring the sources that already exist, vacancies, reviews, tender results, sales conversations, together per dimension instead of per competitor. Once that picture exists, it becomes visible whether the difference with a competitor lies in something you can close with a few adjustments, or in something woven into processes, people and systems. The latter is execution work, and what that work costs and which part of it can be done with AI instead of with extra people is worked out in the work scan at ftetoai.com.