New Primary Intelligence Corporate Website

This week, I have to give big kudos to our design department, and especially to Mark Larson who had a vision for our company website and usability. While our previous site was very usable and conveyed our value well, it was very product oriented. Sometimes, visitors had to work too hard to figure out how we fit into their world.

Now, the website has been broken down into three major categories:

1. Who we help
2. What we offer
3. Who we are

Under each of these, visitors will find a great deal of information that is focused right on their needs.

1 – Who we help – Here, you will find information for C-Level Executives, Sales Managers, Marketing, Sales Professionals and Market Research professionals.

2 – What we offer – Our intelligence services are easy to access and understand. Here, visitors will find information on our competitive intelligence and sales intelligence services such as Win Loss, Sales Confidence Index, Target Prospecting, Competitive Analysis and Client Retention

3 – Who we are – Provides information about our company and thought leadership. Here, visitors can see our newsletters, blogs, articles, webinars and information about our company.

The whole redesign was accomplished with the goal of helping business professionals find solutions more quickly. We hope you’ll give us a visit and let us know what you think. (http://www.primary-intel.com/)

You can leave a comment to this blog entry or send me an email with your thoughts. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

A Fortune 100 Company that Understands Competitive Intelligence

Last October, Mike Brose and I presented a webinar titled “The Sad Story of Competitive Intelligence that Didn’t Make a difference.” In short, we talked about how companies spend money on sales, market or competitive intelligence but fail to leverage that intelligence to make a difference. Then, we showed the recipe to gaining more value. The solution is simple: Involve people that can make a difference and show them how the intelligence drives better decisions. Cross-functional teams of executives and senior managers work best.

(Download the webinar here)
(Related blog postings can be found at: Webinar Wrap-Up: Effective Competitive Intelligence,
How Can You Tell if Competitive Intelligence is Effective?)

Recently, I talked with one of our Fortune 100 clients about their competitive intelligence systems, acceptance and use. Some of the conversation was focused directly on the sales intelligence we provide them. Talking about her organization, my contact stated:

The sales managers that understand how to use intelligence have teams that sell more

The marketing group uses our intelligence to measure their branding efforts and better understand the client.

Those are fairly common bits of feedback.

But, the thing that made me smile was when she said that the legal department uses the intelligence and performance scores to modify T&C and other legal requirements that are in the sales process.

When your legal team wants to know:

A) How they score
B) Where they stand in relation to specific competitors
C) Specific information that they can use to make improvements

… and then monitors their score over time…

You know that you have an intelligence-focused organization.

Just for fun, ask yourself the last time someone outside of marketing asked for intelligence that realistically has the ability to increase sales.

This is just a small bit of the conversation and one example of many of companies using intelligence to beat the competition in the marketplace. If you want to talk about some other ideas, give me a call (Chris, 801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Webinar Wrap-up: Effective Competitive Intelligence

Last Thursday, Mike Brose and I hosted a webinar called, “The Sad Story of Intelligence that Didn’t Make a Difference.” That is a fairly lengthy title and I’ll work on being more concise in the future.

But I digress…

Over time, we have seen many organizations that spend money on intelligence initiatives. Those initiatives might be market, sales or competitive intelligence. Most every company conducts some form of intelligence gathering. Whether primary or secondary, the intelligence is deemed important enough to have an effect on the success of the business.

However, we have also observed that many companies spend resources on the gathering of intelligence but have very little commitment to the use of that information. Rarely will a business spend so much money with so little regard for the potential return on investment. I take that back. Advertising seems to often fall into that category. But, that’s not the topic…

The topic of the webinar was based on helping companies make more effective use of the intelligence at hand. We expressed that we were not so concerned with the source or topic of the intelligence. Instead, we suggested how any type of intelligence might display more potential simply by making sure that it would be acted upon.

If you would like to download a copy of the presentation, please click HERE


And, if you would like a summary, delivered in person, or would like to subscribe to our webinar notifications, send me an email and I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Increasing ROI from Competitive Intelligence Efforts

If you have a CI program, take a minute to measure the ROI of your efforts. Instead of simply building a large library of information, ask yourself the following questions:

• Top-line Revenue
– Will this intelligence create new revenue opportunities?
– Will we take away sales from the competition?
– Will our existing accounts stay longer and be more profitable?
• Bottom-line
– Can we be more efficient or learn best practices?
– Are there better ways to manage our processes?
• Application
– How easily will we be able to act on these data?

If you are able to identify areas where you are directly increase top or bottom-line revenue, you are one of the rare success stories in competitive intelligence. If you are like the majority, you may want to consider some of the following tips:

• Reactive CI does not constitute a program. Develop an intelligence program that helps sales, marketing and product development informed of the competition's movements in the most strategic areas. Ignore all of the other noise.
• Information becomes “must have” when executives depend on it to move forward. Understand the willingness of your executives to use intelligence to make decisions. Determine which types of intelligence are best received. Don't spend time developing programs that produce data that won't be used.
• Do not assume that “stacks of information” are better than smaller quantities of targeted intelligence. Busy work does not equal effectiveness.
• Determine WHAT to investigate before starting a search. If you don't have a goal in mind, you will end up on wild goose chases. Everything begins to look appealing if you don't know what you're after.

