Competitive Intelligence from Clients – What Should I Ask?

If you want to win more business, you have to take it from the competition. I know that’s obvious, but generating competitive intelligence that actually helps you compete more effectively is a surprising low priority of too many companies.

But, if your CI program is based on increasing market share, competing more effectively and leading your industry, you are going to have to find the most effective areas of CI. Last week, I posted my thoughts on generating CI from your Voice of the Customer programs.

Today, I’ll provide some ideas of different types of questions that might be asked in each stage of the prospect/client relationship. The following table provides a summary of question topics that might fit your situation.

If you don’t already perform all of these VOC programs, don’t worry. You can move many of the questions around to fit into your existing programs. Or, you might want to craft a new intelligence initiative to answer a group of questions.

And, be careful to make sure that you can ask these types of questions to all of your clients and prospects. Some industries are more sensitive than others.

Either way, you will harvest information that should provide you with competitive advantages in the near future.

This is the kind of work that we do at Primary Intelligence every day. It is our goal to make our Competitive Intelligence clients look like the hero.

And, if you need some help trying to figure out what works for you, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence and TOO MUCH DATA!

Ron Sathoff (an associate of mine at Primary Intelligence) brought me the results of a study from Advertising Age. The most interesting chart was called, "What Middle Managers Say About Obtaining Necessary Data" and the responses to the survey were generated from 1,009 US and UK respondents in January 2007.

(Source: Advertising Age, Digital Marketing & Media Fast Pack, Published April 23, 2007, Copyright 2007 Crain Communications Inc.)

If you are a competitive intelligence professional, you have to focus on improving the:

-relevancy of your data
-distribution methods of your data

If you consider that 59% say they can’t find existing information, 45% say that they don’t know what the rest of the company is doing and 40% of the respondents say that other parts of the company won’t share info, you have 144% of the people that are experiencing a problem.

Well, that’s not quite right (and you can see the my statistics training didn’t really stick), but it sure seems odd to me that this many managers are not able to find the information necessary to do their jobs better.

So how does a company overcome these obstacles and distribute information more effectively?

1- Someone in the organization has to understand and coordinate the primary
intelligence-gathering campaigns. Depending on the size of the organization,
this may be a difficult task, but a Director of CI should be able to compile and
update a basic list

2- This list needs to be distributed to different levels of management.
People in the organization need to know what is available.

3- If you have a “librarian” that catalogues the data, it is not enough
to “store” it in convenient places. Reports need to be advertised. Data needs to
be presented. Even an internal company newsletter to managers and execs would
help to serve the purpose. But, nobody can hide behind the excuse, “That report
has been posted to the intranet for months. They should have known.” You have to
innovate to distribute intelligence effectively

4- Road shows – Take data on the road. Summarize reports. Go to
scheduled meetings, whether the meeting is down the hall or down the interstate.

5- Build trust with rogue departments that don’t want to share data.
Find out why they want to hold it so close to the vest and work your way into
their trust

6- Recommend consultants to help departments build in the resident
intelligence. Some data recipients like to read reports and distill the results
into their own recommendations. The majority prefers to get the summary, next
steps and action plan. If this is in your comfort zone, go for it. If not, get
outside expertise.

This is the information age. Companies run on intelligence. They run efficiently and better than the competition when they run on the right data at the right time.

If you are an order taker, stop. You still have to listen, but you have to do more than run projects on an as-needed basis. Take responsibility for your company’s intelligence and make it work for more people.

If you have thoughts, questions or suggestions, contact me (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

A Compliment from a Client on our Competitive Intelligence Services

Today, I'm going to beg your forgiveness, but we received a compliment from one of our clients and it really means a lot to me that they would send an unsolicited comment about Primary Intelligence's services.

"We use several sources of information to identify trends in our target market, including government-collected statistics, and reports from industry analysts and news services. However, the data that provides us the richest insight into the needs of our market is the Win Loss data from Primary Intelligence. It tells us everything -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- something our customers and prospects won't always tell us directly first hand, which is exactly what we need to run our day to day business as well as develop future strategy."

While this seems like a shameless plug, we are very proud to be a leading provider of intelligence to "a satisfied Fortune 500 customer." (Contact and company names withheld to maintain confidentiality agreements) It isn't every day that someone tells you that you are doing something right.

When you look at your competitive intelligence initiatives, consider discussing your plans with Primary Intelligence. We can help you build your processes. We can fulfill your service needs. We can help you make use of the results.

