Three Benefits of Win Loss You Can’t Ignore – Analytics & Strategy (1 of 3)

There are few revenue-generating competitive intelligence tools more valuable than Win Loss. If done correctly, a Win Loss exercise provides insight into competitive strengths/weaknesses, marketplace innovations, loyalty factors and steps to improving win rates. From a tactical standpoint, Win Loss derived intelligence can show steps to increase a company’s competitive positioning right now.

I know that today’s post will be a pretty strong commercial, but Primary Intelligence has developed sophisticated predictive analytics that crate an unparalleled strategic view. Let me show you what I’m talking about.

Below, you will see an example of a Strength/Weakness evaluation based on data from recent sales opportunities, taken from a win loss study of 50-60 opportunities. Half of the data come from new business that was won and the other 50% come from opportunities that were lost to competitors:


The data are sorted from biggest negative competitive gap (weakness) at the top to the biggest positive competitive gap (strength) at the bottom. The scores are based on a 1-10 scale where 1 is Poor and 10 is excellent.

If you were to make strategic changes in your company based on the data in this table, you would probably look at the weaknesses and evaluate the most effective ways to close the competitive gap.

But, would this make a difference? What would happen if you were to increase your performance in Overall Solution Cost or Understanding Needs by ten percent? (A 10% improvement would mean that you increase your score of 8.1 to 9.1) How much would your win rate increase? Would making improvements in your weaknesses correlate with a stronger competitive preference, or would you be pulling the wrong levers and pouring time and money down the drain?

Traditional intelligence looks at Strengths and Weaknesses
• Should you “fix” weaknesses or accentuate strengths?
• Strength/Weaknesses don’t always correlate with decision making.
• Where is your opportunity to increase win rates and market share?

Can you rely on today’s strength and weakness assessments to point your company to the strongest positioning tomorrow? Does a measurement of strengths and weaknesses provide the foresight to recommend company-changing shifts? Where is the crystal ball that will show the actual gains that might be made on performance changes in your company, product and sales efforts?

Primary Intelligence does this all the time. To show your company where the real opportunities exist, we:

1. Interview recent wins and losses where your company competed head-to-head with specific competitors.
2. Measure your competitive performance in 20-30 specific decision influencers
3. Determine strengths and weaknesses (Not the gap score in the table below. Positive gaps indicate weaknesses. Negative gaps indicate strengths)
4. Use predictive analytics to determine the influencers that, it improved, would result in the greatest increases in market share. (Impact column, explained below)

Impact identifies your expected improvement in market share. For instance, in the chart above (a real-world example taken from one of our clients), if you were to improve your company’s performance in Product Knowledge by one point (In other words, if you improved the 7.7 rating to an 8.7), you would expect your win rate and market share to increase by the impact score of 5.7% (at the 90% confidence level).

And, Product Knowledge is already a competitive strength. Overall, you outperform the competition by 5% in this area. The key may be to make this competitive advantage more consistent throughout the company.

In other words, there are influencers that would provide 2x, 3x and 4x the results of others if improvement were made in those specific areas. This could result in gains of millions or billions of unexpected dollars, based on some potentially simple improvements in the right areas.

This approach takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. No espionage required. And, yet, the company makes the biggest gains in increasing its client base.

Star Trek, Competitive Intelligence and Analytics

Whether you are focused on market, sales or competitive intelligence, analytics are becoming more important, and useful, every day. Of course, the analytics tool you use has to be focused on your specific need. I see tools come and go that try to be everything to everyone, which ends up working for nobody.

The concepts of analysis and analytics, however, are sound.

I'll turn the presentation over to Matt Bailey, Founder of SiteLogic, a company that provides consulting and tools to increase website effectiveness. I enjoyed his lesson on how analytics may help save the lives of the "Red Shirts."

Analytics According to Captain Kirk
In my seminars, I enjoy teaching analytics because the fun is in finding effective and memorable methods to help people understand the concepts. One of my favorites is an analysis of the Red-Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek.

What? You don't know about the Red Shirt Phenomenon? Well, as any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you are wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you're gonna die. That's the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn't seen any definitive proof; it's just what people said. (Remind you of your current web analytics strategy?) So, let's set our phasers on 'stun' and see what we find...

The Basic Stats:
The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (startrek.com) in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%.

Data Segmentation:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:

Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)

Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)

Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4

Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.

However, that's only just simple stats reporting - ready for some analysis?

