Where are the Innovators in Competitive Intelligence?

So, I receive a daily alert on various competitive intelligence topics through Google’s Blog alert service. You probably track any number of topics (including the competition) by the same means (either in news, blog or regular search alerts). I like to track the “chatter” of the competitive intelligence community. I’ll also admit that I’m a little vain. I like to make sure that my blog entries make it into the top 5 each day. It took a while and a lot of consistent work to gain Google credibility, but we’re pretty visible now.

Everyday for the past year, I have received an email with at least 5 competitive intelligence topics which were generated that day. Occasionally, a rare treat will present itself in the form of a bit of information that makes me think. Mostly, I see article after article (day after day) about how the internet makes competitive intelligence possible for companies. Specifically, you should look at your competitor’s website and grab all of the information you can.

There is nothing wrong with this advice. Many competitive intelligence initiatives begin at that very spot. But, I’m a little bit surprised at how consistently some of the simplest techniques appear at the top of the searches each day.

If it isn’t “Watch your competitor’s web page,” it’s “Do a patent search.” Again, good advice, but I’m still surprised at how many people seem to come up with that idea each day and profess the practice as the next big development in competitive intelligence.

And, the whole web analytics field believes that they have reinvented the competitive intelligence field, simply by tracking Alexa traffic ratings. I’ll bet I see a couple of blog posts about that every week.

I sure do wish that the innovators in Competitive Intelligence were publishing more thoughts and creating more dialogue in the blog community. Of course, SCIP does their part to produce articles and thought leadership, but too few practitioners are participating in the blog world.

I will recommend a few of the blogs that I enjoy. Some of them are published more often than others, but they all come from very intelligent people who have a track record of sharing valuable insight.

Jon Lowder (SCIP)

Arthur Weiss (UK)

Adrian Alvarez (Latin America)

Dan McHugh (Seems to have disappeared in the fall, but his stuff was good)

CI Podcast – August J. Jackson

Fuld

EastSight Consulting

I know I’m missing a ton. Hopefully, you’ll help fill in the blanks with your comments. And, I have included some of our competitors. In fact, I am happy to include them. There are some smart people out there and their thoughts should be promoted above the din.

These people are developing new ideas and sharing them with the CI community. These are the people that will move the industry forward. And, I sure do wish that their intelligence, creativity and insight would drown out some of the drivel that currently exists.

Hopefully, my thoughts, expressed on behalf of Primary Intelligence, have provides some level of quality or inspiration. There are so many topics that need to be covered in competitive intelligence. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about key issues and less about the “new technique” of surfing your competitors’ websites.

A Really Cool Competitive Intelligence Presentation We Made Yesterday…

Yesterday, RoxAnne Loosle (Pronounced Loose-LEE, in case you want to give her a call at 801-838-9600 x5052) presented competitive intelligence findings to one of our clients. In this case, we targeted our intelligence efforts at two specific competitors, gathering data and creating analysis based on recent sales interactions and opportunities (won and lost) by our client.

Due to the confidential nature of our interactions with our clients, I can’t share specific information from the presentation. However, I will share some overall concepts that were brought to light in the presentation that would be considered “hidden gems.”

Our client found that they were leading their competitor consistently in the following areas:

Industry experience (Company Driver)

Technology reputation (Company Driver)

Stability (Company Driver)

References (Sales Team Driver)

Product knowledge (Sales Team Driver)

Areas of weakness were identified as:

Ability to customize (Product Driver)

Purchase cost (Product Driver)

Service cost (Product Driver)

Understanding these performance comparisons is so very important to our clients and their ability to grow market share. Not only were we able to show where the strengths and weaknesses exist today, we also provided specific feedback on those specific points to show why the scores were lower (in comparison with the competitors) and how they could be most effectively brought online.

In addition, we spent time showing our client:

The sales stage where they are eliminated as a vendor in the purchase process when they lose.

A comparison of their overall solution cost compared with the competition

Key marketing activities that influenced the sale

The intelligence we provided has direct relevance to the marketing, sales and product leaders. They left the call, graciously thanking us for the report and 20+ slides of data and recommendation.

