Webinar Wrapup - Does Your Sales Team Have Heart

Yesterday, Adam Dunford (VP Product Development) and I presented an answer to that very question through our webinar. The idea is that the performance of the sales team, how they think and feel about their products, services, and management team clearly impacts their efforts, success, and $$$. It is common sense that if the sales team is demoralized, win rates and pipelines are bound to suffer.


In response to that idea, Primary Intelligence has developed a product called Sales Confidence Index. The following description will help you understand the purpose of this system:

• Consumer Confidence Index - The Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) is defined as the degree of optimism on the state of the economy that consumers are expressing through their activities of savings and spending Economists closely track consumer confidence because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of all U.S. economic activity.

• Sales Confidence Index - Companies closely track salesperson confidence because sales team efforts account for the economic activity of the firm. The confidence of the salesperson, loyalty, his or her competitiveness, confidence in the strategic direction, value delivery, and innovativeness measures the sales person’s outlook over the next six months.

If you would like to watch a reply of the webinar, the recorded version is available here. If you’re willing to watch that demo, talk to me about the possibility of the offer extended at the end of the presentation. (801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Analytics in Competitive Intelligence: Stated Importance vs. Derived Importance

If your company uses market information to make decisions, you are almost certain to be familiar with the “Of these items, how important was…” or “Which of these would you consider to be first, second and third most important?” These questions result in a measurement of stated importance, or those things that are easily identified and verbalized as important.

While these data are easy to generate and generally seem reasonable at face value, there is evidence to show that decisions based solely on stated importance are subject to important limitations. Those areas of your company’s performance that are identified as most important often do not correlate well, if at all, with purchase decisions. Which means that your company can act on those performance areas identified as most important and yet, no measurable improvement be made from those efforts. In most companies, that is defined as poor ROI or “a waste of money.”

For example, through your research, you may identify a performance area with a relatively low performance score and might initially trigger discussion regarding ways to improve the performance. However, you wouldn’t want to do much about it if it had a low correlation to overall increases in market share. For instance, let’s consider this principle in a Win Loss setting. Suppose we had created an interview and included the measurement of professionalism of a sales force against a prospect’s likelihood of choosing a vendor. Whether the performance rating against the competition was positive or negative, it would be difficult for an executive to understand the impact that professionalism actually has on the company’s sales win ratio. It would be impossible to know how much a change in performance would affect that win ratio. If it turns out that the correlation to the sales win rate is high, the decision to put emphasis on increasing professionalism would be very easy and relatively risk-free. If the correlation were low, resources could be assigned to improve other parts of the sales process.

There is much evidence to indicate that responses on importance scales can be affected by other factors that distort the accuracy of the response, for example the need to please, social demands, cognitive dissonance, and generic importance, among others. In the entertainment industry, for example, television viewers using such scales will continually rate the value of news and information above sex or escapism. However, would anyone wish to predict, based upon these data, whether the ratings of the program Seinfeld will be lower than those of The PBS News Hour? Thus, there is a much deeper level of insight to be gained from deriving the information from the respondents’ answers rather than taking them at face value.

The quadrant below shows how actual data from our win loss studies has plotted on stated importance and derived importance:

Legend
• Stated importance is plotted on the Y-axis; it represents the average importance rating given by respondents for each influencer’s characteristic or attribute.
• Derived importance is plotted on the X-axis; it is obtained by assessing the company’s performance in each influencer and determining (through proprietary modeling techniques) the impact that each influencer had on the sales outcome. The higher the derived importance, the more impact that influencer has on the overall sales win ratio.

• Upper left quadrant—“Declared important”: This quadrant consists of items that are stated to be important, but which ultimately have little correlation to a respondent’s decision-making process.
• Upper right quadrant—“Key influencers”: This quadrant reflects attributes that the respondent both states as being important and which prove to be highly influential at a derived level.
• Lower right quadrant—“Hidden opportunities”: This quadrant consists of attributes that the respondent cannot readily identify at a stated level, but which do impact overall satisfaction at a derived level.
• Lower left quadrant—“Limited impact”: Attributes in this quadrant have both low stated importance and little influence on overall satisfaction.

