7 Elements of Competitive Intelligence

Competitor Intelligence

Competitor Intelligence is focused on understanding the movements and decisions of competitors in your industry.

It is meant to track how your competitors are developing products, selling services, marketing, winning sales deals, and the overall competitiveness of other businesses within your industry or landscape. It also gives you a comparison of your products and services vs. competitors.

It is critical for every team to understand and track what the competition is doing with their coinciding department and how it is impacting their business, the market, consumers, etc.

Competitor Intelligence can be especially useful for marketing and sales teams to understand how competitors are marketing their own products and services and winning deals with prospects that you might have been targeting.

The need for Competitor Intelligence arises as competition is increasingly getting more difficult. Understanding your competitors’ overall strategy for winning deals in your landscape can help your sales, marketing, product, and other departments combat the strategies of your competitors and ultimately bring in more revenue for the business.

Challenges such as understanding where you place in the market, how you can win new customers, and how you can keep loyal customers can all lead your business to gather competitor intelligence.

Competitor Intelligence is important to the success of your business so you can remain competitive in your industry and potentially stay ahead of the curve. With competitor intelligence, you research what your competitors are doing, monitor their movements, and create strategies to combat them so that you can improve the overall competitiveness of your business, meet the needs of your customers and prospects, and close more deals.

Competitor Intelligence helps different teams within a business understand how counterpart teams working for a competitor manage their movements and business decisions. It’s important because it can identify how marketing teams are adapting their messaging, sales teams are adapting their strategies, and product teams are developing or refining products.

Innovation Intelligence

Disruption describes a process whereby a smaller company wither fewer resources can successfully challenge established incumbent businesses.

Innovation intelligence is the process of solving problems by discovering and combining ideas and methods in new ways.

To grow and evolve to ever-changing markets, all businesses need intelligence on innovation to gain early-market advantage and stay competitive.

Innosight Research found that the average tenure of a company on the S&P 500 Index decreased 38% in the past 50 years and it continues to shrink. This is because companies are failing to innovate and keep up with changing consumer preferences.

Whether your business is an incumbent or disrupter, Innovation Intelligence is essential to your success.

• Incumbent businesses benefit from tracking disruptors in the market to enable their teams to innovate new products and services or improve current products and services.
• Disruptors benefit from innovation and disruption intelligence to understand where there are holes in the market that they could fill and find where less-demanding customers are unsatisfied with incumbent businesses.

One of the challenges that lead to innovation and disruption is the overextension of a business. Some incumbents overextend their business beyond their reach. This leads to some customers receiving less attention than other high-ticket customers. Innovators and disrupters in the market can identify customer pain points and offer better solutions.

Innovation and Disruption Intelligence is the essence of a competitive environment that enables incumbent businesses to further develop their products, and it enables industry disruptors to find holes in the market that have yet to be filled or create their own market to address new problems faced by consumers.

It helps businesses address rapid changes in customer behavior, the influx of competitors from different industries trying to expand their reach, identify needs for new offerings, and change their sales model to remain competitive in their respective markets.

Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence is the use of data and software to help salespeople focus their effort on buying ready accounts, generate leads, create customer profiles, better manage their data, and more. Businesses change daily and sales need tools that constantly monitor them. 

Too often sales teams are running one campaign per quarter are focused on accounts that don’t have a current need.  Sales Intelligence monitors the market constantly for triggers that indicate buyer readiness.  It also provides research on key accounts for personalized and relevant outreach.

Notably, battle cards are incredibly popular – especially for SaaS sales.  Battle cards give reps the info they need when competitor objections come up on calls so they aren’t caught off guard. 

Procurement and Supply Chain Intelligence

Procurement and Supply Chain Intelligence is the process of gathering and analyzing information relevant to your supply and vendor contracts which helps you confidently make decisions in sourcing and category management.

This type of intel gives you insight into:

• Supply and demand figures
• Costs of production
• Competitive sale price
• Storage Costs
• Regulatory and taxation risk/costs
• Material supply intel
• Vendor/Partner Breakdown

Essentially, supply chain intelligence constantly monitors what’s happening in the market to inform what rate of production is required based on demand, where is the best place to manufacture/store, and what your costs vs sale price is so you’re producing what the market wants and come out profitable to give you that bigger competitive edge.

The mid-term challenge for sourcing teams are commodity and category inflation.  The quantitative easing measures applied by many central banks, coupled with commodity demand increase due to recovery, are expected to lead to cost inflation across several categories. Procurement teams will need to anticipate that, forecast it in the relevant categories, plan for it, and manage it appropriately.

In the long-term, this function is poised to be disrupted through newer technologies and business models.  Technologies such as block-chain and business models like Amazon B2B are just a few examples of what companies are experimenting with. The disruptions arising from these models have the potential to transform different parts of the sourcing value chain.

– Vishal Suri, Associate VP and Solutions Architect of Corporates and Professional Services, Evalueserve

Procurement and supply chain intelligence is important in giving a company a competitive edge because it helps procurement and supply chain teams identify ways to save money and reduce the risk for the organization. It also helps achieve benefits like improved credibility, risk monitoring, trend identification, and supplier identification.

ESG Intelligence

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Intelligence is focused on understanding the impact your business practices have on the environment, social issues, and government relations.

It tracks your environmental footprint, where your industry and competitors are headed with sustainability, and the environmental impact. Social welfare and other humanitarian efforts competitors are making, and relationships with foreign and national governments.

ESG Intelligence is important for businesses to adapt their business to shifting attitudes about environmental, social, and government relations. As other businesses adapt their business models, customers demand more ESG impact, and the landscape adjusts to becoming more sustainable, it’s important for businesses to track these changes so they can adapt faster than their competitors and lead the change that consumers appear to be demanding.

Businesses cannot ignore ESG and ESG Intelligence allows them to stay on top of the changes happening.