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)

The Compartmentalization of Competitive Intelligence in a Company

Over the past couple of weeks, I have spent some time on the phone talking with a number of our current and past clients. What a great experience this has been. I am reminded of the great people that have chosen to work with Primary Intelligence.

The goal of these conversations has been to understand a little bit more about how companies use our intelligence. At Primary Intelligence, we have a strong value proposition and we’re pretty good at communication the message. To us, the true value of what we do is obvious. The list of people in a company that should benefit from our services is well defined. In other words, we’re a simple plug-in solution that solves a set of problems and provides an expected value.

All of which is true to some extent. But, the real fun has been to find out all those little nuances of use, value and such that come into existence within each of our clients’ corporate environments and cultures. We have some very creative clients that are finding bigger and better ways to leverage their intelligence to create more value. We also have a few that are looking forward to a summary of my findings as a “thank you” for their willingness to spend time with me.

Something that is coming out in many of my conversations, however, is the fact that intelligence often has a tendency to be compartmentalized. By this, I mean that there is a tendency for the intelligence to be consumed by a single person or group of people for strategic planning and tactical to-dos, but other departments are often left in the dark regarding the presence of win loss feedback.

Some of the most interesting examples of this compartmentalization occur between sales and marketing. (Can’t we all just get along?) When sales intelligence is purchased by sales, sales operations or sales training, there is often a reluctance to share the data throughout the organization. The intelligence is used by the sales group to accomplish their designs, but marketing, product or corporate executives often do not receive information.

Even more interesting is the reaction from the marketing side. In numerous cases, marketing has told me that they use the win loss data to answer questions about marketing and product. They even put pieces of our intelligence into presentations that are delivered to the executive boardroom. But, when asked about how the sales team uses the intelligence, a long silence happens and then they ask, “What would sales want with this information?”

Personally, I would have thought sales would be eminently interested. But, from some points of view within a company, they can’t see what a sales leader or rep needs to be more successful.

Caveats: We do have plenty of clients that share between sales, marketing, product and others. These phone calls are not a scientific measure. These conversations are as relevant as one-offs on any topic. Some companies use intelligence more effectively than others. Most sales and marketing groups work together to coordinate their intelligence needs. A win loss project doesn’t mean the same thing to every company in every industry.

That said, it is my observation that our clients that create a processes to accept, digest, understand, distribute and act on sales intelligence tend to be leaders in their respective industries. I’m sure that many of these companies have an overall culture that is accustomed to using research, data and intelligence of many types. The fact that they can process our information is the result of a leadership group that expects all leaders to be more fact-based.

What is the takeaway? You might want to look at your company culture and plans for 2008. What types of competitive intelligence are you generating? Does your CI program have ROI potential? How far does it travel and are there any real expectations that the information will be used to make a revenue-enhancing decision (increased sales success, better market positioning, increased competitive strength, faster time to market, etc…)?

What can you do to gain one more champion of your competitive intelligence efforts? Can you reach out to another department and make a friend? Can you find others within your company that are willing to receive your data? How willing are you to listen to other research performed by other departments in your company?

Personally, I believe that the good intelligence should rise above the clutter to the top and it should be used as often as possible, as long as it is relevant, to strengthen the company. Otherwise, the overall value is marginalized.

Progress starts with one person trying to make something a little better. Are you the person to break down some of the compartmentalization of your company?

Competitive Intelligence and the Marketing Department Merging (Old News, Interesting Article)

Yesterday, Jon Lowder of SCIP, posted various CI related links, one of which describes the continuing trend to combine sales and marketing efforts.

The article is two years old and written from the pharmaceutical industry. However, I found the overall content interesting and recommend that you give it a read, too.

(Teaser) One of the statements that took me a bit by surprise was, “some experts argue that market research is just a subset of competitive intelligence.[CBD1] ” My personal observation is that CI usually lives side-by-side or as a subset of market research. Please, let me know if you are in a company where market research is a subset of competitive intelligence.

The article can be found HERE. I’ll give you a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:

More companies are folding Competitive Intelligence departments into Market Research. Here's why that strategy makes sense—and some hints on making the new relationship work.