In-depth Analysis
Analysis involves asking questions about the data. Analysis attempts to bring reason and cause to the reported data in order to find why something is happening. With that data, one can improve the situation based on the intelligence gained from the analysis.

Q: What causes a red-shirted crewman to die?

On-board incident - 42.5%

Beaming down to the planet - 57.5%

There were also many fights during the mission; on the Enterprise, on planets, and various space stations. The fights were also divided between alien races or crazed crewmen (usually wearing red shirts).

There were 130 fights over 80 episodes.

18 of the 130 fights resulted in a fatality.

13 of the 18 fatal fights resulted in a red-shirt fatality.

Q: what was the rate of red-shirt casualties?

18 red-shirt fatality episodes:

8 multiple fatality occurrences; involving 34 red-shirted crewmen.

9 single red-shirt fatality situations.

It was found that red-shirted crewmembers tended to die in groups. In 17 red-shirt fatality episodes, 8 were multiple incidents, 9 were single incidents. In a little less than 50% of the fatal red-shirt situations, multiple crewmen were vaporized.

Q: What factors could increase/decrease the survival rate of red-shirted crewmen?
Besides not getting involved in fights, which usually proved fatal, the crewmen could avoid beaming down to the planet's surface, which is inherent to their end. However, that could result in a court-martial for failure to obey orders.

Besides not beaming down, another factor that showed to increase the survival rate of the red-shirts was the nature of the relationship between the alien life and captain Kirk. When Captain Kirk meets an alien woman and "makes contact" the survival rate of the red-shirted crewmen increases by 84%. In fact, out of Captain Kirks' 24 "relationships" there were only three instances of red-shirt vaporization.

The caveat to this is when Captain Kirk not only meets the local alien women, but also starts a fight among alien locals. The combination of these events has led to the elimination of 4 crewmembers (3 red-shirts).

Here are the statistics:
Red Shirt Death episodes = 18
Episodes with fights = 55
Probability of a fight breaking out = 70%
Kirk "conquest" episodes = 24
Kirk "conquest" + fights = 16
Kirk "conquest" + red shirt casualty= 4
Red shirt death + fight + Kirk "conquest" = 3

And the data trends
Probability of a red-shirt casualty= 53%
14% of fights ended in a fatality (with a 72% chance the fatality wore a red shirt)
Probability of a red-shirt "incident" when Kirk has a "conquest" = 12%

The red-shirt survival rate is slightly higher when Kirk meets women than when a fight breaks out. This trend necessitates the question: How often did Captain Kirk "meet" women? In 30% of the missions.

As the data shows, Captain Kirk "making contact" with alien women has an impact on the crew's survival. The red-shirt death rate is higher when a fight breaks out than when Kirk meets a woman and a fight breaks out. Yet the analysis shows that meeting Kirk meeting women only happens in 30% of the missions.

Conclusion:
We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

Reporting the Data:
Now, researching the data can be fun and informative. However, that is only half of the battle. The interesting part comes when you have to communicate not only the data, but your conclusions in an effective, persuasive manner. The best analysis won't go far if you can't communicate the conclusions in a manner that people understand.

There are a few options at our disposal. First, the PowerPoint Method.








There are a number of things wrong with the typical method of presenting data. For starters, this presentation could bore even the most hardened Starfleet manager (CEO). The typical corporate PowerPoint slide design is obnoxious and does not leave room for information, the charts are redundant, even unnecessary, and it does not do a good job of communicating the information or the analysis.

In most cases, PowerPoint is NOT the recommended tool for communicating analytics data. It is not the right tool for the job. Communicating analytics data involves providing conclusions based on facts, tests, comparisons, and research. In order to display the necessary data, a better method must be used, and not one that forces redundant bullet point and "snazzy" charts.

Visualizing the Data:There are some necessary elements required in developing a chart for this type data:

A list of the specific episodes

Events that happened in each episode

The number of events that happened in each episode

An easy way to identify data, then compare and contrast actions in all episodes

By seeing all of the available data in one chart, associations, patterns and conclusions can be drawn simply by comparing the relationships as they are presented. This is something that I learned from Edward Tufte - 1. More information is needed to simplify data presentation. 2. Unless all of the data is presented, there is no data integrity.

Information is Primary to Design
This is critical in developing a chart of information - the information is primary. List the necessary data elements first. Then, develop the design around the information, and not the other way around. Otherwise, a beautiful chart will lack the critical information necessary to support your conclusions. The graphing software that I found extremely effective for communicating the episode data for this Star Trek analysis is Microsoft's Office 2007, and in Apple's OS X graphics software.


