Competitive Intelligence Webinar – Key to Setting Up a Win Loss Program

Yesterday, Ralph Nielsen (Director of Research Operations) and I co-presented a webinar on how to set up a Win Loss program that works. We took the opportunity to talk about best practices, obstacles, unexpected value. If you are thinking about setting up an in-house effort or you work with a 3rd-party vendor for your Win Loss, we gave you a ton to consider.

Also, I have recently spent some time with our great clients talking about how they use Win Loss, to whom they distribute it and where it makes a difference in their companies. I turned the results of this work into a section in the webinar that I refer to as Seven Secrets of Making Your Win Loss Program More Effective. That’s kind of a long title, but it leaves little room for confusion.

If you would like to download the slides alone, you can find them HERE.

If you want to watch the entire webinar with audio and video, you can download that file right HERE.



Over the next few days, I’ll spend some time sharing the ideas from the webinar in the blog.

Also, we appreciate the many people that gave their time and attended. If you watch the presentation and have any questions or comment, let me know. Leave a comment on this blog, email me (cdalley@primary-intel.com) or give me a call (801.838.9600 x5050)

Military Intelligence – A Template for Effective Competitive Intelligence

More than 95% of U.S. based businesses indicate that they have dedicated some amount of resources to the gathering of intelligence. This may include market, sales or competitive intelligence, but the goal is usually the same: be better at business than the next guy.

But, few companies would rate themselves as being very effective with the intelligence. And, the funny thing is the discrepancy of the perception between those that gather the intelligence and those that would use it. Executives usually rate themselves as “somewhat effective” or “very effective” as using intelligence while the intelligence professionals generally rate the executives as “not very effective.” Hmmmm. Why so many axes to grind?

Every organization should examine and reexamine its practices to create a continual improvement process. During this process, I would recommend that each organization take a little time to review other organizations that make intelligence a priority.

Now, it would be difficult to peek into other businesses and discover their secrets. You wouldn’t open your doors to this kind of review. Why would anyone else?

But, you can look at an institution that, overall, leads the world in the gathering, analysis and use of intelligence – The military. In fact, you can make the case that the military has the longest running and most successful intelligence system in history. (We won’t talk about policy makers and their use or misuse of intelligence. That’s another story for another day…

Where else are the stakes higher than on the battlefield? In a situation where lives and equipment are constantly at risk, we can learn some very critical things about how the military values its “competitive intelligence”, from gathering through strategic use.

“Most militaries maintain a military intelligence corps with specialized intelligence units for collecting information in specific ways. Militaries also typically have intelligence staff personnel at each echelon down to battalion level. Intelligence officers and enlisted soldiers assigned to military intelligence may be selected for their analytical abilities or scores on intelligence tests. They usually receive formal training in these disciplines.”

“Critical vulnerabilities are…indexed in a way that makes them easily available to advisors and line intelligence personnel who package this information for policy-makers and war-fighters. Vulnerabilities are usually indexed by the nation and military unit, with a list of possible attack methods.”

“Critical threats are usually maintained in a prioritized file, with important enemy capabilities analyzed on a schedule set by an estimate of the enemy's preparation time. For example, nuclear threats between the USSR and the US were analyzed in real time by continuously on-duty staffs. In contrast, analysis of tank or army deployments are usually triggered by accumulations of fuel and munitions, which are monitored on slower, every-few-days cycles. In some cases, automated analysis is performed in real time on automated data traffic.”

“Packaging threats and vulnerabilities for decision makers is a crucial part of military intelligence. A good intelligence officer will stay very close to the policy-maker or war fighter, to anticipate their information requirements, and tailor the information needed. A good intelligence officer will ask a fairly large number of questions in order to help anticipate needs, perhaps even to the point of annoying the principal. For an important policy-maker, the intelligence officer will have a staff to which research projects can be assigned.”

“Developing a plan of attack is not the responsibility of intelligence, though it helps an analyst to know the capabilities of common types of military units. Generally, policy-makers are presented with a list of threats, and opportunities. They approve some basic action, and then professional military personnel plan the detailed act and carry it out. Once hostilities begin, target selection often moves into the upper end of the military chain of command. Once ready stocks of weapons and fuel are depleted, logistic concerns are often exported to civilian policy-makers.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_intelligence)

The points that catch my attention are:

1. Intelligence professionals are present at each level of the military
2. They receive formal training in intelligence practices
3. Good intelligence officers stay very close to the policy-maker or war-fighter
4. Good intelligence officers ask lots of questions to make sure that the intelligence program is on the right track and can anticipate the leaders’ needs
5. Good intelligence officers package the intelligence in ways that the users can easily consume while still getting the intended “nutritional value”
6. While competitive intelligence personnel are not responsible for policy, direction or decisions, they should try to understand how these decisions are made. This will provide a deeper context to make future intelligence efforts more valuable.

