Competitive Intelligence (CI)

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the action of deﬁning, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in strategic decision making for an organization.

Competitive Intelligence can be split into four steps of action:

1. Defining

Seeing true success is impossible if you do not properly take time to deﬁne your company’s use case. Several factors beyond competitors and industry can have major impacts are your business. Defining your company’s use case for competitive intelligence will require both an inward and outward look on internal business functions and external factors.

Make sure to identify and define these potential factors to better understand your need for competitive intelligence:

Primary Competitors
Potential Customers
Business Investors
Supply Markets
Demand Markets
Government Regulations
Weather trends
Other Potential Business Factors

2. Gathering

Now that you have deﬁned what can affect your business you will need to ﬁnd an efﬁcient way of gathering impactful activity as quick and as often as possible. The worst outcome would be to discover a business-critical problem too late and not have enough time to react appropriately.

The old methods of pulling a massive level of data manually or pulling a general aggregated report is problematic as both methods still cause you to waste precious time, which could be spent acting on the upcoming issue, avoiding the problems altogether, or working on new projects and business developments.

With the advancement of Artiﬁcial Intelligence and Machine Learning, it is now possible to automate data gathering, leveraging technology to signal potential problems and advantages far earlier and in a more insightful way so you and your team can be proactive in preventing these problems and get ahead of market and competitor trends.

Don’t waste any more time gathering data by yourself, let AI do that, spend more time acting on the data provided by AI and expert analysts with platforms like Insightsfirst.

3. Analyzing

Analyzing data you’ve gathered is time-consuming when done manually.

Actionable Insights are difﬁcult to automate, especially when pulling assets that rely on cross-referencing data between multiple data points.

It has been an eternal struggle to ﬁnd the ‘perfect’ report. Only 31% of companies claim to be “data-driven,” so, many professionals ﬁnd themselves stuck attempting to interpret data into actionable insights leading to important details slipping through the cracks.

Using a competitive and market intelligence platform can help in the analyzing stage by:

Eliminate difficulties when analyzing what data is important and what data is not.
Eliminate any internal bias toward specific data sets.
Help identify clearer pathways to new strategies and markets.

The Deﬁning stage is critical to understanding why and how certain data points relate to and inﬂuence each other, but at the end of the day, it requires a level of industry knowledge that is hard-pressed to ﬁnd at scale or cost-effective. It is a balancing act.

Analyzing should be separated from Strategic Decision Making. You are squandering precious time in the pursuit of understanding what is happening. Focus on scaling your efforts with automation so you can leverage your domain expertise at scale, build a plan with more information, and have the time to ensure your plan is executed to your speciﬁcations.

4. Distributing

You’ve deﬁned business impacts, scaled data gathering, and are getting that data processed into actionable insights regularly. Now that you’ve got an amazing action plan in place you must implement it quickly, efﬁciently, and ﬂexibly.

Keeping all the moving pieces in the right place can be a time suck.

One-to-One communications are outdated, and versioning becomes a huge problem, so utilize configurable features of a Competitive and Market Intelligence platform to send relevant information such as key competitor articles, data insights, and market trends to the appropriate people.

Leverage technology to create one source of truth with what actions need to happen and make sure it’s easy to access and scalable by configuring your Competitive and Market intelligence platform to show you the most relevant information first.

Configure your CRM, Messaging platform, and Competitive and Market Intelligence platforms into one to distribute information across multiple teams within your organization to streamline communication and eliminate unnecessary time sucks.

Conclusion

Getting started is hard, especially from scratch. Premade solutions can be costly when customizing for your business’s specific competitive and market intelligence needs. At Evalueserve we have experts that make the process easy and it all starts with a simple conversation. From there we’ll set up a diagnostics workshop to understand your current processes and goals, work with you to co-design to-be processes, and create an execution roadmap.

Request a demo of Insightsfirst to improve you competitive intelligence strategy.