Use these tips to work with your manager and executives to create a program rather than a competitive intelligence library.

Dan McHugh – A Pretty Smart Guy who likes Competitive Intelligence

I was flattered this week to find a kind mention about Primary Intelligence in an associate’s blog. Mr. McHugh enjoyed some of my thoughts about attaching ROI and results to your competitive intelligence efforts. (click HERE to visit Dan's blog)

Dan McHugh started his blog a couple of weeks ago. In his first post, he provided a preview of what to expect from his writings:

What to expect:

• Advice and insights for “Lone Wolf” CI practitioners as well as those setting up thier own CI/Market Intelligence practices.
• Thoughts on the use and misuse of CI by Technology companies.
• CI in Asia Pacific and some of the unique pitfalls and benefits.
• A bit of irreverence and the continuing battle between sales and marketing.

What not to expect:

• Commentary on the competitors I focus on for my day-to-day job. Not that I don’t like being opinionated regarding them, but rather, I want this blog to be about the art of CI. I also greatly admire the work that many of my brethren do, regardless of the company they work for.

In my opinion, this type of information would be of benefit to any practitioner of Competitive Intelligence. Best wishes to Dan in building a readership. So far, his content is worthy of my time.

I don’t know how to personally contact Dan, but I believe that he is the Senior Manager, Competitive Intelligence – APAC at Oracle. Hopefully, I’ll have lunch with him someday.

If you enjoy reading blogs and articles on market, competitive and sales intelligence, do the author a favor and leave a comment. Agree with the article. Offer a contradictory opinion. Promote your own work and point of view. Half of the fun of blogging is receiving feedback and knowing that you have created a dialogue rather than a monologue.

And, just when you thought statistics were boring…
One last thing from Dan’s blog. Today, he posted the following:

Aaron Koblin looks at 15,000 flights that flew in and out of the USA over a period of 24 hours. You would think that would be pretty much the end of the story. Click to see just how exciting statistics can get!

I’m always happy to chat about competitive intelligence (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)

This Just In: Corporate Espionage Continues to Grow

The corporate world is in a constant state of battle and each participant searches for the key bit of competitive intelligence that will give an edge. Espionage has been a constant practice in nearly every industry and there is no sign of slowing.

http://economicintelligence.blogspot.com/2007/04/corporate-spying-grows.html

The likelihood of getting caught is pretty slim. So many do it because most activities are never going to be discovered. And, some forms of espionage are so simple to execute that you almost feel compelled to try.

To stay on the side of ethical, I use a pretty simple rule: "If a person would lose their job by providing this information to me, I won't pursue it."

Just because you can think of creative ways of gathering info doesn't mean that you should execute on every one of them.

And, then, you need to decide if the information you pursue is going to provide you a benefit anyway. If the information is interesting but worthless, why would you risk your company's ethics and legal standing?

Before you chase any piece of information, try to apply the following two questions and plot the answer on the quadrant below:

1- How practical is it to procure this information?
2- What is the potential ROI?


Try to stay in the upper right-hand quadrant. Otherwise, your company is wasting time, money, and perhaps legal capital on efforts that just don't really matter.

If you have an idea about a competitive intelligence or competitive advantage project, talk to me and let's figure out where it might fit in the overall productive scheme of things.

Email or phone (801-838-9600 x5050)

Be the Consultant, Not the Waitress

Last night, my family went to dinner to celebrate the birthday of my oldest son. As a family with five children (and two grandmas present), we kept our waitress very busy with requests for drinks, napkins, condiments and the like.

Fortunately for us, our waitress was very patient and kept a smile on her face the whole time, even though she was under some pressure to serve a number of tables in our area. For her efforts, we added some extra to her tip to show our appreciation. Since the restaurant pays very little, the service help usually works very hard to impress the clientele in hopes of increasing their take-home pay.

In my experience, many CI managers work much like our waitress. Hopefully, you are not in the majority here. Too many people expect the CI group to be a passive, order-taking bunch. It is disappointing to see the number of CI requests that come through our company for data that has a miniscule chance of making a difference.

You can’t always say, “No” to CI requests. But, you should have a broader view of the landscape. Start by listening. But, make sure that you understand the actual business problems before anything else. Find out why the requested information is necessary. Relate the business problem to revenue generation, market share or operational efficiencies. (If you can’t, push back.) If there is no plan, what is the likelihood that the information you collect will be used?

Be a guiding force in the types of information that are collected. And, be proactive. Create CI programs that will regularly feed high quality information into different departments.

You aren’t working for tips. Be a strategic thinker, improve the bottom line and make a difference.

Share your ideas with me. Call me at 801.838.9600 x5050.