You Couldn’t Make Competitive Intelligence So Irrelevant if You Tried

If your idea of effective competitive intelligence is gathering a bit of information, consolidating that information into a brief doc (perhaps on an attractive company letterhead) and sending that doc off to a distribution list, please stop reading. Go back to your cube, surf some more web sites and live a happy life.

Pardon me if I’m a little grumpy today, but I have just finished reviewing a company’s CI efforts and have added one more company to the pile of “irrelevant competitive intelligence efforts.”

What do I mean by irrelevant? In this case, the marketing department employs a few “analysts” to gather CI on a few competitors, market conditions and industry developments. These people put a little personal spin on the data and then launch their reports and briefs into different corporate branches through email, an intranet and their SFA tool.

(Yes, there is disdain in my description, but it wouldn’t matter if they increased the quality of their personnel or budget to gather more information.)

The problem here is that the CI program is not making any difference at all in their ability to be more competitive. The data that is collected is better than nothing, but even if it is read, nobody acts on it, provides feedback or seems to value it at any important level of the company.

The intelligence has to make a difference somewhere in the company or the program is simply a money sink that exists because “other companies have a CI department.”

I suppose that there are all kinds of people out there, but I, for one, would be bored out of my skull if I didn’t think my efforts were making a positive difference in the company. If I found myself in that situation, I would do everything I could to change the situation. To be clear, this isn’t a matter of personal ego. Instead, I want to leverage our competitive intelligence efforts to create as much benefit as possible.

Enough of the rant. On Friday, I’ll describe an environment that makes exceptional use of Competitive, Market and Sales intelligence.

And if you want to chat about these thoughts, please leave me a post, call me (801-838-9600 x5050) or email me (cdalley@primary-intel.com)