Let me know how we can be of service (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Where does your Competitive Intelligence Go?

In some recent studies from Primary Intelligence, we have asked representatives from various industries and company sizes "Who has access to the competitive intelligence data?"

For the most part, Competitive Intelligence is distributed to executives and marketing managers. Sales receives the information to a lesser degree.

From our observations:

-Execs receive the data. Generally, they are sponsoring the research

-Point of the lance (Sales Reps) are not being included

-Indicates a predominance of strategic intelligence over tactical intelligence?

From my point of view, I think that it is an interesting phenomenon that the sales reps are not receiving the competitive intelligence as often as other departments. If they are front line, I would want to push out a little more information to them and help them be more competitive. If I were a sales rep, I would ask for more of this information.

I am curious about your experience with the executive group. What do they ask for the most? And, in your experience, do they use the information you provide? My experience is that many CI initiatives are reactionary ("Why did we lose that deal?!?!? When did [competitor] start selling widgets to compete with ours?!?!?!") By the time the Competitive Intelligence has been compiled, so much time has passed that the data can't be used.

But, I'm willing to believe that I haven't seen it all. Hopefully, there are various experiences.

What is your organization doing to broaden the distribution of your Competitive Intelligence? How are you maximizing the usefulness and benefits of your programs? Let me know how you think the intelligence should be used (or how the perfect CI program would run if you had a magic wand).

I'm here at cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050

Voice of the Customer Should Be Used to Collect Competitive Intelligence

Yesterday, Primary Intelligence hosted a webinar for a great group of people. The purpose of this presentation was to show how current Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives can be modified to provide Competitive Intelligence to different departments.

The first step is to review your current touch points with customers at different stages of the relationship. The second is to figure out how to add competitive intelligence questions into those processes.

Of course, if you don’t have those processes in place already, you might consider the cost/benefit of implementing a broader range of VOC “listening programs” (surveys).

You can see below a chart that shows many possible interaction points with your clients. Every single one of these touch points is a potential source of competitive intelligence.

This is a chance to think strategically about your VOC program in relation to CI. You should be asking yourself “During each phase of the relationship, what does my client think or know about my competitors and marketplace?”

And, you would be very surprised by how much your clients actually do know about your competitors. They may have purchased from you, but they have evaluated many other vendors over time.

Over the next few days, we’ll review specific ways to integrate CI questions into different steps.

I would also like to thank everyone that attended the webinar. We had a very interactive group and the questions provided a very rich environment for knowledge exchange.

As a follow-up, we’re hosting a panel discussion on Tuesday, April 24 at 2PM ET (11AM PT). If you are interested in participating in an open discussion, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)

Leave me a comment on the topic. What would you like to know about this topic?

Webinar (Tomorrow) - Competitive Intelligence from your VOC Program

Tomorrow, I will co-host a webinar with Ron Sathoff. The presentation will be made on April 19 at 2 PM ET (11 AM PT). You can register by clicking here. Consider yourself invited.

The fact of the matter is that your customers know nearly as much about the competition as they do about you. They evaluated the competition before selecting you as their vendor. They are regularly courted by the competition and many of your best clients also have purchased from your competitors, either in the past or currently. Take a minute to see if your VOC program is generating competitive intelligence.

Come join us and expand your Voice of the Customer/Competitive Intelligence horizons.

If you miss it, we'll post it to our website later.

Competitive Intelligence in the 21st Century – Moving Past the SWOT with Predictive Analytics

In my last post, I said that a SWOT analysis leaves a strategic decision-maker with a problem. You may be able to identify some competitive weaknesses (compared with a specific competitor or in the marketplace in general), but you don’t have any way of gauging what would happen to your market share if the weaknesses were improved.

And, you can’t tell whether continuing to improve the strengths would provide a bigger competitive benefit to your company’s efforts.

So, if a competitive intelligence professional spends all of their time studying the market and the end results is a list of strengths and weaknesses (with no predictive analytics or direction), how much value does that person provide?

I guess that I should be clear that a SWOT analysis is not useless. There is tactical value in a SWOT. You can figure out what to say today with a SWOT, but you can’t make strategic decisions based on a SWOT. There is still too much guesswork.