Now, one caveat is in order here. Some performance areas may be ranked high in stated importance, but will be low in derived importance. This doesn’t mean that a company can cut back efforts in the areas of stated importance. They still have an effect on the sales process. When an attribute has a high stated importance, the data are saying that this is a performance area that can’t be neglected without adversely altering the win loss ratio, but significant improvement may not provide actual gains in the win loss ratio.

In the end, using the most sophisticated analytics tools to determine the key influencers will eventually provide the greatest strategic decision-making ability for your company. In so many cases, this approach has improved company performance so much more than “gut feeling,” reactive competitive intelligence programs, and stated importance measurements.

This is where Primary Intelligence makes its living; providing powerful predictive analytics to our clients in order to grow their market share. Perhaps, we should discuss how this might work for you. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence - Working Data for Sales Teams

Some say that knowledge is power. We at Primary Intelligence believe that the right kind of knowledge is exponentially powerful.

An example of our intelligence and feedback we provide is listed below. In this example, our client is Tenscon, a software solutions provider. Now, we have changed the names to maintain confidentiality, but our customer list includes companies such as Microsoft, Avaya, Symantec and EDS are the kinds that tend to do very good work with us.

The table below shows "Tenscon's" competitive advantage against 4 competitors (Names have been changed to maintain confidentiality, but the results are real).

The results show some competitive advantages in the company and sales, but the product has some significant weaknesses against Sistemic and Howein Partners:

Overall, Tenscon had generally higher performance ratings than the competition, especially in the company and service drivers. However, several ratings for the sales team were lower than those of the competition as a whole, indicating that some improvement in these areas may be needed.

An analysis of the responses from clients yields the following key findings concerning Tenscon’s performance:

-Tenscon was seen as a strong and solid company, but was not generally seen as an innovator. As a senior vice president from Dillent explained, “I don’t think they showed as much innovation in their solution. I think they took a much more conservative approach, a much more introverted approach rather than an innovative approach.” The CIO from ABC Aerolineas echoed this sentiment by saying, “We have some applications that we expected to be technologically advanced, but what they offered us was delayed during the delivery process. By this I mean that some applications were not as innovative as we expected them to be.”

-Some clients were concerned that Tenscon was not offering a unified solution, but rather a set of pre-packaged offerings. For instance, a respondent from ABC Aerolineas said that the initial Tenscon team did “have a real understanding of our model, and they just trying to sell us stand-alone systems. This was the idea. The idea was a cost-effective strategy, and people from Tenscon did not understand our model, our strategy, the market, or our needs. They just about systems and stand-alone processes.” A representative from Flentic Crendall explained, “One of
complexities of [Tenscon] is it is five separate businesses that have been swept into one company. It’s trying get them to work as one company with one approach. don’t think that there was a perfect solution.”

-While a majority (66 percent) of clients believed that Tenscon put the right people in front of them, there were some concerns that decision makers were not involved in the negotiation process. A vice president at JNPD expressed this sentiment, saying, “As some of these things escalate, or we run across impasses, there might be opportunities in the future that if we were
able to talk directly to the true decision makers, then it might expedite the process.” A senior vice president from Fiserv also said, “It took a while to get the right representatives from the healthcare side and from the financial side [of Tenscon] to be on our team.”

-Understanding the clients’ needs and business requirements was a theme throughout the interviews, and an area where respondents believed Tenscon could improve. Tenscon’s ratings in this area were slightly lower than the average for other bidding companies, indicating an area of advantage for Tenscon’s competitors. As the CIO of Coles Meyer explained, “Sometimes I was worried [that they gave] affirmative answers without really understanding what the issues were. At
times I felt they didn’t understand how big and complicated the work was going to be. ‘Let’s make the sale and then afterwards worry about how we are going to deliver it.’ There was a lack of business and delivery knowledge with the up front sales team. With other vendors we don’t experience that.”

If you have any ideas of how to make these data come to life in your organization, drop me a line. (801.838.9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Webinar Wrap-up – Putting Sales Intelligence into the Sales Force

Yesterday, I co-hosted a Webinar with Ron Sathoff, a member of the product development group. We appreciate the time that our attendees shared with us and hope that the presentation was beneficial.

The main takeaways were:

• The definition of sales intelligence
• Benefits and ROI of effective sales intelligence
• Obstacles to the adoption of sales intelligence by sales groups
• Examples of solutions that increase sales intelligence usage

If you are a practitioner of competitive intelligence, this Webinar was geared specifically to making sure that your company receives the biggest market gains from your efforts.

