Competitive intelligence 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 enables you to learn from your competitor’s mistakes and strive to improve in areas where they may be better than you. Conducted properly competitive analysis will help you:
- Develop new products and features,
- Identify gaps in the market,
- Uncover trends, and
- Market and sell your product more effectively.
To create quality competitive intelligence, data from many sources needs to be analysed to create insights that are useful for the intended audience. It involves collection of data from different sources for different competitors. The type of data analysis is specific to the insights that need to be extracted. So, it is often difficult to chalk out a clearly defined process for competitive intelligence.
Distribution of Competitive intelligence traditionally is done via email newsletters, conference calls, providing access to documents on internal file servers and several other ways. Several organizations try out various systems to distribute competitive insights to the target audience. Often these systems are very challenging to sustain consistently for a long time. These initiatives can get really complex to update. They either share unfiltered information to the teams causing information overload. They become very generic and tend to lose in terms of popularity among the users. Since it would not be discussed as much and solely the system loses popularity.
To sustain competitive intelligence initiatives, it has to be
Contextual - to the sales opportunity
Easily accessible - Ideally in the existing tools
Easy to update - on a regular basis
Single source of truth - without access to old outdated versions
A structured approach - follow a simple narrative or a story. Include the organization’s sales philosophies like challenger etc.
Easily customizable for the organization.
Right amount of un-complicated insights. The more information there is the more difficult it will be to maintain it.
Possibility for a two way communication - Quick field feedback helps your organization gain competitive advantage over your competitors.