So what? Replace the SWOT with Impact-based Competitive Intelligence. For instance, Primary Intelligence does this all the time. To determine competitive strengths and weaknesses, we:

1-Interview recent wins and losses where your company competed head-to-head with specific competitors.
2-Measure your competitive performance in 20-30 specific decision influencers
3-Determine strengths and weaknesses (Not the gap score in the table below. Positive gaps indicate weaknesses. Negative gaps indicate strengths)
4-Use predictive analytics to determine the influencers that, it improved, would result in the greatest increases in market share. (Impact column, explained below)

Impact identifies your expected improvement in market share. For instance, in this example (a real-world example taken from one of our clients), if you were to improve your company’s performance in Product Knowledge by one point (In other words, if you improved the 7.7 rating to an 8.7), you would expect your win rate and market share to increase by the impact score of 5.7% (at the 90% confidence level).

And, Product Knowledge is already a competitive strength. Overall, you outperform the competition by 5% in this area. The key may be to make this competitive advantage more consistent throughout the company.

In other words, there are influencers that would provide 2x, 3x and 4x the results of others if improvement were made in those specific areas. This could result in gains of millions or billions of unexpected dollars, based on some potentially simple improvements in the right areas.

This approach takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. No espionage required. And, yet, the company makes the biggest gains in increasing its client base.

Now, this approach does not satisfy all Competitive Intelligence needs, but it sure does take the OPPORTUNITY column of the SWOT table to a completely different level.

I am happy to talk about this approach with you. Let me know what you think about how this would fit your organization. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Why the Competitive Intelligence SWOT is Stuck in the 20th Century

A very typical request we receive at Primary Intelligence is for a SWOT analysis. Our clients want to know the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats presented by a competitor or group of competitors in a marketplace.

Of course, this SWOT analysis has a place, but its value is more tactical than strategic. Sales guys should have access to a SWOT, but I don’t know that executives should make decisions based off of this kind of information.

The problem that I see with the SWOT analysis is the fact that a company will know where its current strengths and weaknesses may be, but doesn’t have any insight into the areas of change that will bring about the biggest improvement in win rates, market share and defeating the competition.

Below, you will see an example of a Strength/Weakness evaluation based on data from recent sales opportunities. Half of the data come from new business that was won and the other 50% come from opportunities that were lost to competitors: (click on the image to see a bigger version)

The data are sorted from biggest negative competitive gap (weakness) at the top to the biggest positive competitive gap (strength) at the bottom. The scores are based on a 1-10 scale where 1 is Poor and 10 is excellent.

If you were to make strategic changes in your company based on the data in this table, you would probably look at the weaknesses and evaluate the most effective ways to close the competitive gap.

But, would this make a difference? What would happen if you were to increase your performance in Overall Solution Cost or Understanding Needs by ten percent? (A 10% improvement would mean that you increase your score of 8.1 to 9.1) How much would your win rate increase? Would making improvements in your weaknesses correlate with a stronger competitive preference, or would you be pulling the wrong levers and pouring time and money down the drain?

Traditional intelligence looks at Strengths and Weaknesses
• Should you “fix” weaknesses or accentuate strengths?
• Strength/Weaknesses don’t always correlate with decision making.
• Where is your opportunity to increase win rates and market share?

In my experience, efforts to improve the biggest weaknesses rarely result in an overall improvement in market share and competitive sales wins. In other words, odds are good that most companies are wasting time and money by using SWOTs for strategic planning.

In my next post, I’ll show you a new way to prioritize your strategic plans, based on a more intelligent form of Competitive Intelligence and performance evaluation.

If you need more info on this topic, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)

And, don't forget to register for my webinar on Thursday. Click here to register (all of the info is on the registration page).

Producing ROI from your Competitive Intelligence - "How To:

If you have every spent any time talking with me about Competitive Intelligence, you know that I am a big proponent of intelligence programs that produce revenue. So many companies launch an intelligence program with the intention of "understanding the competitive landscape" but, this is hardly a focused goal.

Over time, the intelligence program expands (bloats) to include as many intelligence categories as possible. Soon, the company hires a "librarian" and implements content management systems just to keep all of the information organized. Corporate personnel are happy because they can ask just about any question and get an answer. CI personnel are happy because they have a job that keeps them busy and security for the future.

But, my argument has always centered on, "Why do the work if you can't justify the ROI?" In other words, Competitive Intelligence has to be a driving force for strategic corporate planning. The Competitive Intelligence group should be able to tell the executives, "At a high degree of confidence, if we do 'X' in market 'Y', we would expect a 10% increase in market share and revenues."

This is so much better than knowing "how many square feet are in our competitors' new warehouse in Cedar Rapids" or "what color is our competitor's intranet login page?"