That sort of insight has led to the latest trend in the world of competitive intelligence. Recognizing that competitive intelligence and market research overlap, companies across multiple industries are combining the two functions. The jury is still out on how effective this strategy will be in the long run, and on what the best way is to structure the two functions to work well together. But in the meantime, market-research groups have been turning their attention more and more toward collecting and analyzing competitive intelligence to support specific product goals. The pharmaceutical industry in particular has been integrating competitive-intelligence and market-research efforts to engender greater strategic impact from their market-research functions.

Fifty years ago, market-research groups enjoyed vast resources—large budgets and staffs to support almost any research need—as the industry began to adapt to more consumer-driven markets. Slowly, though, companies pulled back their market-research dollars and eventually shrank internal market-research groups to one or two team members.


The pharma industry witnessed some of the most drastic cuts in market-research resources. In the mid-1980s, pharmaceutical market-research teams were almost non-existent, even in the most-respected firms. Outsourcing became a quiet solution to data collection and cost savings. Most pharma companies outsourced all their market-research work during the 1980s.

The 1990s, however, saw a shift back to building internal market-research teams, which has lasted to the present. Those teams were built to support the blockbuster generation: Find a market gap, use the data to develop a first-to-market product, and brace yourself for the sales upswing. As scores of blockbuster products approach patent expiration and companies begin looking to lifecycle management teams to expand their franchises, market-research resources are settling to a more comfortable size... (for more, click here)

Using Data to Make Decisions in Marketing

Marketing. An Art? A Science? An amalgam of both. Historically, marketing has been a craft owned by the creative rather than the methodical. And, it is likely that the creative will never leave. But, technology continues to push the envelope on what can be tracked and measured. Each day, demand increases for marketers that can measure their results.

“There is such tremendous change in the marketplace that marketing techniques that used to work may not work anymore,” says Roland Rust, chairman of the marketing department at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business at College Park, Md., and author of numerous books on marketing. “Companies are trying a lot of new things and don’t know whether they work. The companies that are getting ahead these days are those that use data to make decisions,”

Prof. Rust adds. Conquering highly profitable markets, or having the right market focus and position, is one of the key building blocks of a high-performance business, says Mr. Merrihue of Accenture. And a high-performance business today demands cost-effective, results-driven marketing” (http://online.wsj.com/ad/accenture/)

The source of this information comes from an advertisement -, but the message, while a touch bombastic, remains the same. Understanding your marketing position and tracking progress against goals has become one of the most important topics in marketing. That is no secret at all. Determining what to measure and how to improve is a large challenge.

I’ll toss out my two cents on how Competitive Intelligence can improve a marketing department’s ability to compete.

If done properly, competitive intelligence should be able to tell you:

Crucial business needs that lead people to consider your product/service/solution

How the competition positions itself against you

The perception of the prospects in regard to your value proposition

The right message at the right time of the evaluation process

Your company’s image compared with that of the competition

What are the most important factors that cause a prospect to use you vs. anyone else.

Competitive Intelligence should feed your marketing department with these types of answers, allowing the most effective messages to be refined. Tracking this information over time will provide the ability to measure improvement and/or keep pace with a changing marketplace.

These ideas are some of the most basic possibilities. If you have other ideas or need suggestions, let’s chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Why is Competitive Intelligence Not Effective?

Competitive Intelligence. Everyone is doing it. You should too. (Of course, you already do)

You have a CI department. So do your competitors. So does everyone else. The question really is whether your intelligence efforts are effective at strengthening your competitive position, discovering new markets or developing your product/service/solution.

In short, does your company make changes to increase revenues and profitability based on your intelligence efforts?

Based on our experience, if you are like most companies, the effect of your intelligence efforts are minimized and, often, substantially. Why? There are five primary reasons that intelligence is not leveraged to its maximum potential:

1. Indecision
2. Delays and Timeliness
3. Misunderstanding Other’s Worlds
4. Communication Problems
5. Lack of Acceptance

Most of the time, these reasons apply mostly to the executive level of your company. If the change agents in your company are not committed to using intelligence as a road map or do not find your intelligence relevant, they will continue to make decisions based on intuition and whatever information they find helpful.