(click image for full-size version)

I like this chart - eliminating the need for a legend is critical to allowing the information to flow. The data is the same color or object as the information we are trying to convey. Because there is no suitable color for Captain Kirk's affairs, we substituted a very flattering picture. Fights are represented by tiny phasers, which are not the best representation because of the size, but can easily be determined by the process of elimination. This chart allows conclusions and observations that simple charts, numbers, and explanations may never bring to the surface. It allows for easy comparison, both to other shirt colors, and in relation to other episodes. It also looks as though Kirk was a very busy man.

In the first year of the series, red-shirt casualties were lower than other color-shirted crewmembers. The second and especially the third seasons were especially brutal. In the third season, only red-shirted crewmembers died; maybe because the other colors enacted better safety protocols, or maybe because they avoided the bridge when a new planet came into view, for fear of beaming down with Cpt. Kirk.

Summary:
Of the elements that helped to provide this analysis, segmentation was key.

Segmentation of groups allows for comparisons. Comparisons allow you to spot trends that may be different from the rest. Asking questions of the data allows you to dig into specific trends and spot additional factors that affect the original analysis. Unless we dug into Kirk's personal life, we may never have spotted the contrast of Kirk's attraction to alien females as it related to saving red-shirt crewmen's lives.

Remember, when you have to account for lost crewmembers, your report needs to account for the how, the why, and the ability to draw specific conclusions as to how to affect the trends in the future. Depending upon your approach, you could either doom the project, and future red-shirted crewmen, or you could be visiting planets full of peaceful alien women.

Need a CI Consultant to Achieve Business Improvement? Think Primary Intelligence

Yeah. The subject line sounds like a commercial, but that is nearly unavoidable if I want to tell you about specific ways we’re providing high-value services to our clients. Some people over time have seen Primary Intelligence as a solid 3rd-party research group, capable of producing high-quality CI. We love our clients and appreciate their support.

The other group of our clients sees us as a full-service consultancy to effect positive revenue change within their organization. They have grown to appreciate our consultative, hand-on approach at multiple locations within their company. Starting with on-site kickoff meetings, personal consultations with stakeholders to explain and evangelize the endgame and training programs based on world-class competitive intelligence efforts and analytics, our clients are converting information into action plans that produce results. (Man. Even as a marketer, I nearly choked on my hyperbole. But, you have to know about these things. Remember, I’m only telling you these things because you need to know.)

The truth of the matter is that everyone needs some extra help sometime to produce the desired results. We specialize in providing that 3rd-party opinion. Combine our expertise in competitive intelligence with a consultative program that brings strategic changes to life and you have much more than a pretty report that gathers dust on executives' desks.

Deliverables for consulting solutions include:
1. One or two-day onsite workshops
2. Remote maintenance workshops
3. A block of time that can be used to consult with PI’s consultants
4. Identification and assessment of sales opportunities, competitive opportunities and customer opportunities (workshop content)
5. Work sessions on real-world opportunities
6. Mapping sales intelligence and competitive intelligence to sales processes and methodologies
7. Enhancements to current sales processes and methodologies
8. Sales and/or Management plan development
9. Sales plan/Management plan roll-out
10. Sales plan/Management plan monitoring

Customer Benefits
Primary Intelligence’s customers can expect the following benefits from PI’s consulting solutions:
1. Specific improvements to current sales processes and methodologies
2. Greater ROI on current research initiatives
3. Greater adoption of competitive intelligence and sales intelligence initiatives within organization
4. Enhance your organization’s competitive advantages in your target markets
5. Improve sales performance and effectiveness of sales channels
6. Ensure win ratio improvements and enhance revenue growth
7. Greater visibility of key competitive and sales intelligence initiatives

If you need a little extra information on the topic, give me a call. I’m not sales. I can tell it like it is. (801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Competitive Intelligence, Analytics and Your Job

Where can analytics benefit a company in its competitive intelligence program? Can the application of analytics to specific performance areas (vs. the competition) provide a competitive advantage? Such areas include:

• Supply Chain
• Loyalty
• Pricing
• Human Capital
• Product and Service Quality
• Financial Performance
• Research and Development

While many of these areas would seem to be analysis of internal processes, these same techniques can be applied to outside influences as well, including the competitive landscape.