How do you determine ROI criteria for your Competitive Intelligence? I'll give you some suggestions:

1) Top-line Revenue
–Will this intelligence create new revenue opportunities?
–Will we take away sales from the competition?
–Will our existing accounts stay longer and be more profitable?
2) Bottom-line
–Can we be more efficient or learn best practices?
–Are there better ways to manage our processes?
3) Application
–How easily will we be able to act on these data?

If your CI efforts match up well with these criteria, you are probably pretty advanced. If your initiatives serve other purposes, they may still be valid, but ROI probably isn't your goal. If you need some help determining the ROI potential of your efforts, talk to Primary Intelligence. We're here to help.

And, if you don't know what the purpose of your CI initiatives are, you need to start asking. Or, looking for another job. If you can't show potential return on your efforts, you run the risk of becoming as valuable as your data; interesting, but worthless.

Please, add to the ROI criteria list. Post a comment or call me (801.838.9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Competitive Intelligence, Right Under Your Nose

How often do you talk to your customers? If you add up the touches made by sales, account management, marketing and other client-facing services in your company, you might find that each of your customers is talking to you very regularly.

Hopefully, you have a central management group that has established some formal information gathering processes. Very common programs would include Customer Satisfaction, Account Loyalty, Win-back, Win Loss, Client Retention and Defection. Usually, these programs fall under the heading of "Voice of the Customer" (VOC).

So, you have two types of contact:
1-Informal, everyday conversations
2-Formal programs to gather Voice of the Customer Data

The fact of the matter is that your customers know nearly as much about the competition as they do about you. They evaluated the competition before selecting you as their vendor. They are regularly courted by the competition and many of your best clients also have purchased from your competitors, either in the past or currently.

Take a minute to see if your VOC program is generating competitive intelligence. In my experience, most customer sat and loyalty interviews focus on the client's experience with their present vendor. Go one step further and:

1-Ask your clients who they perceive as your biggest threats
2-Find out what they are hearing about the competitors' recent initiatives and offers
3-Understand how you stack up in various performance areas

The information will not only be enlightening, but will show your company what is happening in the market place in real time. Your company will benefit in the following ways:

1-Sales will know what is being said about your company by the competitors. They will have more intelligence to sell more effectively and counter negative messages
2-Marketing will know what the prospects and clients value in the marketplace (not just from you) and will be able to establish messaging that drive home the most important value propositions
3-Product Development will know the advances being made by the competition and will understand how well these innovations may be received by the marketplace.
4-Executives will have the right Competitive Intelligence to make strategic decisions.

And, to think... all of this information resides within your current customer base.

Next week, I will co-host a webinar with Ron Sathoff. The presentation will be made on Thursday, April 19 at 2 PM ET (11 AM PT). You can register by clicking here. Consider yourself invited.

And, Current Analysis (a company that I respect) has some information on creating CI from VOC. It is good to see shared thinking between two companies.

If you want to talk specifically about these ideas, call me (801-838-9600 x5050) or send me a note (cdalley@primary-intel.com). I would like to hear your ideas, too.

This Just In: Corporate Espionage Continues to Grow

The corporate world is in a constant state of battle and each participant searches for the key bit of competitive intelligence that will give an edge. Espionage has been a constant practice in nearly every industry and there is no sign of slowing.

http://economicintelligence.blogspot.com/2007/04/corporate-spying-grows.html

The likelihood of getting caught is pretty slim. So many do it because most activities are never going to be discovered. And, some forms of espionage are so simple to execute that you almost feel compelled to try.

To stay on the side of ethical, I use a pretty simple rule: "If a person would lose their job by providing this information to me, I won't pursue it."

Just because you can think of creative ways of gathering info doesn't mean that you should execute on every one of them.

And, then, you need to decide if the information you pursue is going to provide you a benefit anyway. If the information is interesting but worthless, why would you risk your company's ethics and legal standing?

Before you chase any piece of information, try to apply the following two questions and plot the answer on the quadrant below:

1- How practical is it to procure this information?
2- What is the potential ROI?


Try to stay in the upper right-hand quadrant. Otherwise, your company is wasting time, money, and perhaps legal capital on efforts that just don't really matter.

If you have an idea about a competitive intelligence or competitive advantage project, talk to me and let's figure out where it might fit in the overall productive scheme of things.

Email or phone (801-838-9600 x5050)

Making Competitive Intelligence Louder than the Corporate Noise

At Primary Intelligence, we just finished working with a company that had very mature competitive intelligence processes in place. The processes provided information that should have helped maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Overall, the builders of the CI program put a lot of work into creating and refining processes that collected the right information.