Overcoming these challenges takes effort, evangelization and commitment. Habits are not easily replaced.

For more information on increasing the effectiveness of your intelligence efforts, let’s chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence Newsletter

In this issue, we attempt to cross the chasm between Sales and Marketing, make Competitive Intelligence part of your current VOC programs and show how a major technology deal was won.

Cover Story
The Bridge Between Sales and Marketing - Sales Intelligence
By Mike Brose, Primary Intelligence Inc.The conflict between sales and marketing is an age-old story that will probably never end. The misunderstanding between the two departments is often based on pride rather than collaboration and results. At its core, Marketing is more effective when its efforts bring qualified prospects to the sales organization. Sales wants nothing more than to close business... (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Competitive Intelligence from Clients - What Should I Ask?
If you want to win more business, you have to take it from the competition. I know that's obvious, but generating competitive intelligence that actually helps you compete more effectively is a surprising low priority of too many companies (For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
How HP Canada Won a $10 Million Contract with Carleton University
Originally Published in June 2005.
To ensure that it could meet the needs of its students and research programs, Carleton University decided to upgrade its network infrastructure. From a list of 10 initial responses, the short list was narrowed to HP Canada and... (For more, click here)

Making Competitive Intelligence Effective with Cross-functional Teams (Part 1 of 4)

On Wednesday, I was a little sour toward irrelevant Competitive Intelligence efforts. Fortunately, I am associated with dozens of companies that are producing intelligence efforts at different levels of effectiveness. More importantly, each of these companies has a commitment to making the efforts more effective over time. They are searching for best practices and making changes.

In my experience, companies that make the most effective use of intelligence all use the same system at some level. If your company truly wants to make gains based on intelligence it should:

1. Have a commitment to making decisions with intelligence


2. Create a cross-functional team, including leaders from Sales, Marketing, Product Development, Finance and the Executive Board


3. Determine the most effective routes to generating effective competitive intelligence


4. Involve a 3rd-party to provide guidance (This is not a shameless plug. I’ll explain later)


5. Provide a strong voice to evangelize the competitive intelligence


6. Demand accountability of leaders based on their willingness to consider and implement changes based on the intelligence initiatives

Let’s talk about the first point.

A commitment to making decisions with intelligence
This quality starts at the very top. Perhaps you have a corporate board or an executive team. How do your CEO, CSO, CMO make decisions? Have they been around so long that they “know everything?” Do they reach out personally to clients, employees, partners and other significant market drivers?

You may not know the executive personally, but you can infer their receptivity to market intelligence by the conversations they have with employees. If they are the type that make idle talk and discuss the weather or the local sports team, they may tend to be more closed-minded about intelligence-based decisions. On the other hand, if they are committed to LISTENING to real matters that effect real people, they may tend to consume intelligence more willingly.

Of course, if the executives already sponsor intelligence initiatives, you might consider that a dead giveaway.

Why is this commitment to making decisions so important?

Because intelligence is only a means to an end. The end has to be change in the company that produces more revenue. And, change doesn’t happen without a commitment at the highest levels.

All of your competitive intelligence efforts won’t mean much if the change agents in your company don’t use it. You can contract with 3rd-party vendors, scrape websites, monitor press releases, evaluate public financial documents and measure market penetration forever. But intelligence without action is worthless.

Over the next few posts, let’s consider the other bullet points above.

And, if you want to chat, let’s chat. Post a response, call (801-838-9600 x5050) or send an email (cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Getting the Most out of Win Loss Analsysis

What is Win Loss Analysis?
A Win Loss Analysis is a systematic analysis of the new business opportunities for which your sales team (or channel partners) has competed. By implementing a Win Loss Analysis program you’ll be able to obtain reliable, actionable and unbiased feedback about how well your sales team performed in recent competitive opportunities. And, you’ll be able to identify much more, including the best practices of your top performers, your competitive positioning within each opportunity, and how well your products and services were received.

What are the benefits of a Win Loss Analysis?
A Win Loss Analysis will reveal the risks and opportunities associated with your sales strategies, your competitors’ strategies and your target markets. You can learn about your marketplace in a way that transcends simply knowing about your own customers. A Win Loss Analysis will also reveal the varied buying habits, challenges and adoption rates of your customers, your competitors’ customers and your mutual prospects.