And, nobody has to apologize for categorizing the refinement of internal processes as competitive intelligence. If a company can gain a bigger competitive advantage by studying itself rather than the competition, why wouldn’t you consider this method?


FUNCTION/DESCRIPTION/EXEMPLARS
Supply chain – Simulate and optimize supply chain flows; reduce inventory and stock-outs. (Dell, Wal-Mart, Amazon)

Customer selection, loyalty, and service – Identify customers with the greatest profit potential; increase likelihood that they will want the product or service offering; retain their loyalty. (Harrah’s, Capital One, Barclays

Pricing – Identify the price that will maximize yield, or profit. (Progressive, Marriott)

Human capital – Select the best employees for particular tasks or jobs, at particular compensation levels. (New England Patriots, Oakland A’s, Boston Red Sox)

Product and service quality – Detect quality problems early and minimize them. (Honda, Intel)

Financial performance – Better understand the drivers of financial performance and the effects of nonfinancial factors. (MCI, Verizon)

Research and development – Improve quality, efficacy and, where applicable, safety of products and services (Novartis, Amazon, Yahoo)

(Davenport, Thomas H. (2006), “Competing on Analytics”, Harvard Business Review, page 6)

Some competitive intelligence professionals are taking the lead in this area and expanding their skill set to include predictive analytics and advanced statistics. Others are still working on creating libraries of information and relying on gut feelings and intuition to provide direction to the company.

Watch for graduates to come out of school with advanced degrees in business analytics. They will be in very high demand in the near future. If you don’t understand these concepts, you may be working for a dinosaur. If your company isn’t a dinosaur, you may have to find a job working for one as the highly skilled analytics experts move in.

Sorry about the doom and gloom. But, that’s where I see things heading. I recommend moving ahead of the curve and adding some additional analytic training to your repertoire.

Of course, Primary Intelligence stands ready to put predictive analytics into your Win Loss and Account Loyalty programs right now. If you have a couple of minutes, give me a call and I’ll show you how. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

You Know You Compete on Analytics When…

1. You apply sophisticated information systems and rigorous analysis not only to your core capability but also to a range of functions as varied as marketing and human resources
2. Your senior executive team not only recognizes the importance of analytics capabilities but also makes their development and maintenance a primary focus.
3. You treat fact-based decision making not only as a best practice but also as part of the culture that’s constantly emphasized and communicated by senior executives.
4. You hire not only people with analytics skills but a lot of people with the very best analytics skills-and consider them a key to your success.
5. You not only employ analytics in almost every function and department but also consider it so strategically important that you manage it at the enterprise level.
6. You not only are expert at number crunching but also invent proprietary metrics for use in key business processes.
7. You not only use copious data and in-house analysis but also share them with customers and suppliers.
8. You not only avidly consume data but also seize every opportunity to generate information, creating a “test and learn” culture base on numerous small experiments.
9. You not only have committed to competing on analytics but also have been building your capabilities for several years.
10. You not only emphasize the importance of analytics internally but also make quantitative capabilities part of your company’s story, to be shared in the annual report and in discussions with financial analysts.
    (Davenport, Thomas H. (2006), “Competing on Analytics”, Harvard Business Review, page 9)

Using analytics in your competitive intelligence is a natural evolution, but also requires that the company evolve with you. Executive management has to respect the data, the findings and recommendations. Without this level of buy-in, you'll have analytics with no audience. And, if a predictive model falls in the woods...

If your company is ready to introduce analytics to your competitive intelligence or if you want to take your program higher than it has gone in the past, let's chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Analytics and Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence has always seemed much more of an art than a science. But, leading companies (Wal-Mart, Amazon, Dell, Harrah’s, Marriott, Honda, MCI, Yahoo and the New England Patriots) have learned that swinging the exercise back toward science yields great dividends.

