How can a simple call change our view of a competitor?

I was in a call today, getting ready to bolt out of the meeting to go catch a flight. During the call, a business as usual call, the conversation turned into the number of visitors of our site on a daily basis. It is our policy not to disclose this information for many reasons which I will not go into, but you would have an idea of what they are if you were in a similar position.

The calling party then had the gull to disclose a competitors number of visitors during a specific period of time. Now, I didn’t ask for this information, it was volunteered. It was at this moment when I realized how keeping mum on certain company information is worth more in silence than the price of an ounce of gold. That could have been our information being disclosed to a competitor of mine.

Here is where it gets interesting, I was pressured to disclose what I consider vital information for the success of our business. I continued to decline an answer to the point where the calling party thought I was nowhere near the amount of traffic this specific competitor had to our site. He was trying hard to make me cave in and disclose this information.

I knew inside of me that our number of visitors was higher. Much higher than the number the caller stated. I just didn’t know an exact figure. After the call, I was left with a bitter taste both from a business call perspective and sour business practices. Goading me at whatever cost, to get, what again I would consider sensitive data, was unprofessional.

Well, without sounding arrogant or like if am gloating, here it is. I did an analysis of our traffic and here is what I will share, it took me four tries to get my data to match anywhere near our competitors traffic. For half the period of time from our competitor, our traffic was in the 7 digits, then cutting down the period of time to half, the traffic was in the six digits, cutting down the time to a months worth of traffic, the data was still in the six digits, then my sarcasm kicked in and decided to cut down the time to a four day period, our traffic was still higher by 27,000 new visitors.

That data blew me away. In four days, we had as much, if not, more traffic than a certain competitor has had over a 12 month period. There is a lesson here somewhere, I just don’t know what it is. Had this caller not provided me with someone else’s data either public or private, I would have not known how we fared against them. At the same time, I wish I would have not learned of their data. I now know where we are in relationship to them, but that doesn’t mean we can sit on our laurels and not compete as aggressively and tenaciously as we always do. In business, one misstep and you can become a statistic and that of the dead pool. There is no way we are headed to the dead pool. Maybe our competitor is judging from their traffic. Certainly not us.

Now that’s the art of Entrepreneurship.

Carlos

ps: to the caller – see this is why I don’t divulge this type of data. It could be used against me.