Competitive Intelligence, sometimes referred to as business intelligence, refers to the skill to gather, analyze, and use information collected on participants, customers, and other market factors contributing to a business’s cheap advantage. Competitive Intelligence is crucial because it helps companies understand their competitive environment and the opportunities and challenges it presents. Businesses analyze the information to create effective and efficient business practices.
How does competitive Intelligence works?
By definition, competitive Intelligence assembles actionable information from diverse published and unpublished sources, collected efficiently and ethically. Ideally, a business successfully employs competitive Intelligence by cultivating a detailed enough portrait of the marketplace so it may anticipate and respond to challenges and problems before they arise.
Here are some problems that will face in a competitive field in competitive Intelligence is:
1.) poor competitive differentiation: Competitive intl was too general and didn’t differentiate based on specific competitors. The information was also feature-specific, rather than giving insight for employees to set the product apart from valued propositions. It didn’t help the business stand out.
2.) decentralized competitive Intelligence : Information was being pushed out, but it was scattered everywhere. Employees would have to sift through old emails, docs, and slides in an attempt to find the insights they needed.
3.) internal messaging was inaccurate: Out-of-date information is terrible but incorrect information is worse. There was a disconnect between what marketing said and what sales experienced; marketing campaigns pushed positive positioning slants that weren’t true
4.) competitive information lacked strategic direction: There was no clearly defined strategy behind the competitive Intelligence being gathered. Sales teams were using the intel on an ad-hoc basis rather than creating structured battle cards that could help them through every sales cycle stage.
Competitive Intelligence is the systematic collection and analysis of information from multiple sources and a coordinated business’s competitive advantage. It 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 means understanding and learning what is happening in the world outside the business to increase one’s competitiveness. It means learning as much as possible, as soon as possible, about one’s external environment, including one’s industry in general and relevant competitors.
Key Takeaways
Competitive Intelligence is a legal business practice instead of industrial espionage, which is illegal.
The focus is on the external business environment.
There is a process involved in gathering information, converting it into Intelligence, and then using it in decision making.
Some Competitive intelligence professionals erroneously emphasize that if the Intelligence gathered is not usable or actionable, it is not Intelligence.
How Competitive Intelligence Works In order to obtain competitive Intelligence, companies can gather data and information from a vast amount of sources: customers, competitors, industry experts and reports, trade shows and conferences, financial statements, and government records. Additionally, due to the explosion of user-generated content on blogs, forums, social networks, and more, more information is available than ever before. This has led to a new phenomenon named ‘information overload.’ To deal with this exponential expansion of data, companies rely on tools and apps that help them collect, process, and analyze data more efficiently.
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