Making Competitive Intelligence Effective with Cross-functional Teams (Part 1 of 4)

On Wednesday, I was a little sour toward irrelevant Competitive Intelligence efforts. Fortunately, I am associated with dozens of companies that are producing intelligence efforts at different levels of effectiveness. More importantly, each of these companies has a commitment to making the efforts more effective over time. They are searching for best practices and making changes.

In my experience, companies that make the most effective use of intelligence all use the same system at some level. If your company truly wants to make gains based on intelligence it should:

1. Have a commitment to making decisions with intelligence


2. Create a cross-functional team, including leaders from Sales, Marketing, Product Development, Finance and the Executive Board


3. Determine the most effective routes to generating effective competitive intelligence


4. Involve a 3rd-party to provide guidance (This is not a shameless plug. I’ll explain later)


5. Provide a strong voice to evangelize the competitive intelligence


6. Demand accountability of leaders based on their willingness to consider and implement changes based on the intelligence initiatives

Let’s talk about the first point.

A commitment to making decisions with intelligence
This quality starts at the very top. Perhaps you have a corporate board or an executive team. How do your CEO, CSO, CMO make decisions? Have they been around so long that they “know everything?” Do they reach out personally to clients, employees, partners and other significant market drivers?

You may not know the executive personally, but you can infer their receptivity to market intelligence by the conversations they have with employees. If they are the type that make idle talk and discuss the weather or the local sports team, they may tend to be more closed-minded about intelligence-based decisions. On the other hand, if they are committed to LISTENING to real matters that effect real people, they may tend to consume intelligence more willingly.

Of course, if the executives already sponsor intelligence initiatives, you might consider that a dead giveaway.

Why is this commitment to making decisions so important?

Because intelligence is only a means to an end. The end has to be change in the company that produces more revenue. And, change doesn’t happen without a commitment at the highest levels.

All of your competitive intelligence efforts won’t mean much if the change agents in your company don’t use it. You can contract with 3rd-party vendors, scrape websites, monitor press releases, evaluate public financial documents and measure market penetration forever. But intelligence without action is worthless.

Over the next few posts, let’s consider the other bullet points above.

And, if you want to chat, let’s chat. Post a response, call (801-838-9600 x5050) or send an email (cdalley@primary-intel.com)