The Webinar can be downloaded here. The file may be a little large, but can be easily navigated once it is downloaded.

If you would like to receive an invitation to our Webinars in the future, please drop me a line at cdalley@primary-intel.com. Also, I’m happy to explain any of the concepts presented if you would like to discuss.

What is Sales Intelligence?

Sometimes, it is interesting to try to classify different areas of research and intelligence to see how certain specialties have originated, evolved and grown into their own species, so to speak. This study of the “origin of the species” can provide intelligence practitioners with the ability to see how their efforts might support or interrelate with other disciplines.

So, let’s define the top rung as general market research. The purpose of market research is to answer any question that might be of interest to a company. This is very broad and probably doesn’t do justice to all of the value a skilled market research director can provide. But, the umbrella of market research covers the entire gamut of information collection.

A subset of general market research is competitive intelligence. Again, this can be a pretty broad area and it is concerned with gathering information and answering questions that are influenced by the presence of competitive forces.

A sibling to competitive intelligence is market intelligence. To me, this specialty works to understand the market, value proposition, opportunity and forces in play against your company and product which are not influenced by the competition.

Sales Intelligence sounds like it should be a sibling to competitive and market intelligence. It could be defined as the information that is used to help sales sell more. If you limit this type of information to sales data (stuff like contact name, phone number, email, etc…) I guess you could say that’s true. But, overall, I don’t think this is the right approach.

To me, the definition of sales intelligence is:

Intelligence (competitive or otherwise) that can and will be used by a sales individual or team to increase the chances of ultimately
winning a quality sales opportunity.

This is a definition that is still evolving, so don’t get too stuck on any particular point. Overall, sales intelligence seems less like a specific discipline and more like a purpose. In other words, bits of competitive intelligence, market intelligence, general market research, (branding, pricing, value, etc…) can all be included in sales intelligence. If the information can be used to help sales people sell more, I think it can properly be classified as sales intelligence.

If a business exists to make money (and really, what other purpose does the business entity have?) as efficiently as possible, and the role of sales is to create the revenue streams as effectively as possible, then isn’t sales intelligence potentially the most important information a company can generate?

There are so many research initiatives that clamor for budget. When deciding which efforts to support, give the proper amount of gravity to those project that will have a direct effect on a company’s ability to sell more effectively in a market against the competitive landscape. Your company will benefit from this approach.

If you would like to help me refine the definition of Sales Intelligence, let me know. Send your suggestions to 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)

Primary Intelligence Competitive Intelligence Newsletter – 6/12/07

We’re receiving good feedback on our newsletter. It is our hope to cover topics that will help companies sell more. Now.

The most recent issue is posted below. If you like the information, please forward it to a friend. That would be the biggest compliment of our work.

If you would like to be added to our subscription list, send me an email and I'll make sure you are added for the next edition (cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Cover Story
Sales Teams: Making "Second Half Adjustments" to Win the 2007 Sales Game
By Tony Randall, Primary Intelligence Inc.These "dog days of summer" are actually more important than many sales teams may realize. Sure, we all want to take a break and head to the beach or the mountains to get recharged. And we will. But lest we forget that while you may be ignoring your current clients or targeted prospects, someone out there may be courting them in your absence. So, how do we prepare for that all important second half push. (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Voice of the Customer Should Be Used to Collect Competitive Intelligence
You would be very surprised by how much your clients actually do know about your competitors. They may have purchased from you, but they have evaluated many other vendors over time... (For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
Why Did Overstock.com Choose Oracle over IBM?
Originally Published in 2004.
Executives at Overstock.com, an online retailer of discount and closeout merchandise, wanted to create a “data strategy” for the Company that would guide its future solution purchases. Vice President of Technology Shawn Schwegman said that Overstock.com did not look at any marketing materials and considered only the technology that potential vendors could provide. The Company evaluated IBM, MySQL (an open-source database solution), and Oracle.(For more, click here)


If you have feedback or comments, let me know. I am interested to know what you think about our publication. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Webinar: Putting Sales Intelligence into the Sales Force

Companies who use Sales Intelligence typically report an increase in market share and competitive performance by 10% or more. Yet, less than half of sales managers and reps claim to use sales intelligence of any kind.