In the next post, we’ll look at the usual structure of intelligence in today’s business.

And, if you have any thoughts, leave me a comment. I dare you.

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.

Why Haven’t I Been the Target of a Competitive Intelligence Program?

Last month, my wife, kids and I piled into the family suburban. We started from our home in Salt Lake City, pointed the car east and didn’t stop driving until we hit New York City. We’re a road trip family, but I don’t think we’ll need to see I-80 again for a while.

As we traveled, we frequented dozens of hotels, restaurants, tourist traps… I mean, attractions, gas stations and everything else that goes with a long road trip. You really shouldn’t travel 5,000+ miles without stopping to see a lot of places.

Anyway… at the consumer level, my observation overall was that the companies with whom I interacted had no program whatsoever to understand me as a client, let alone gather little bits of competitive intelligence. Maybe they are all making money hand over fist and they don’t see the need, but even with my feeble understanding of the synergy between sales, marketing and competitive intelligence at the consumer level, I saw opportunities for each of these vendors and service providers to pry a little more cash out of my wallet and away from competing establishments.

I’ll provide one quick example: We stayed at many different hotels/motels, often just off of the freeway. After a long day’s drive, we would attack the pack of motels, looking for the right amenities and the best bargain. When I approached the clerk in each motel, the conversation started with availability and quickly turned into a negotiation. If you were watching, you would have thought we were in a middle-eastern bazaar, haggling over the price of a gourd.

Never once did the clerk at the desk ask me where else I was considering. Never once, was I asked what was important to my family. Maybe the guest rooms had a comment card for me to fill out, but it was likely hidden behind some brochure.

To its credit, one of the hotel chains (of whom I am a loyalty program member) sent me a couple of emails after my stay asking about my satisfaction. They ought to ask me about my stay at a couple of the competitors’ establishments also. As a traveler, I’m looking for comfort and a decent price. I’ll tell them what the competition is doing if it will help me get a better stay for my family next time.

Maybe, my next gig will be a consultant to consumer-oriented companies. The dollars and margins may be smaller, but the volume can be huge. It would make my day to be influential in the change of an entire industry with a few simple measures.

Why Doesn't Competitive Intelligence Flow to Sales?

It has been my observation that most companies perform some type of competitive intelligence. In fact, most have several, if not dozens, of programs. Each research initiative is built to produce information upon which decisions may be based.

It has also been my observation that the production of intelligence is almost always handled by the marketing department, which makes sense. Of course, I am painting in broad strokes, but if you can accept that most analysts, competitive intelligence specialists and market research groups fit under the marketing umbrella, we should all agree on this point.

In fact, in one of our Primary Intelligence internal studies, 89% of companies said that they have a formal competitive intelligence program in place. This is higher than the 78% that have a customer sat program and the 65% that conduct account retention analysis.

But, when we ask the sales reps about the availability and use of competitive intelligence in their jobs, 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. But, I don’t know the percentage of intelligence that comes from marketing vs. self-generated intelligence. Sales reps and account managers can be very resourceful when it comes to preparing to do their job.

All this seems to beg the question… why isn’t sales organizing competitive intelligence initiatives more often? Why don’t sales managers use competitive intelligence to position more effectively? Why doesn’t the sales department work more closely with marketing?

It is my experience that there is more than one obstacle. But, the most important fact is that the intelligence is delivered in chunks that sales doesn’t want to eat. This fact seems to outweigh the type of intelligence available or any other obstacles that might exist between sales and marketing.

Another important fact to consider is that the competitive intelligence is often commissioned by management and executives, which means that the intelligence is not designed from the outset to satisfy sales nor answer questions relevant to sales.

Both of these problems can be overcome through tighter communication between sales and marketing. Odds are that current intelligence initiatives can be reworked to include a few tidbits for the sales group. Furthermore, marketing can study the current information sources used by sales and mimic those sources to deliver bits and pieces (or full meals) straight to the sales reps.

If the intelligence can make a sales rep 10% more effective (and current evidence suggests that 10% is a conservative figure), how much revenue does your company stand to gain by improving the intelligence communication process? What opportunity is being lost today by not doing so?

Let’s talk about the possibilities and what they mean to you. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence Needs a Personal Touch

I am a little hard of hearing today after yelling and cheering at the Utah Jazz/Houston Rockets game. What a great game! The crowd was nuts. The players played hard, and (more importantly for Jazz fans) there will be a game 7 on Saturday night.

You may have already seen this, but check out the Google driving directions from New York to London, UK: (click here)

The fun of it is when you consider that these are driving directions. The best part is looking all the way down the list and finding out that the Google people know that you can’t drive across the Atlantic Ocean. However, they have a practical alternative.

