Increasing ROI from Competitive Intelligence Efforts

If you have a CI program, take a minute to measure the ROI of your efforts. Instead of simply building a large library of information, ask yourself the following questions:

• 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?
• Bottom-line
– Can we be more efficient or learn best practices?
– Are there better ways to manage our processes?
• Application
– How easily will we be able to act on these data?

If you are able to identify areas where you are directly increase top or bottom-line revenue, you are one of the rare success stories in competitive intelligence. If you are like the majority, you may want to consider some of the following tips:

• Reactive CI does not constitute a program. Develop an intelligence program that helps sales, marketing and product development informed of the competition's movements in the most strategic areas. Ignore all of the other noise.
• Information becomes “must have” when executives depend on it to move forward. Understand the willingness of your executives to use intelligence to make decisions. Determine which types of intelligence are best received. Don't spend time developing programs that produce data that won't be used.
• Do not assume that “stacks of information” are better than smaller quantities of targeted intelligence. Busy work does not equal effectiveness.
• Determine WHAT to investigate before starting a search. If you don't have a goal in mind, you will end up on wild goose chases. Everything begins to look appealing if you don't know what you're after.

Use these tips to work with your manager and executives to create a program rather than a competitive intelligence library.