Is your company taking the lead or are you falling behind your competitors in the use of this critical best practice?

How can your company go beyond general sales information to Sales Intelligence? Primary Intelligence would like to invite you to a Webinar on how to produce intelligence that actually makes a difference to both your marketing and sales personnel.

Through this presentation, Primary Intelligence will show:

• The difference between Sales Intelligence and sales information
• Why Sales doesn't make full use of Sales Intelligence
• Benefits of a coordinated intelligence effort
• How to bring intelligence to the front line effectively
• How your front line can solve most of your Competitive Intelligence needs

Date: Thursday, June 21
Time 2 PM EST (11 AM PST)
Duration: 1 Hour

To Register, click here: https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/141819788

Those that will most benefit from this discussion include:

• Sales and Marketing leaders
• Market research managers
• Market and Industry analysts
• Sales reps and account managers

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)

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)

Primary Intelligence Newsletter Launches!

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Yesterday, we launched the Primary Intelligence Weekly Newsletter, which was a very big deal for our company. A number of events came together lately to encourage us to share our ideas and the newsletter seems to be the best tool for our purposes.

Our newsletter will be dedicated to the promotion of sales and competitive intelligence. If you have spent any time reading this blog, you'll know that we lean heavily toward intelligence that is most likely to provide ROI. We will discuss current topics, provide case studies and bring you techniques that are likely to help your company move ahead of the competitors. In brief we will:

• Promote competitive intelligence
• Create a forum of likeminded people
• Solicit viewpoints from practitioners and academics

If you would like to be added to our subscription list, send me an email and I'll make sure you are added for the next edition (cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Take a look at the stories from our first edition:

Cover Story

Million Dollar Competitive Intelligence for Pennies a Day

By Ron Sathoff, Primary Intelligence Inc.

My Dad always used to say, "Leveraging all that you already have in an efficient way can bring about unexpected benefits." Of course, he phrased it as "Make the most of what you have," or "No, you can't have any more money," but the sentiment is similar. Enhancing your Competitive Intelligence does not mean you have to launch a whole new set of research initiatives. (For more, click here)

BlogCentral

It Really Isn't About Price

Recently, we interviewed a lost sales opportunity for one of our vision care providers. They had battled it out with two other providers and in the end, they weren't selected, but it wasn't about price. (For more, click here)

The Big Deal

The A-List: 7-Eleven Selects HP Technology

7-Eleven needed to upgrade the information technology that it had in its stores to provide them with the data they needed to run their systems faster. After sending out RFPs to several companies, 7-Eleven narrowed its short list to two alternatives: a Hewlett-Packard solution, and a combined solution from NEC and NCR, with NEC providing the hardware and NCR providing the service for the solution. (For more, click here)

If you have feedback or comments, let me know. I am interested to know what you think about our publication. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

SellingPower Gets It, Too

I was very pleased today to see that SellingPower (the leading source of sales management information) gave Primary Intelligence top billing in its Sales Management Newsletter (Keeping Tabs On the Competition). Heather Baldwin, Contributing Editor, attended our webinar in April and provided a very thorough summary of our philosophy to create impactful competitive intelligence from your most productive information channels; your clients.

Our new website homepage attempts to drive the same message home. In the diagram just below the header, Primary Intelligence attempts to demonstrate all of the areas where sales intelligence can be a) generated and b) put to use to create additional competitive advantage. Of course, we have an intelligence product for each step. If you want to find out more, please visit. Let me know how you like the visual representation.

Most importantly, I still think that most companies can increase their Competitive Intelligence quantity and quality by focusing on the reasons why people buy from their company and the competitors. This intelligence should be gathered after the first sale and also, after each additional renewal, upgrade, additional sale or lost sale in any of those events.

Specifically, take a look at your customer sat, account loyalty, win/loss and other client-studies. What would happen if you added a question or two? For example:

- Which other vendors provide services like ours?
- What are some of their key selling points?
- Where do you feel that we are superior to [vendors]
- What have innovations have [vendors] included that we should think about?

Of course, you have to assess your current study, client base and other factors. You don’t want to start your clients thinking too hard about your competitors. But, don’t think for a minute that even your most loyal clients don’t know anything about your competitors. And, if they’re loyal to you, they’ll most likely share information with you, too.

Let me know what you’re thinking about this stuff. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

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)