CI helps businesses create a picture of the market that guides their overall business strategy. It’s not enough to collect data; you need to transform it into insights that your team can use to take action. Getting reliable and relevant intel will help you identify trends that can be activated for your sales and marketing teams.
1. Identifying Your Competitors
The act of gathering competitor intelligence is the most time-consuming part of competitive intelligence. You’ll often be sifting though competitor websites, social media, announcements, and content in order to find the most useful information. By keeping your business goals in mind, you can prioritize what you’re looking for and focus only on the sources with the most information.
It may be tempting to track every competitor. However, a more targeted approach will produce better results in your competitive intelligence analysis. Focus instead on the two to four rivals who pose the greatest threat to your business’ growth. These competitors don’t have to be industry giants. They should be the companies your ideal customers would turn to if you weren’t available.
Once you have identified the main competitors in your market it is time to analyze their strengths and weakness. Whether you’re using competitor data to improve sales or marketing strategies, it’s important to take the time to understand what your competitors are doing right and wrong.
Reading customer reviews and online forums on competitor products is a great way to find out what customers think. This information can help you identify the ‘pain points,’ or problems that your competitors’ clients are experiencing. You can then create campaigns or product improvements that address these issues.
Similarly, learning what your competitors’ pricing tiers are can be useful for improving your own go-to-market strategies. This knowledge can be used to create more effective demo scripts and sales collateral, or to craft more compelling price offers that will help drive more revenue for your business.
It’s important that you share your CI findings with all teams in your organization to get the maximum benefit from it. Knowing the pricing, product features, and strategy of your competitors allows each department to adjust their strategies accordingly. This can result in stronger and more effective marketing, improved customer engagement and a more robust go-to-market strategy. Sales, for instance, can make better-informed product pitches and provide feedback on the features of competitors that they feel lack.
2. Analyzing Your Competitors
Once you have gathered competitive information, it is important to separate signal and noise. You should also ensure that the intel you have is useful. One way to do this is by centralizing all of your competitor information in a single location, whether through a dedicated competitive intelligence tool or a well-organized spreadsheet. Another way is to categorize and tag your intel, allowing you to quickly access it when needed. Finally, a third way is to triage new intel and prioritize it accordingly.
Once you have defined your competitors, it is time to analyze their actions and capabilities. You want to know how your competitors’ goals and strategies align with their capabilities and how you can use this information to create new opportunities for your business. For example, a competitor’s investments in a new product or service could be an indicator that they are expecting to see increased demand in the future.
It is more than just a cliche to “know your opponent”; it’s a way to understand the business plans of your rivals and how they’ll respond to different threats. It helps you create a moat to help your business survive the growing competition.
Ideally, you should also be looking at your own business’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitors. This will allow your business to identify its own growth opportunities, and provide you with a roadmap for the future of your company.
You may be able, for example, to develop products and services that are targeted at a specific segment of customers that your competitors have been ignoring. Or, if your competitor is trying to dominate a particular niche market, you can leverage this information to develop messaging that will appeal to the needs of that market.
A good competitor analysis will also identify gaps in your market, which can help you better position your own offerings. For example, if your competitors are heavily promoting products that cater to competitive athletics, you can use this information to develop marketing materials that appeal to customers who prefer more casual movements.
3. Developing A Strategy
Having a deep understanding of the competition empowers teams to develop and implement effective strategies. These can be tactical (short-term) or strategic (longer-term), but regardless of the scope of the effort, it’s important to have a clear plan of action to get started.
Once your team has identified their competitors and established a competitive intelligence process, it’s time to start gathering data. This can be a time-consuming step in a CI program. You’ll need explore competitor websites and social networks, monitor announcements, collect information about new hiring initiatives and pricing changes, etc.
The best competitive intelligence professionals can collect and analyze large quantities of information quickly and effectively. This is due in large part to technological advancements, which have enabled businesses to collect information through automated real-time channels such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing. This has allowed businesses to scale up their efforts, incorporating data from a variety of sources including unstructured data like audio and videos and customer feedback.
While collecting competitive intelligence requires number crunching skills, the most valuable competitive intelligence data often comes from qualitative sources, such as customer feedback, win/loss interviews, and internal meetings. CI teams need a system to capture this data and a way to communicate the value of these findings to other departments.
For example, if a competitor is opening and closing stores in your geographic region, competitive intelligence data can inform a marketing strategy that targets those areas. It can help a team of product managers better anticipate market changes by aligning new features and abilities with competitor strengths and weaknesses.
It is important to ensure that the research and insights your team produces are actually consumed by stakeholders. This can be achieved by implementing deliverables, such as reports, presentations, and internal communications, to make it easy for anyone on your team to find and use the data that you’ve collected. This ensures that your research is being utilized and that you’re able to leverage the information you’ve collected to improve your company’s performance.
4. Implementing A Strategy
A solid competitive intelligence program is not just about collecting data on your competitors, but also using that information to make informed business decisions. That’s what makes a strategy successful.
Before the Internet, competitive intelligence (CI) grew out of a covert human intelligence model — think FBI agents framing themselves as prospective customers to gather competitor intel. While such spying is neither ethical nor sustainable, CI is now more like market intelligence, focusing on core competitors. This is what drives CI’s impressive growth, with the percentage of businesses monitoring their competitors at least once a month rising from 64 to 70% in just five years.
A robust CI program will provide useful information for every department and team within the business. This can range from tactical intelligence to more strategic insights. It should help all employees in the company to understand how their product or service compares with the competition, identify opportunities and threats, as well as plan for the future.
It’s important to start by remembering that the majority of competitor information you require already exists within your organization. Whether it’s in your CRM or scribbled on the back of a napkin, your business is already tracking key competitor information — it’s just a matter of prioritizing and organizing it.
Once you have a solid framework in place, now is the time to start implementing your CI strategies. Begin by ensuring that your team is trained to recognize and prioritize competitive intelligence. Then, implement a system for collecting and reporting that information to the team.
It could be as simple as setting up a dedicated CI-channel or sharing research findings on competitive intelligence in meetings, emails and newsletters. It can also include incorporating CI into the work of your internal teams, such as having salespeople reference competitive intelligence when addressing customer objections or adjusting their go-to-market approach.
By taking advantage of new technology and techniques, you can collect and analyze a much larger volume of information more efficiently and effectively. Artificial intelligence tools can automate a range of tasks, including the collection of data. They can also digitize analog sources, such as phone conversations. More and more businesses are turning towards a centralized AI powered CI platform in order to support their analysis and research efforts.