In many of these cases, these companies are using analytics to measure their own performance, systems, processes and personnel. For example:

“One analytics competitor that’s at the top of its game is Marriott International. Over the past 20 years, the corporation has honed to a science its system for establishing the optimal price for guest rooms (the key analytics process in hotels, known as revenue management). Today, its ambitions are far grander. Through its Total Hotel Optimization program, Marriott has expanded its quantitative expertise to areas such as conference facilities and catering, and made related tools available overt the Internet to property revenue managers and hotel owners. It has developed systems to optimize offerings to frequent customers and assess the likelihood of those customers’ defecting to competitors…. The company has even created a revenue opportunity model, which computes actual revenue as a percentage of the optimum rates that could have been charged. That figure has grown from 83% to 91% as Marriott’s revenue-management analytics has taken root throughout the enterprise. The word is out among property owners and franchisees: If you want to squeeze the most revenue from your inventory, Marriott’s approach is the ticket.” (Davenport, Thomas H. (2006), “Competing on Analytics”, Harvard Business Review, page 3)

Many of these companies are starting by turning their measurements and analytics on themselves. But, watch closely as analytics begin to be turned toward outside influences, including competitors.

Primary Intelligence is already at this point; using Win Loss and Account Retention data to power analytics. The result of these calculations is a clear and efficient path to increasing win and renewal rates at very high levels of confidence.

You can start to put these practices into place right now. Many companies perform some levels of segmentation or other analytics of revenue sources. Over the next couple of entries, I’ll address specific areas where analytics should be applied.

And, if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, let’s chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Marrying Competitive Intelligence, Business Intelligence and Analytics

Business intelligence companies are starting to how they are relevant to the gathering of competitive intelligence in the organization. Surprisingly, they are demonstrating how to leverage your customers (of all people) to gain the necessary intelligence to compete more effectively.

Jerome Bergerou of AccuraCast says the following:

"In an increasingly competitive world, using your client database smartly, to gain a better understanding of your number one asset – your customers – can make or break the success of your company."

"One of the primary reasons companies do not fully realize the potential competitive advantages they can gain from their own databases is the lack of proper integration of datasets across departments. Even though all the information might reside within the company, it may remain elusive due to a fragmentation of the data across incompatible databases. Regrouping all internal data into a single dataset or a series of interconnected datasets could be the single most useful step a company might take towards providing a solid foundation on which quality business intelligence can be developed."

This article goes on to demonstrate some specific techniques in building a BI repository and system that would be of benefit to most companies. If you are interested in my content, you should probably check them out, too.

I agree whole-heartedly that the quest for competitive intelligence needs to be founded on the most productive sources of information. And, there has to be more to analyzing the data than gut feelings and educated hopes. Analytics are not just important; they are essential to making sense of the information. Otherwise, the intelligence may be skewed by the loudest voice or hidden trends may be ignored.

If you have some ideas on competitive intelligence and analytics, I’d enjoy talking to you (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence in the 21st Century – Moving Past the SWOT with Predictive Analytics

In my last post, I said that a SWOT analysis leaves a strategic decision-maker with a problem. You may be able to identify some competitive weaknesses (compared with a specific competitor or in the marketplace in general), but you don’t have any way of gauging what would happen to your market share if the weaknesses were improved.

And, you can’t tell whether continuing to improve the strengths would provide a bigger competitive benefit to your company’s efforts.

So, if a competitive intelligence professional spends all of their time studying the market and the end results is a list of strengths and weaknesses (with no predictive analytics or direction), how much value does that person provide?

I guess that I should be clear that a SWOT analysis is not useless. There is tactical value in a SWOT. You can figure out what to say today with a SWOT, but you can’t make strategic decisions based on a SWOT. There is still too much guesswork.

So what? Replace the SWOT with Impact-based Competitive Intelligence. For instance, Primary Intelligence does this all the time. To determine competitive strengths and weaknesses, we:

1-Interview recent wins and losses where your company competed head-to-head with specific competitors.
2-Measure your competitive performance in 20-30 specific decision influencers
3-Determine strengths and weaknesses (Not the gap score in the table below. Positive gaps indicate weaknesses. Negative gaps indicate strengths)
4-Use predictive analytics to determine the influencers that, it improved, would result in the greatest increases in market share. (Impact column, explained below)

Impact identifies your expected improvement in market share. For instance, in this example (a real-world example taken from one of our clients), if you were to improve your company’s performance in Product Knowledge by one point (In other words, if you improved the 7.7 rating to an 8.7), you would expect your win rate and market share to increase by the impact score of 5.7% (at the 90% confidence level).

And, Product Knowledge is already a competitive strength. Overall, you outperform the competition by 5% in this area. The key may be to make this competitive advantage more consistent throughout the company.

In other words, there are influencers that would provide 2x, 3x and 4x the results of others if improvement were made in those specific areas. This could result in gains of millions or billions of unexpected dollars, based on some potentially simple improvements in the right areas.