This does have a point.

The Google directions are smart enough to tell you that you’re going to have to swim to cross the ocean. Someone at Google had the notion to take a piece of information that was delivered automatically and insert a custom bit of instruction that is either useful or entertaining, depending on your point of view.

If you provide competitive intelligence in your organization, you have to help advise the users on different points. If you leave everything to the reader of the data, it is possible that they will end up in the wrong place with the wrong tools. Use your experience to understand the context of the data and provide recommendations.

One of the worst things that can happen to intelligence is to orphan a report or brief in a department. In most companies, they will suffer from neglect. Very sad, indeed.

And, I think the Jazz will beat the Rockets in game 7. Goooooo JAZZ!

Let me know what you think (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence and TOO MUCH DATA!

Ron Sathoff (an associate of mine at Primary Intelligence) brought me the results of a study from Advertising Age. The most interesting chart was called, "What Middle Managers Say About Obtaining Necessary Data" and the responses to the survey were generated from 1,009 US and UK respondents in January 2007.

(Source: Advertising Age, Digital Marketing & Media Fast Pack, Published April 23, 2007, Copyright 2007 Crain Communications Inc.)

If you are a competitive intelligence professional, you have to focus on improving the:

-relevancy of your data
-distribution methods of your data

If you consider that 59% say they can’t find existing information, 45% say that they don’t know what the rest of the company is doing and 40% of the respondents say that other parts of the company won’t share info, you have 144% of the people that are experiencing a problem.

Well, that’s not quite right (and you can see the my statistics training didn’t really stick), but it sure seems odd to me that this many managers are not able to find the information necessary to do their jobs better.

So how does a company overcome these obstacles and distribute information more effectively?

1- Someone in the organization has to understand and coordinate the primary
intelligence-gathering campaigns. Depending on the size of the organization,
this may be a difficult task, but a Director of CI should be able to compile and
update a basic list

2- This list needs to be distributed to different levels of management.
People in the organization need to know what is available.

3- If you have a “librarian” that catalogues the data, it is not enough
to “store” it in convenient places. Reports need to be advertised. Data needs to
be presented. Even an internal company newsletter to managers and execs would
help to serve the purpose. But, nobody can hide behind the excuse, “That report
has been posted to the intranet for months. They should have known.” You have to
innovate to distribute intelligence effectively

4- Road shows – Take data on the road. Summarize reports. Go to
scheduled meetings, whether the meeting is down the hall or down the interstate.

5- Build trust with rogue departments that don’t want to share data.
Find out why they want to hold it so close to the vest and work your way into
their trust

6- Recommend consultants to help departments build in the resident
intelligence. Some data recipients like to read reports and distill the results
into their own recommendations. The majority prefers to get the summary, next
steps and action plan. If this is in your comfort zone, go for it. If not, get
outside expertise.

This is the information age. Companies run on intelligence. They run efficiently and better than the competition when they run on the right data at the right time.

If you are an order taker, stop. You still have to listen, but you have to do more than run projects on an as-needed basis. Take responsibility for your company’s intelligence and make it work for more people.

If you have thoughts, questions or suggestions, contact me (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Making Competitive Intelligence Louder than the Corporate Noise

At Primary Intelligence, we just finished working with a company that had very mature competitive intelligence processes in place. The processes provided information that should have helped maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Overall, the builders of the CI program put a lot of work into creating and refining processes that collected the right information.

And, their department just lost most of its funding. New initiatives won’t be added and it will be difficult to preserve much of the status quo. Smart people will soon be working with other companies.

Why?

Because, the CI department never really figured out how to make the results meaningful to the executives. Decisions were rarely influenced (let alone, based on) the results of their efforts.

And, that’s all she wrote. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there…

This is not a one-time occurrence. And, it is a way of life that is not limited to the Competitive Intelligence, Marketing Research or Marketing departments of the world. In fact, important people in mission-critical roles are dismissed regularly if the perception is that they are not producing results.

What is the take home lesson?

Be seen. Be heard. Be effective and make your presence known. Specifically, in relation to Competitive Intelligence:

1- Push information into the executive boardrooms as often as possible
2- Ask, ask, ask, ask, ask about the current questions that need to be answered for the company leadership
3- Study the way key decision-makers in the company find and read information. Do they prefer raw data, spreadsheets and crude analysis or will they only consume small, polished briefs, one chunk at a time
4- Be a consultant. Present intelligence options and drive the topic of competitive intelligence methods as an agenda item.
5- Be prepared to show case studies of related efforts showing ROI potential in competitive intelligence.

After all this, be prepared to do it over and over. If you want to stay above the noise in the corporation, you have to be a little better organized, targeted and unified than everything else. Otherwise, you will just be static.

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.