It’s fun to share our findings with clients. In some cases, our findings are eye-opening. In others, we affirm information or sentiments based on unrelated efforts. Either way, there is satisfaction in being part of strategic and tactical initiatives that build company momentum.

If you want to chat about these kind of results, reach out. I enjoy a chance to hear from different people. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050) And, if you want to talk to someone that knows what she’s doing, RoxAnne is always happy to talk about the work she can do.

What the Mitchell Report and Competitive Intelligence Have in Common

Major League Baseball received the fruits of a $30M, 409 page report on the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Most would agree that the past 10-20 years have been a sad time for the integrity of the game. Hopefully, the game will be cleaner, and better, for having been through this level of scrutiny. Personally, I’m sure that all of this activity means more to some than others. I don’t know how yet to feel about the information about a game that I like (but probably don’t love) and I’m not sure I’ll spend enough time thinking about it to form an opinion.

But, I will say that the recommendations offered to major league baseball in the Mitchell Report have some applicability to Competitive Intelligence programs. The following recommendations come straight from the report and are detailed under “Recommendations on the Drug Program.”

The program should be independent

The program should be transparent

There should be adequate year-round drug testing

The program should be flexible enough to employ best practices as they develop

The program should continue to respect the legitimate rights of the players

The program should have adequate funding

Let’s look at those recommendations in a competitive intelligence light:

The program should be independent – This could be tough within a company. However, if the intelligence group is able to act with some degree of autonomy, there are increased chances that the information will be overtly biased. Consider using a 3rd-party to help balance the mix and insert objectivity

The program should be transparent – The best results are likely to come from a group that regularly informs others of their findings, actions and plans for the future. Do not run your competitive intelligence group like a mad scientist’s laboratory. Publish results. Present findings. Get the word out about your capabilities and future direction.

There should be year-round [efforts] – One-and-done research efforts often provide a shot of information but don’t provide context to track results or changes in the marketplace over time. Create some consistency in your efforts and don’t sacrifice stable programs for “flavor of the day” projects.

The program should be flexible enough to employ best practices as they develop – Learning, education, and willingness to improve will help competitive intelligence programs inch forward in progress.

The program should continue to respect the legitimate rights of the players – Be above board with everyone inside your company and out. Do not sneak around. Do not look for the covert. Do not sacrifice integrity and ethics. You can find out almost everything you need to know without violating the law. If you have to dabble in the illegal to compete, you have bigger problems in your business than your competitive intelligence efforts can fix. Just say “no” to espionage.

The program should have adequate funding – Amen. Someone inside of your department is going to have to sell the results of your efforts. Even if your findings are consistently recognized as good, you still have to battle for budget to make sure that funding doesn’t slowly diminish.

Consider the soundness of these recommendations and act. If you follow these basic precepts, you’re likely to keep your organization moving smoothly with little need for earthshaking actions from ownership.

Most importantly, and for the record Mr. Mitchell, this blog is 100% steroid free.

Competitive Intelligence Newsletter – Dave Stein Talks About Sales Intelligence

This week, we took the opportunity to speak with Dave Stein about the role of competitive intelligence in the world of sales training and sales performance enhancement. His insights into his experience with business leaders that “get” the intelligence side may help jump start your next conversation about strategic planning and tactical improvement.

As always, if you would like to a no-cost semi-weekly subscription to the Primary Intelligence Competitive Intelligence Newsletter, send an email to info@primaryintelligence.com with your name and email address. You will receive the next issue.

Cover Story
Competitive Intelligence Makes Sales More Effective – 5 Questions with Dave Stein
By Chris Dalley, Primary Intelligence
In today’s competitive marketplace, skills and bravado are not enough. Sales effectiveness leaders are continuing to espouse the need to understand how the competition sells, how they position themselves against you, what they offer in specific situations and where they are vulnerable...(For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Competitive Intelligence – Helping Sales Aim its Artillery
Only 56% of sales managers claim competitive intelligence as one of their tools. A higher percentage of sales reps (68%) say that they use competitive intelligence to sell. All this seems to beg the question… why isn’t the sales department organizing competitive intelligence initiatives more often...(For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
Pinnacle Systems Chooses RightNow to Satisfy Customers
Originally Published in May 2005.
When Pinnacle Systems discovered that its Asia sales region was using a sophisticated sales automation system, the company decided to evaluate technologies to implement throughout its entire operation...(For more, click here)

Competitive Intelligence Tip #3 for 2008 – Leverage Your Intel to Beat the Competition to the Battlefield

In a marketing case study published by SCIP way back in 2001, the following description of the competitive environment illustrated the need to involve more sales and marketing people within the competitive intelligence efforts.