If you want a clear picture of each individual sales opportunity and the emerging trends across multiple opportunities to help sales professionals win more business, a Win Loss Analysis can do the following:

-Improve individual and company-wide competitive win ratios
-Establish clear Win Loss benchmarks
-Increase sales per employee
-Build successful sales organizations that are always improving
-Discover the reasons for lost opportunities
-Increase your competitive advantage
-Enhance your understanding of competitors

By obtaining reliable and unbiased feedback from your recent sales opportunities, sales representatives can refine their techniques, learn how to effectively target a client’s needs, and make appropriate presentations that put your company and products in the best possible light. A Win Loss Analysis will provide you with empirical, yet pragmatic, information to drive your business, products, and marketing decisions toward an improved competitive advantage, increased revenue growth and greater market share.


Which departments within an organization are impacted by a Win Loss Analysis?
Although many people assume the information from a Win Loss Analysis is only for the sales force, we have found that Win Loss will impact every department in your organization. Additionally, key individuals in your organization such as Sales Representatives, Sales Management, Product Development, Marketing and Executive Management will all be able to leverage the actionable information that is captured in a Win Loss Analysis program to make better decisions.

Sales Representatives will better understand the perception of their prospects and what they were really thinking about the representative’s abilities and effectiveness. Sales representatives will also begin to better understand their strengths and weaknesses, the company’s positioning, their competition and the overall marketplace.

Sales Managers will get data on the key issues that are hampering their over all sales efforts. Hard data on what your competitors are doing right, what you’re doing wrong or not doing, and data on how the market perceives you. This information will help sales managers to refocus, redeploy, and retrain where it’s most important.

Product Development can now begin to understand more about where a solution or product may be lacking against their competitors and what features and functionality are most important to the prospects in the pipeline.

Marketing will receive direct feedback from their audience as to what is working and what isn’t working. They’ll learn which marketing tools have the most impact with whom and which are not worth the investment of time and money.

Executive Management will now get actionable intelligence on every aspect of the entire sales process. They’ll learn about new players in their markets and gain insight into current market trends.

Can’t We A Just Get Along? (Sales and Marketing)

I was working with a company yesterday that just doesn’t get it. They have a fairly traditional relationship between sales and marketing. Sales says that the leads that Marketing produces are worthless (and that’s an attempt to keep this blog family-friendly) and Marketing says that Sales doesn’t work the leads and expects too much.

So, in the end, these departments tend to go their own way, complying with corporate strategic initiatives, but leveraging each other’s strengths to produce a result that is greater than the sum of its parts.

How does this relate to competitive intelligence? Sales and Marketing need each other here more than anywhere else. We see examples of success and failure among our client base often at Primary Intelligence.

Where else is the competitive battle fought more passionately than the sales trenches – deal by deal. The right information delivered at the right time, coupled with the skills of an experienced sales representative can mean the difference between a loss and a long-term client with substantial lifetime value and profitability. But, yesterday, the marketing team was “number-crunching weenies that love their reports and miss the boat.”

And, who can provide marketing with more information about value proposition, messaging, competitive pressures and information specific to different industries or segments? The sales team works in this arena every day. They have their ear to the ground. Sales reps will see trends develop long before marketing hears word one. But, in yesterday’s meeting, sales was “gun-slinging outlaws with more bravado than brains.”

In my experience, the sales and marketing department have to be married (happily) and work together continuously. In some companies, the position of VP Sales and Marketing exists. There are potential problems in combining two roles into one person, but there is less territoriality and conflict.

I recommend that someone from Sales and Marketing stage a love-in, professionally speaking. Create dialogue between the two organizations. Develop committees with leaders and worker bees from each group. Develop communication channels to move information up the chain and around to everyone in both departments.

The benefits will include:

-Stronger market alignment
-Messaging that is much more precise
-Sales reps that are better equipped with competitive intelligence
-A company with pronounced tactical advantages
-Increased sales and higher lifetime client values

I can’t think of any real cons to this arrangement.

If you have ideas on moving Sales and Marketing closer together to leverage strengths and produce synergies, let me know. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)