Effective Competitive Intelligence – Don’t Let Indecision Derail You

No matter how you practice competitive intelligence, you have to be concerned with the fact that your CI program must be effective in your business. Much emphasis has been put on various programs in the company and their “effectiveness.” To me “effective” is a relative term. There are so many levels of effectiveness that almost anything can be graded as effective. The real talent and wisdom are manifest in one’s ability to differentiate between lower and higher levels.

So, what are the effectiveness qualifiers for competitive intelligence? I’ll stick with a definition put forth earlier in this same blog (which was also a topic in our recent webinar which can be downloaded HERE). The mission of effective Competitive Intelligence should be to:

– Strengthen your company’s position
• How is our value proposition perceived?
• What is the competition doing?
• Which industry-wide best practices will truly apply?
– Discover new markets
• What is possible with new technologies?
• Where should we steer the company?
– Develop new products/services/solutions
• What problems do our clients experience that we can address?

Indecision
There are so many obstacles to producing effective intelligence. The first of these obstacles is indecision. This indecision devalues intelligence efforts and, in some cases, leads to the dissolution of the actual intelligence efforts.

What is the real problem with indecision? It’s the fact that nobody can agree on what should be studied or what results should come of the efforts. Often, executives will request specific bits of information while other departments create laundry lists of potential topics.



In way too many cases, a strategic plan for intelligence is lacking. Evidence of this environment usually rears its head with the philosophy of “Let’s grab everything we can” and “Once we have the intelligence, we’ll know what to do with it.” The most dangerous symptom is a company that is very reactive in its intelligence efforts. “What just happened?!?! Go find out what [competitor x] is doing!”

The truth of the matter is that this lack of system usually leads to way too much information which can not be prioritized. The abundance of information leads to overload and blindness. The end result is that the intelligence is used less and less until the prevailing feeling is that the intelligence is not useful after all. From this point on, corporate decisions will not be based on the intelligence efforts, but on experience and such.

Without a competitive intelligence strategy that makes effectiveness a strong characteristic of success, the intelligence group is likely to marginalize its own value.

Recommendation
So, the recommendation is that you have to make your company be decisive about its intelligence efforts. Develop a set of effectiveness criteria or use those that I included above. Measure your strategy against its ability to be effective. And, be enough of a salesperson to sell this idea to your management and on up the chain.

Create a habit of decisiveness around your intelligence efforts, strategies and plans. Otherwise, indecision will trivialize your best efforts.

Thoughts? Leave me a comment or we can chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)