When researching the market, companies often focus on firmgraphic data. This includes things like:
- Vertical
- Size of the company
- Company location
- Income
- Business Type
All of these are helpful in building the big picture of your place in the market, including the foundation for things like your ideal customer profile and the total addressable market.
But, at least on their own, these factors do not form competitive marketing intelligence.
Sales teams and marketers must analyze the role that technology plays in the daily life of the consumer and apply that information to marketing strategy.
To gain a real competitive advantage in your marketing intelligence, your sales and marketing teams can focus on technology data: what technologies are being used, how they are being used, and when they are being deployed.
Better yet, you can go even further with spending intelligence data: how much your target accounts spend on particular technology categories and even specific products.
Tech data lets you see consumers’ tech purchases and the tools they depend on. In turn, leveraging this data makes for more effective marketing strategies and smarter sales conversations.
Focus on the right offers for your pipeline. A recent HBR article drives this point home: “Marketing analytics should shine a light on the interactions that drive revenue, not just those that are easy to measure.” The idea is that taking the time to listen to conversations, identify prospects’ spending, and even talk to competitors, while time-consuming, will pay off in a big way. Just as data from phone conversations can drive better conversations in the future, data from market spending can drive better conversations in your pipeline in the first place.
How is Competitive Intelligence applied?
Competitive intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing information about an industry with the goal of strengthening its business strategy. The information collected may relate to any aspect of the business ecosystem, including:
- Competitors
- Customers
- Suppliers
- Products and services
- Technologies
- Industrial trends
- Economic or political conditions
Terms like “business intelligence” and “market intelligence” are often used instead of “competitive intelligence.” While they are related, it is essential to note the differences.
Examples of business or corporate intelligence focus primarily on data and information collected internally.
In this article, we will stick to the term competitive intelligence, although we will delve into different aspects of these more specific types of intelligence.
Operating a business without the knowledge of the landscape leaves you vulnerable to threats and leads to missed opportunities. These blind spots are detrimental to any business, and competitive intelligence provides a solution.
Perhaps your competitor is launching a new product that competes with your company’s main offering. Or maybe a recent event has shaped the perception of your industry in a negative way. Without competitive intelligence, you will likely miss market changes, make mistakes, and experience setbacks.
As mentioned, CI is about gathering the intelligence you need to make long-term business decisions. To come up with useful competitive insights, you must first gather and analyze data.
How to apply competitive intelligence?
In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, keeping tabs on the competition is critical to the success of your business. By analyzing the competitive landscape, organizations gain valuable insights that allow them to compete more effectively with other players in their market segment. Consequently, competitive intelligence has become an essential strategic tool for developing product sales enablement and marketing programs to drive success. After all, you can’t keep up with the competition if you don’t know anything about them.
The investigation may require the commitment of substantial resources, both time and money. So what is the reward? It is a powerful tool to shape your company’s strategic differentiation from the competition and help in the development of messages and product positioning.
The goal is not to find out what competitors are doing with their marketing strategies and product offerings and then match them against the function of the function. Instead, you want to identify things that your company is doing differently, more effectively than your competitor: a sales tactic, product offering, or value proposition that has helped you win business in the past. Something your competitors aren’t doing, say a unique pricing or support scheme or a referral program. Then highlight that point of differentiation in every sales pitch you make.
Use the information to arm your sales team to overcome objections. Instead of getting bogged down in individual feature comparisons, give your team ammunition to demonstrate how your solution/product performs better than the competition on use cases that are relevant to prospective customers. Ultimately, competitive intelligence helps you highlight your company’s strengths and puts you in a position to win more sales opportunities.
Knowing what your competitors are doing will also help you identify new business opportunities, such as expanding operations into underserved geolocations and vertical markets or creating new products and services that outperform your competitor’s offerings. Other potential use? Explaining the competitive landscape puts you in a great position to identify acquisition targets if that’s part of your plan to grow your business.
Who uses Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is only as good as what it produces: better preparation, happier customers, stronger revenue growth, etc. To get these results, you must activate the Intel you gather: you must put it in the hands of your colleagues.
People who use competitive intelligence:
- product managers
- vendors
- sales representatives
- executive leaders
Product managers use Intel to determine what to build.
So how does Intel get activated for its product team? It’s a tricky question; as you may know, many PMS like to do their own competitive research. To find out what will work best for your particular colleagues, you’ll first need to chat with them and get a sense of what they’re already doing and how they feel about their existing CI workflows.
In general, though, a feature comparison matrix is a safe bet.
Competitive intelligence addresses two primary business needs: making informed decisions and making them fast. CI encompasses research on competitor activities, industry trends, the general market environment, and customer sentiment. Armed with this data, a company can navigate the market with a clear strategy.
- Find useful information to plan your business strategies effectively.
- Identify who your real competitors are. You may think you know who your competition is, but there’s always the chance of missing out on a key competitor.
- Analyze the performance of your competitors and see what is helping them succeed. The key here is not to copy your competitors but to excel at your job. Learn what they are doing and get one step ahead of them.
What is the goal of competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the practice of monitoring your competitors, markets, and customers to acquire, aggregate, and disseminate information. The objective of competitive intelligence is that a company or individual can make intelligent and strategic decisions with that information.
These decisions can be made when risks and opportunities are better understood. Often the results of the analyzed data are shared with a group of decision-makers. This is often done in the form of a board report.
This Board report will be a summary of all the different types of intelligence collected after being analyzed and analyzed. They are also likely to hand over this data to an executive group. The accompanying briefing will have similar data presented, but to an audience with different objectives.
Having, and more importantly, being able to interpret competitive intelligence will provide a holistic view of market conditions, current business position, and competitors. There is a common lack of competitive intelligence focusing primarily on gathering information from your competition. While this is certainly an important aspect, it is far from complete.
Being able to make better decisions relies on having as much relevant data as possible. This data does not end with the competitors. You start by looking at your own business model, goals, and directions. It then branches out to incorporate more entities.
When people think of competitive intelligence, they often conjure up thoughts of defense or military contractors conducting espionage for subsistence. This is not an accurate picture of what it really is. In truth, a wide variety of industries would stand to benefit from using it. Competitive intelligence is often industry driven. Certain industries rely on it and have adopted it as a necessary practice. Apart from defense and military, any fast-paced industry with long life cycles would benefit.
What are the main elements of competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is intended to give companies a competitive advantage in the marketplace. For a company to truly gain a competitive advantage, all of your teams need access to the intelligence that will affect them so you can adjust, respond, and improve your division.
While many think of competitive intelligence initially as competitor intelligence, meaning just tracking your competitors, there is much more you need to track to gain comprehensive competitive intelligence and move your business forward.
Acquisition | Sales | ESG | Innovation | Product | Supply chain
Industry intelligence tracks what is happening in large groups of companies. Sectors are created by aggregation companies with similar primary business activities such as healthcare, financial, information technology, communications, etc. Look for economic changes and large-scale changes for these categorical companies.
Since each industry has unique characteristics and a different risk profile, industry intelligence provides access to these trends.
Typically, consultants and investors from management, advisory or investment firms will use industry intelligence at least weekly to help them make key recommendations.
For example, investment banks must make buy/sell decisions quickly. Sector intelligence plays a key role in making that decision, as stocks tend to follow the performance of their relative sector.
Similarly, consulting firms provide knowledge-based services and recommendations. They commonly work with companies going through very difficult times, such as bankruptcy. Partners of these companies need up-to-date industry intelligence first to sell their expertise to companies but also to make these critical recommendations that play critical roles in a company’s future.