And, their department just lost most of its funding. New initiatives won’t be added and it will be difficult to preserve much of the status quo. Smart people will soon be working with other companies.

Why?

Because, the CI department never really figured out how to make the results meaningful to the executives. Decisions were rarely influenced (let alone, based on) the results of their efforts.

And, that’s all she wrote. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there…

This is not a one-time occurrence. And, it is a way of life that is not limited to the Competitive Intelligence, Marketing Research or Marketing departments of the world. In fact, important people in mission-critical roles are dismissed regularly if the perception is that they are not producing results.

What is the take home lesson?

Be seen. Be heard. Be effective and make your presence known. Specifically, in relation to Competitive Intelligence:

1- Push information into the executive boardrooms as often as possible
2- Ask, ask, ask, ask, ask about the current questions that need to be answered for the company leadership
3- Study the way key decision-makers in the company find and read information. Do they prefer raw data, spreadsheets and crude analysis or will they only consume small, polished briefs, one chunk at a time
4- Be a consultant. Present intelligence options and drive the topic of competitive intelligence methods as an agenda item.
5- Be prepared to show case studies of related efforts showing ROI potential in competitive intelligence.

After all this, be prepared to do it over and over. If you want to stay above the noise in the corporation, you have to be a little better organized, targeted and unified than everything else. Otherwise, you will just be static.

Inteligencia Competitiva

Yesterday, I received a very kind note from a gentleman (and Competitive Intelligence Professional) named Adrian Alvarez. His company, Midas Consulting , provides consultative services in Latin America.

I read his latest blog entry and found his observations to be insightful. If you don’t read Spanish, I’ll take the liberty of (very briefly) summarizing Mr. Alvarez’ message:

Adrian ponders the fact that Guillefmo Cañas has beaten Federer twice in their last two meetings. He suggests two reasons for Cañas’ success:

1- Based on quotes from Federer, his intelligence on Cañas game may be out of date. I would appear that Federer was surprised when he was not able to exploit Cañas’ game during the last two matches.
2- Cañas’ desire to win may have been underestimated.

These points are brought to business by demonstrating:

1- Companies need to update their intelligence regularly. Old (bad) data may be worse than no data.
2- Don’t underestimate the lengths that smaller, more hungry companies may go to in order to take your customers and market share.

Adrian says that he posts once a week. Join me in returning to his blog regularly to review his insights. And, if you read other Intelligence blogs and think I should know about them, email me.

Self-service Competitive Intelligence

Last fall, on behalf of Primary Intelligence, I co-authored an article for a local magazine on self-service intelligence. The main idea was to emphasize how to put the right intelligence in the right places at the right time to make sure that your company is capitalizing on the right markets as efficiently as possible.

For example:

Analytics
The first step you need to take to leave your safe harbor is to evaluate your data collection processes and your analytic capabilities. What is the use of collecting information if you can’t interpret and act upon it with predictable outcomes? Successful analytics processes help to evaluate the quality of the initial data and determine which portions reinforce the central goals of the organization. The usefulness of the information and analytics can be determined by its ability to support the company goals.

Customization
Simplicity is the key here; companies should evaluate different solutions to determine the most effective collaboration tools. Special care should be taken to ensure that sensitive data is easily accessible to all required personnel while protecting it from exposure to outside parties. The fundamental requirements of sharing sensitive information must address the establishment of trust and the need to enable users to find and make sense of all available information by:
*Enabling users to understand the reliability, accuracy, and urgency of the information.
*Empowering owners to retain control of information and precisely determine its access and use.
*Logging and auditing who, what, and why information is accessed and used.

Distribution
How do successful companies share data? It has to be part of the company culture and encouraged from the top down. The creation of “information silos” (repositories where data and analytics are stored, but not used) is most easily avoided when effective collaboration tools are used. The need for these tools increases exponentially with the size of the company. Smaller and medium-sized businesses generally benefit from more easily accessible communication channels. Larger companies become more compartmentalized and data tends to remain within divisions and managerial levels.

Some effective methods of disseminating information through an organization include:
*Knowledge bases and expert systems
*Help desks
*Corporate intranets and extranets
*Content management
*Wikis
*Document management

If you want to get results from your competitive intelligence efforts, the formula is simple: the right information delivered to the right people in a format they can understand. Try to hit at least 2 of those 3 criteria every time.

Check out the article. Let me know what you think.