Competitive Intelligence Tip #2 for 2008 – Choose the Best Sources

How different is the job of the competitive intelligence professional with the immediacy and availability of the internet. Of course, these are not new developments. You probably started leveraging the internet more than a decade ago to either develop your program or augment your data.

We could use a lot of blogsphere space talking about some very obvious methods of monitoring the competition: Google and Yahoo Alerts, Yahoo Finance, libraries, press releases, blogs, customer forums and user groups, etc… All of these sources put the world of information in the palm of your hand.
Really, you have to give people credit for the creativity they use in mining these sources of information. The level of inference and deduction available based on these bits of information can be unexpected.

But, I would encourage CI professionals to continue to monitor the competition through human interaction, too. No. I do not mean that you should attempt to infiltrate the enemy. That is still called espionage and it still carries a large fine and jail sentence. Stay away from that. Or hire an ex-spook, I suppose. But, really. Don’t do that.

I recommend that you continue to mine competitive intelligence from sources that are currently at your disposal.

By this, I mean that you should:

Look at your current voice of the customer programs and see where you might be able to insert a few questions about the competition

Consider a win/loss program to understand how you are performing TODAY against the competition.

Examine the types of information regarding your competitors that your most trusted clients might know. (Believe me. Your best clients know your competitors very well)

Search for new ways to ask the same questions to your marketplace to gather comparisons between you and your most troublesome competitors.

This approach is likely to save time (you already know who your client and prospect base are), money (these types of interviews might even piggy-back on other voice of the customer programs at no actual cost to you), generate some of the best insight into the marketplace and provide intelligence that can be of use to sales, marketing, product and executive levels.

Gathering competitive intelligence from your clients and prospects is not perfect. You can gain different levels of insight from web sources, analysts and other programs. However, in our experience, reaching out to people that live in the marketplace often provides most of the insight your sales, product and marketing team need to increase their competitive abilities.

And, if you are able to sell, market or produce solutions that better meet the needs of your marketplace, you have a fantastic ROI story you can attribute to your competitive intelligence program.

If you need a little help, don’t be afraid to contact me (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050) at Primary Intelligence. This is what we do every day.