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?

Effective Competitive Intelligence – Misunderstanding of Your Efforts

In my last post, I started talking again about effective competitive intelligence. Again, my definition of effectiveness is:

– Strengthen your company’s position
• How is our value proposition perceived?
• What is the competition doing?
• Which industry-wide best practices will truly apply?
– Discover new markets
• What is possible with new technologies?
• Where should we steer the company?
– Develop new products/services/solutions
• What problems do our clients experience that we can address?

Do you know what is frustrating?

Lots of things.

That wasn’t very enlightening. In fact, it was fairly useless. But, to salvage the moment, I’ll let you know something that I see much too often.

Over time, a very common frustration in business has always been, “Why doesn’t so-and-so appreciate my efforts?” This thought is not limited to any one department, but has certainly be uttered its share in the intelligence world.

Mostly, the thought is, “I did really great work on this intelligence brief. Why won’t the executives look at it? Why won’t my manager show this off? Why is everyone ignoring my stuff?”

If you have had a similar moment, you’re not alone. In fact, in the intelligence world, this is a very common feeling. I’ll offer a suggestion and you may not like it, but I’m going to place some of the responsibility on your own shoulders.

The primary cause of your problem is that you are not taking the time to understand the world of your target recipients. Your hope is that people will appreciate your work on its own merits. If you build it, they will come. But Shoeless Joe hasn’t wandered through the cornfield to find your ballpark of a brief.

Let’s not take anything away from your work quality. I’m sure that your results were prepared from thorough research and the presentation is first-rate. Unfortunately, that only matters so much. In brief, if nobody can understand your work, the benefit and value are going to be marginalized, at best.

This very topic was the subject of a recent Primary Intelligence webinar. If you want the full scoop, download the recorded webinar presentation HERE.


The most effective thing you can do is start to look outside the needs of the people with whom you are most closely associated. Otherwise, you probably have a view of your company needs that is way too myopic.

If you want product management to understand and appreciate your work, take time to appreciate their specific problems and intelligence needs.

Then, discuss your ability to fill their needs and sell them on the idea of creating an intelligence flow process that appeals to them.

Of course, the final step of the process is to deliver at least according to their expectations. Over-deliver if possible. But that term is so passé. Valuable, but passé.

After you have won a champion or two in your target departments, you can start the process of sharing your pet projects and specialties. Once you have their attention, you’ll start to earn their respect. That’s the time to show what you have done.

Need a little help with the process? Let’s chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

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)

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.

The ROI of Win Loss Analysis (Primary Intelligence Style)

If you found a surefire way to make your company grow, you would have to consider the ROI potential of the program, initiative, solution, right?

Well, I did a little digging today with a couple of clients to find recent ROI success stories. The results were surprising. I’ll share a couple of experiences here:

“We did a round of win loss analysis with Primary Intelligence. The process included interviews with our newly won accounts and lost prospects from the past 6 months. Primary Intelligence provided us with individual opportunity profiles for each sales engagement.

“After we (sales leadership) received the profiles, we identified the 10 biggest losses (based on opportunity size). We reviewed the feedback, needs and perceptions that caused the prospect to choose our competitor. Then, we created a plan to reengage each of those 10 lost prospects. Since this was our first attempt at a formal post-sales reengagement, we didn’t have any expectations of success. We just wanted to see what was possible.

“So far, based on the intelligence we received, we have won 3 of those 10 losses. These were multi-million dollar accounts that potentially stretch out over long-term
contracts.

“This is just one way we are using our Sales Intelligence provided by Primary Intelligence. The ROI potential of this sales intelligence is mind-boggling.”

A second client of Primary Intelligence described their ROI experience in this manner:

“When we perform win loss analysis with Primary Intelligence, we provide PI with a list of our recent wins and losses. These sales opportunities are pulled from our SFA and are based on the best information that our sales reps have.

“Primary Intelligence calls through the list of opportunities, setting up appointments for interviews and weeding out opportunities that don’t qualify for analysis. While engaged in this activity, PI regularly finds a few opportunities that were categorized by our company as losses, but are still in consideration. These opportunities may be lukewarm to very warm, but they are not dead.

“PI immediately calls us to let us know when they have discovered a ‘nugget,’ or a potential opportunity that needs immediate attention. We send that information directly back to the sales rep and our conversion rates in these instances is surprisingly high.

“We more than pay for our entire sales intelligence effort based on these nuggets alone. The strategic and tactical data we use to create new business is actually just frosting on the cake after you consider the revenue that PI creates for us.”

Primary Intelligence provides data and consulting to help companies in over 45 industries create strategic and tactical improvement. Our work extends from the executive boardroom to sales, marketing and product leadership and down to each individual sales rep. We have a methodology to improve the performance of the most key departments in your company.

If you would like to know a little more about these experiences or specific information about the companies that have achieved these results, call me. (801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)