“A truism: In the face of economic uncertainty, companies must be more aggressive in order to gain competitive advantage. A fact: Under pressure to deliver against difficult odds, sales and marketing groups increasingly are being embedded into company-wide CI operations. The result: A real difference in revenue generation, from winning a small sale, to taking advantage of a major market opportunity.”

In a case study of Merck’s intelligence efforts, a description of the objectives included the following:

“The project involved re-positioning a current Merck drug so that it claimed the competitive space a rival's product was aiming to occupy -- thus delaying the competitor's launch to the point where, because of patent expiration timetables, a major rollout no longer made financial sense.

Summed up, this project involved using publicly available data to predetermine the competitor's plans for marketing and positioning a brand still in development. Once anticipated, a pre-emptive counterstrategy was conceived and employed by Merck, by repositioning a product already on the market. This forced the competitor to conduct new trials to reposition its brand, resulting in a significant delay in market entry, and allowing Merck's existing brand to enjoy sustained growth and increased market share.

While the specifics may relate to pharmaceuticals, basic CI technique was at the heart of this success. Early warning of the competitor's intentions was gleaned by attending professional medical meetings and gathering public domain information such as efficacy and safety data, and clinical trial results -- providing clues on how a forthcoming development may be marketed.

‘We found that the message around the competitor's product, which hadn't been introduced yet, was very strong. Not only strong, but in a market segment that no one else occupied," related Mr. Kalb. "Our own original data about a Merck product showed if our product was positioned in the same area where their product was most likely going to be positioned, we could block them. We could get into their space before they got there, and occupy it in a way that prevented them from claiming a unique selling proposition.’”

Merck ended up running simulations of marketing messages, strategies, product marketing and attempted to anticipate where the competitor’s product would be of most value. As a result of these exercises, Merck was able to beat the competitor to its intended market, causing the competitor to delay its product launch 18-24 months due to repositioning efforts. Additionally, Merck was able to take advantage of being first to market and weakening all subsequent efforts of the competitor.

Merck estimated a gain of $150-200 million over the competitor due to its competitive intelligence project, which was still bringing in gains. These gains may have eventually total out somewhere in the $300-400 million range.

Not a bad bit of ROI for a hard working competitive intelligence team.

Not every competitive intelligence initiative is such a big hit. In fact, some CI efforts do little more than monitor trends. But, if you are in a position to understand company strategy, future direction and aspirations, you need to step away from the day-to-day and examine how your current CI might lead to bigger insights. If you can improve your company’s overall performance by just 1-5% with intelligence, the ROI story can be very impressive.

And remember. Every extra dollar you earn for your company is a dollar your competition will never see.

Competitive Intelligence Tip #2 for 2008 – Choose the Best Sources

How different is the job of the competitive intelligence professional with the immediacy and availability of the internet. Of course, these are not new developments. You probably started leveraging the internet more than a decade ago to either develop your program or augment your data.

We could use a lot of blogsphere space talking about some very obvious methods of monitoring the competition: Google and Yahoo Alerts, Yahoo Finance, libraries, press releases, blogs, customer forums and user groups, etc… All of these sources put the world of information in the palm of your hand.
Really, you have to give people credit for the creativity they use in mining these sources of information. The level of inference and deduction available based on these bits of information can be unexpected.

But, I would encourage CI professionals to continue to monitor the competition through human interaction, too. No. I do not mean that you should attempt to infiltrate the enemy. That is still called espionage and it still carries a large fine and jail sentence. Stay away from that. Or hire an ex-spook, I suppose. But, really. Don’t do that.

I recommend that you continue to mine competitive intelligence from sources that are currently at your disposal.

