Nearly every owner I work with has tried to find out what a competitor charges. Some have a spreadsheet. Some have a colleague who called the competitor pretending to be a buyer. Most have a number they heard once at an industry event and have believed ever since.
The information is worth having. Most of the ways people go after it produce either nothing useful or a real risk, and there are four sources that work better than any of it.
Why owners get this wrong
The usual question is "what do they charge?" That question has no single answer, which is why the hunt for it goes in circles.
A commercial services firm might charge $18,000 for a project and $34,000 for what looks like the same project, because one client had three sites and the other had one, or because one signed in a slow month. The published rate, if there is one, is a starting position. The transacted price is a different number and it varies by deal.
The useful question is narrower: for a buyer that looks like the one I just lost, what range did my competitor sit in, and what were they including that I was not? That question has answers, and they are gettable.
There is a second mistake underneath. Owners chase pricing because they suspect price is why they lose. In my experience it is the reason buyers give and rarely the reason they decide. A buyer who trusts you and understands the value will pay more. A buyer who does not understand what you are offering has nothing to compare except numbers, so price becomes the whole conversation by default.
The four sources that actually work
Published pricing pages. Obvious, and worth doing properly. Read them for structure as much as for numbers. Do they charge monthly or per project? What is bundled at the base tier? Where do they place the line between the cheap option and the real one? The structure tells you how they want buyers to think, which matters more than the figure. Keep a dated screenshot, because these pages change and your memory of last year's price will be wrong.
Public procurement and tender records. This is the source owners forget, and in Canada it is a large body of real transaction data. Public bodies at every level publish awarded contracts, and the records commonly name the winning supplier and the contract value. Municipalities, health authorities, school districts, universities, Crown corporations, and provincial and federal departments all publish in some form. If your competitors sell to any public buyer, their actual contracted prices are already public. Nobody has to be tricked, because the buyer published it.
The figures need reading with care. A contract value covers a defined scope over a defined period, so a three year award divided by three is not the same as an annual price for a private client. Used as a range rather than a point, this is the most reliable pricing data most small B2B firms can get for free.
Industry rate and salary surveys. Trade associations, professional bodies, and recruitment firms publish rate benchmarks for many service categories. These are averages across a region, so they will not tell you about one competitor, and they are useful for a different purpose: checking whether your whole market is priced where you think it is. An owner who discovers the regional average day rate is well above theirs has learned something more actionable than one competitor's quote.
Your own lost deals. The best source, and the one companies use least. This deserves its own section.
Your lost deals are the best source you have
When a buyer chooses somebody else, they know both prices, they know what each proposal included, and after the decision is made there is no reason to protect the information. A polite question two weeks later gets answered surprisingly often.
The call has to be genuinely without an agenda. Say you are not trying to reopen the decision, you want to understand it so you can improve. Then ask a small number of specific things.
- What did the winning proposal include that mine did not?
- Was the gap in price, or in something else?
- If price, where did we sit against them?
- What nearly made you choose us?
That last question is the one most people skip, and it produces the most useful material. It tells you what part of your offer already works.
This works better than any other source for three reasons. The number is a real transacted price rather than a list price. It comes with the scope attached, so you can see whether you lost on price or on inclusions. And it is tied to a buyer you actually wanted, which no published survey can give you. There is a full process for running these conversations in the post on win loss reviews for small companies.
One caution: buyers sometimes misstate the competing price, occasionally to make you feel better and occasionally because they are still negotiating with someone. Collect ten of these before you trust the pattern. One lost deal is a story. Ten is a range.
What not to do
Do not make a fake enquiry. Calling or emailing a competitor while pretending to be a buyer, or having your cousin do it, is misrepresentation. Set aside the ethics for a moment and look at the practical side: what you receive is a first quote for a fictional project, which is the least reliable number in their whole pricing structure. You take on a real reputational risk to obtain bad data. Small B2B markets in Metro Vancouver are small. People find out.
Do not misrepresent yourself to get a price list. Same problem in a different form. Signing up under a false company name, joining a webinar under a false identity, or asking an existing client to request a quote on your behalf all fall in the same place.
Do not discuss pricing with competitors. This is the one with legal weight. Agreements between competitors to fix, maintain, or control prices are a criminal offence under Canada's Competition Act, and the law reaches informal understandings as well as signed agreements. A friendly conversation at an industry breakfast about "where we are all pricing this year" is exactly the kind of exchange the rules exist to prevent. The safe rule is simple: if a competitor raises pricing, change the subject, and if they persist, leave the conversation.
None of this restricts you from knowing the market. Reading a published page, downloading a public tender award, and asking your own lost buyer what happened are all ordinary business research.
What to do with what you learn
Assume you now have a range and a sense of what competitors include. The temptation is to move your price toward the middle of that range. Resist it until you have answered a different question.
Ask what the gap buys the customer. If a competitor charges 30 percent less, look at what is missing from their scope. Usually something is: fewer revisions, slower response, a junior person doing the work, no reporting, a longer timeline. That is a legitimate offer for buyers who want it, and the right response is to name the difference in your proposals rather than to match the price.
If you genuinely cannot find a difference, you have learned something more valuable than a price. Either they are more efficient than you, which is an operations problem worth investigating, or they are underpricing and will struggle. Both are useful to know.
Where pricing research most often should change something is structure rather than level. If every competitor sells monthly and you sell by project, that mismatch is costing you deals whatever your number is, because buyers cannot compare you to anything. The post on retainer versus project pricing goes through that decision. And if your pricing lives only inside proposals, a clear public explanation of how you price does more for your win rate than any adjustment to the number, which is the argument in the pricing page post.
Why being cheapest is usually a trap
Every so often an owner concludes from this research that the answer is to be the cheapest option in the market. For a small B2B firm this is a hard position to hold.
Being cheapest requires a structural cost advantage: scale, automation, offshore delivery, or a narrow product you repeat hundreds of times. A 25 person services firm in Metro Vancouver rarely has any of those. Without one, the low price comes straight out of margin, which means out of your ability to hire, to invest, and to survive a slow quarter.
It also changes who calls you. Price-led buyers switch for price, which means the customers you win this way leave the moment somebody undercuts you. You end up with higher churn, more sales effort per dollar, and a client base that never refers you, because there is nothing to say about you except that you were cheap.
The most reliable move for a small firm is the opposite: be clearly different for a narrower group of buyers, and be priced accordingly. That is a positioning decision rather than a pricing one, and the differentiation framework is the right place to work it out.
The takeaway
Use the four legitimate sources: published pages for structure, public tender awards for real transacted values, industry surveys for the regional picture, and lost deal conversations for the specific buyers you wanted. Do not fake an enquiry, and never discuss pricing with a competitor.
Then spend most of your effort on the second half of the question. A price without the scope attached tells you almost nothing. The useful finding is what a competitor includes at their number, because that is what you can respond to in a proposal.
If the research pushes you toward being the cheapest option, stop and check whether you have a genuine cost advantage. Without one, that road ends in thin margins and customers who leave.