Competitive Intelligence For All Teams
Competitive intelligence is much more than the cliche of “knowing your enemy”. CI from Aqute Intelligence gathers insights and information to help businesses improve their short-term decisions.
It’s also about identifying opportunities for business growth or expansion that you may have missed before. CI is primarily gathered from competitors’ websites, blogs and social media channels.
Identifying Your Competitors
Competitive intelligence is a valuable tool that can be used by every team in your business. From product teams planning their roadmaps around competitor blindspots to sales teams adjusting pitches to competitors’ claims, competitive intelligence can empower all teams to take better decisions.
The first step to competitive intelligence is to identify your competition. A robust competitive landscape includes both direct competitors and indirect competitors. This complete picture allows your team make strategic decisions that will improve the results of your company.
Once you have a solid understanding of your competitors, the next step is to prioritize your research. If you don’t know where to start, it can be easy to collect more information than is necessary for your organization. Start by identifying your goals in step 2. From there you can prioritize which sources of data will be most helpful in achieving those goals. For example, if you’re trying to refine your marketing, focus on sources like competitor websites, social media profiles and whitepapers, but skip those that aren’t relevant.
Customer research is another valuable source of competitive intelligence. You can gain valuable insight into your marketing strategy by observing which competitors your ideal customers choose and why.
Identifying Their Strategies
Competitive intelligence aims to create a detailed picture of your market so that you can anticipate threats and opportunities before they occur. This requires collecting a wide range of data and information from both published and unpublished sources, assessing their accuracy, and using it to guide your decision making. This also includes complying with all laws, regulations, and rules regarding the gathering of information, ensuring privacy, and minimizing any risk of sensitive data being leaked.
The information you collect can be used to identify both direct and indirect competitors. A direct competitor would be a company that directly competes against your product or service, while an indirect rival is a business offering products that are not directly competing with yours but may still solve the same problems or meet the needs of the same customers. This information will also help you identify which market segments your competitor targets, as well as the customer profiles and purchasing habits.
Once you’ve identified your competition, you can then start analyzing their tactics. Clarifying your overall business goals helps you to prioritize the types of information that you are seeking. If your goal is to expand into new markets and increase revenue, you should focus your attention on the competitors who are most likely to have an impact on your goals. Similarly, if your sales reps are struggling to close deals with certain accounts, you should use the insights from competitive intelligence to understand why and target those accounts more strategically.
As a best practice, every company should have a central repository for competitive intelligence that can be easily searched and accessed by all stakeholders. This will ensure that all stakeholders receive the correct information at the appropriate time. Implementing an internal messaging system that allows you to collect competitive intelligence real-time is one of the best ways to achieve this. This is an excellent way to create a culture of competitive intelligence where everyone is sharing what they’ve seen and heard.
Having all the information in the world is meaningless if it’s not turned into actionable insights that your team can utilize to achieve your business objectives. It’s crucial to update your information based on the changes in the competitive landscape.
Identifying Your Opportunities
Competitive intelligence is not corporate espionage as some may think. It’s a way to gain an understanding of how competitors will react in various scenarios, without them even realizing it. This allows your company to plan ahead so that you can have a strategy ready in case a competitor takes a step that could be detrimental to you.
You can identify your competitors’ weaknesses by using a variety sources, including social media, website data, newsletters, and more. For example, if your competitor is promoting a new product, you can create a similar offer to attract new customers. You can also train your reps if you see that a competitor’s sales team has trouble closing deals.
As you continue collecting intel, keep in mind that interpreting and sharing these findings across the organization is the most valuable part. It’s easy for you to get caught up in the research part of this process because it takes a lot of time and requires a great deal of focus. However, if no one sees your findings and leverages them to improve the company’s strategies, there’s really no point in gathering any information at all.
To avoid this, consider establishing a competitive intelligence deliverables process. This involves determining the best way to distribute your intel and ensuring that key stakeholders see it and utilize it. For instance, some companies share their competitive intel through email, while others hold meetings or utilize internal chats to distribute the findings.
Regardless of how you choose to approach the process, it’s important to remember that your competitors aren’t just trying to beat you. They’re also looking to learn from you, and that means they’re able to teach you a thing or two in the process. In fact, embracing competitive intelligence and learning from the mistakes (and successes) of your competitors can help you develop more precise buyer personas. This will allow your marketing and sales teams to create business strategies that perfectly match your customers’ needs.
Identifying Your Threats
While it’s a cliche to “know your enemy,” Competitive Intelligence takes this concept to the next level. This ensures companies aren’t surprised by a competitor’s moves. When done right, this kind of research can reveal a variety of strategic opportunities for growth, while also identifying threats and potential areas of risk.
The most important thing to remember is that competitive intelligence shouldn’t be a one-time activity; it’s a continuous process. Depending on the nature of your business, and where you are in the cycle of development for a new product, you should aim to conduct a competitor review on a weekly or monthly basis (or even more frequently).
Once all the research has been conducted, it’s time to start analyzing it. Here is where competitive intelligence really shines, when it’s turned into insights your team can use for improvement. It’s also where it can be possible to lose sight of your goals if you don’t maintain a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve from the outset.
This step is where you can find out which competitor insights are most useful for your business and focus on generating those. It’s also where the real work starts – taking all this data and transforming it into something useful for your company, such as a report, chart, infographic, or other form of communication that can be used to inform strategy, decision-making, or simply to empower your sales team with up-to-date competitor intelligence.
Competitive intelligence is used differently by every department and position within your organization. However, it’s important to remember that there are two types:
Tactical competitive Intelligence is focused on the short-term and provides actionable insights that you can implement immediately in your business. This could involve tweaking pricing strategies to reflect your competitors’ price cuts or refining a campaign based off consumer behavior data.
Strategic competitive intelligence (SCI) is a long-term strategy that helps you understand the big picture challenges affecting your industry, marketplace and technological evolution. It could help you identify new product and market opportunities, or improve your business model in order to be more competitive.