By this, I mean that you should:

Look at your current voice of the customer programs and see where you might be able to insert a few questions about the competition

Consider a win/loss program to understand how you are performing TODAY against the competition.

Examine the types of information regarding your competitors that your most trusted clients might know. (Believe me. Your best clients know your competitors very well)

Search for new ways to ask the same questions to your marketplace to gather comparisons between you and your most troublesome competitors.

This approach is likely to save time (you already know who your client and prospect base are), money (these types of interviews might even piggy-back on other voice of the customer programs at no actual cost to you), generate some of the best insight into the marketplace and provide intelligence that can be of use to sales, marketing, product and executive levels.

Gathering competitive intelligence from your clients and prospects is not perfect. You can gain different levels of insight from web sources, analysts and other programs. However, in our experience, reaching out to people that live in the marketplace often provides most of the insight your sales, product and marketing team need to increase their competitive abilities.

And, if you are able to sell, market or produce solutions that better meet the needs of your marketplace, you have a fantastic ROI story you can attribute to your competitive intelligence program.

If you need a little help, don’t be afraid to contact me (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050) at Primary Intelligence. This is what we do every day.

From the world of Competitive Intelligence

From the world of competitive intelligence articles, you may want to look at some of the following CI blog posts. Turns out, there are some pretty smart people out there in the competitive intelligence world.

Handy CI Tools for Nonprofits and Small Companies
At the Special Libraries Association conference in Denver, CO, last June, I heard the term “competitive intelligence” uttered more than “Who’s giving away the free cookies?” CI, as it’s called, is not exactly in James Bond’s arena, ...

Compete Search Analytics: Competitive Intelligence Smackdown!
Let that be a reminder to you to take all competitive intelligence data with a grain of salt, especially for small sample sizes. Full Segment List This is a complete list of the site categories and behavior segments available in the ...

Deep Web Searching - A Forgotten Skill
I urge you to take a look at the following resources:. Deep Web Research 2008 By Marcus Zillman; Invisible Web & Database Search Engines - Search Engine Watch; Discover and exploit the Invisible Web for competitive intelligence.

Competitive Intelligence
"Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of monitoring the competitive environment. CI enables senior managers in companies of all sizes to make informed decisions about everything from marketing, R&D, and investing tactics to ...

Competitive Intelligence Tip #1 - Make Your CI Produce Revenue

In a post by Jan P. Herring titled “How Much is Your Competitive Intelligence Worth,” the distinction between information and intelligence is made in a way that speaks to me:

“In the final analysis you can evaluate your company’s CI effort if you properly define what and how you intend to measure. In my experience, senior level users of BI/CI are not as interested in financial or quantitative measures of your CI products & services as they are in having intelligence that visibly affects their decision-making or business actions in a positive fashion. They do, however, expect to see some form of related action. Those actions that result in grater sales, profits, or other measures of business success are the most valued.

An old friend and associate, Robert Steele, probably put it best, “Information costs money. Intelligence makes money!” Essentially, any competitive information that a business manager acts on becomes intelligence. And, intelligence used by a company that makes money is good intelligence!”

He also discusses various ways that Competitive Intelligence can produce ROI, but more importantly, can be measured to validate the ROI:

Time saving: Savings for both professional and support personnel

Cost savings: Elimination or reduction in expenses

Cost avoidance: Elimination of planned expenses

Revenue increases: Increases in the number of sales or size of sales

Value added: Benefits not easily related to specific dollar values, e.g., more effective strategies or better new products and services.

In so many places, we have tried to espouse the same message. Competitive intelligence professionals need to be looking for the ROI in their initiatives. Or, too often, you will be known as the producer of information, not intelligence. And, really? What value is there in that?

Links to other Primary Intelligence thoughts on CI/ROI
Webinar: CI with ROI
Another Endorsement for Win Loss Analysis
Competitive Intelligence – The Difference Between “Interesting” and “Effective”
What are the top challenges with regards to Competitive Intelligence?
Making Competitive Intelligence Effective with Cross-functional Teams (Part 2 of 4)
Increasing ROI from Competitive Intelligence Efforts
Analytics in Competitive Intelligence: Stated Importance vs. Derived Importance