This approach takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. No espionage required. And, yet, the company makes the biggest gains in increasing its client base.

Now, this approach does not satisfy all Competitive Intelligence needs, but it sure does take the OPPORTUNITY column of the SWOT table to a completely different level.

I am happy to talk about this approach with you. Let me know what you think about how this would fit your organization. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Why the Competitive Intelligence SWOT is Stuck in the 20th Century

A very typical request we receive at Primary Intelligence is for a SWOT analysis. Our clients want to know the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats presented by a competitor or group of competitors in a marketplace.

Of course, this SWOT analysis has a place, but its value is more tactical than strategic. Sales guys should have access to a SWOT, but I don’t know that executives should make decisions based off of this kind of information.

The problem that I see with the SWOT analysis is the fact that a company will know where its current strengths and weaknesses may be, but doesn’t have any insight into the areas of change that will bring about the biggest improvement in win rates, market share and defeating the competition.

Below, you will see an example of a Strength/Weakness evaluation based on data from recent sales opportunities. Half of the data come from new business that was won and the other 50% come from opportunities that were lost to competitors: (click on the image to see a bigger version)

The data are sorted from biggest negative competitive gap (weakness) at the top to the biggest positive competitive gap (strength) at the bottom. The scores are based on a 1-10 scale where 1 is Poor and 10 is excellent.

If you were to make strategic changes in your company based on the data in this table, you would probably look at the weaknesses and evaluate the most effective ways to close the competitive gap.

But, would this make a difference? What would happen if you were to increase your performance in Overall Solution Cost or Understanding Needs by ten percent? (A 10% improvement would mean that you increase your score of 8.1 to 9.1) How much would your win rate increase? Would making improvements in your weaknesses correlate with a stronger competitive preference, or would you be pulling the wrong levers and pouring time and money down the drain?

Traditional intelligence looks at Strengths and Weaknesses
• Should you “fix” weaknesses or accentuate strengths?
• Strength/Weaknesses don’t always correlate with decision making.
• Where is your opportunity to increase win rates and market share?

In my experience, efforts to improve the biggest weaknesses rarely result in an overall improvement in market share and competitive sales wins. In other words, odds are good that most companies are wasting time and money by using SWOTs for strategic planning.

In my next post, I’ll show you a new way to prioritize your strategic plans, based on a more intelligent form of Competitive Intelligence and performance evaluation.

If you need more info on this topic, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)

And, don't forget to register for my webinar on Thursday. Click here to register (all of the info is on the registration page).

Self-service Competitive Intelligence

Last fall, on behalf of Primary Intelligence, I co-authored an article for a local magazine on self-service intelligence. The main idea was to emphasize how to put the right intelligence in the right places at the right time to make sure that your company is capitalizing on the right markets as efficiently as possible.

For example:

Analytics
The first step you need to take to leave your safe harbor is to evaluate your data collection processes and your analytic capabilities. What is the use of collecting information if you can’t interpret and act upon it with predictable outcomes? Successful analytics processes help to evaluate the quality of the initial data and determine which portions reinforce the central goals of the organization. The usefulness of the information and analytics can be determined by its ability to support the company goals.

Customization
Simplicity is the key here; companies should evaluate different solutions to determine the most effective collaboration tools. Special care should be taken to ensure that sensitive data is easily accessible to all required personnel while protecting it from exposure to outside parties. The fundamental requirements of sharing sensitive information must address the establishment of trust and the need to enable users to find and make sense of all available information by:
*Enabling users to understand the reliability, accuracy, and urgency of the information.
*Empowering owners to retain control of information and precisely determine its access and use.
*Logging and auditing who, what, and why information is accessed and used.

Distribution
How do successful companies share data? It has to be part of the company culture and encouraged from the top down. The creation of “information silos” (repositories where data and analytics are stored, but not used) is most easily avoided when effective collaboration tools are used. The need for these tools increases exponentially with the size of the company. Smaller and medium-sized businesses generally benefit from more easily accessible communication channels. Larger companies become more compartmentalized and data tends to remain within divisions and managerial levels.

Some effective methods of disseminating information through an organization include:
*Knowledge bases and expert systems
*Help desks
*Corporate intranets and extranets
*Content management
*Wikis
*Document management

If you want to get results from your competitive intelligence efforts, the formula is simple: the right information delivered to the right people in a format they can understand. Try to hit at least 2 of those 3 criteria every time.

Check out the article. Let me know what you think.