With so much competition and new trends, it’s easy to see why businesses seek to improve their competitive position. But it’s also important to remember that a strong competitive Intelligence program goes beyond “knowing your opponent.”
The insights gained from your competitors using aqute.com/competitive-intelligence can be used to improve your sales collateral, demo scripts, and the entire sales process. One potential “big picture” use case for CI is strategic planning.
What Is Competitive Intelligence?
It’s about more than just learning about competitors and their strategies. It’s about using that knowledge to drive better business outcomes – whether that means ensuring your marketing messages hit their target audience, rethinking a pricing strategy or enhancing your brand’s reputation.
The goal of a competitive intelligence team is to ensure that the organization is prepared for changes in its environment and that it can make its own moves that keep it ahead of competitors. This is done through a variety sources, but there are a few that are used by most CI analysts to gather as much information as possible. These include social media, news stories and whitepapers. But the most valuable source is often found in qualitative data gathered through win/loss interviews with new customers and lost prospects.
These interviews can often provide you with valuable insights that will help you avoid mistakes made by competitors. There’s nothing quite like a competitor making a mistake to inspire an AHA moment for your own business.
Everyone in an organisation can benefit from a competitive intelligence program. That’s why it should be normal for all departments to take competitor strategies into account when making decisions. To start fostering this type of culture, share competitive intelligence research with different functions on a regular basis and discuss it in day-to-day meetings. Over time, it will become a part of the company’s DNA and it will be natural for teams to reference this research.
Identifying Your Top competitors
Competitive intelligence aims to identify opportunities and potential threats before your competition does. This is done by analyzing competitors in all areas of your business: products, markets, customer segments, and more. You will need to start by identifying your top competitors. This can be done by doing basic market research and looking at companies that offer similar products or services to yours in a similar demographic. Once you have identified your top competitors, it is time to analyze their operations and strategies. This includes understanding their financial statements and examining how they market their products to customers. You should also consider their geographic footprint. This includes their store openings or closings.
A major part of CI is product development and analysis. Analyzing competitors’ products and product features can help you understand their strengths and weaknesses, identifying potential opportunities for differentiation. Additionally, analyzing competitors’ marketing campaigns can reveal what customers like about their products and how they promote them.
CI can also help you to understand the market environment where your competitors operate. This is done by analyzing their sales potential, growth and industry trends. This type of CI is essential to helping you formulate strategic plans for your business that can withstand competitive forces and grow into new market segments.
In some cases the information that you need to collect in order to develop competitive intelligence is already in your company, in the minds of your peers or on the notes in the drawers of salespeople. To transform that data into actionable information for your business, you’ll need to understand how much work it will take to collect and organise the data. Create competitor profiles. These are like battle cards, and they make it easy to find information on your competitors.
Gathering Information
The data and insights you gather from competitive intelligence are only worth as much as the actions that your company takes to respond. It is important to ask how the information can help you achieve your internal goals. This will keep your team focused on delivering value and ensure that the time they spend gathering and analyzing information is used effectively to provide real business benefits.
It’s impossible to get maximum value from your competitive intelligence program, if you don’t use it to drive initiatives that improve the position of your company in the market. Understanding your competitors’ marketing strategies, for example can help you develop more effective sales tactics that outperform theirs.
By leveraging the tools, technology, and platforms available through competitive intelligence software, you can automate a lot of the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that are involved in gathering competitor data. This can free up your team’s time to focus on more value-adding activities, such as creating precise buyer personas and developing business strategies that align with their needs.
The exact method of gathering data will vary depending on your CI team’s size and the maturity level of your CI program. This stage is characterized by proactively gathering information from various sources and continuously monitoring competitor activity. This can include setting up Google Alerts to monitor competitor names, searching review sites for mentions about competitors’ brands or products, and tracking articles about your industry.
With the right competitive intelligence tools and software, it is easy to collect a wealth of information about your competitors’ marketing strategies, product offerings, pricing structures, and customer demographics. Having the ability to turn this information into meaningful insights that can drive your company’s strategic decisions will give you a significant edge over your competition.
Analyzing Data
It is important to monitor competitors, but relying too heavily on Competitive Intelligence (CI) can prevent a business from innovating or pursuing its own vision. This is because CI can cause a company to become reactive, instead of proactive. This can make it more difficult to resist the temptation of copying competitors’ efforts.
To avoid this trap, it is important to clearly define your business goals and use CI as a support to those goals rather than a replacement. These objectives will help you focus your Competitive Intelligence Program and ensure that your valuable time and resources go towards the data that’s most useful to your company.
For example, if competitor intelligence shows that your competitors are using different messaging in their ads than you do, you can leverage this information to adjust your messaging to better align with the needs and concerns of your target audience. This will give your business a competitive advantage and increase the chances of converting customers.
Additionally, you can use Competitive Intelligence to minimize risk in your own organization by analyzing the strategies of your competitors and learning from their successes (or failures). While you may want to avoid copying the exact strategy of competitors, identifying their actions and how they work can give you an insight into areas of your own business that could benefit from a change.
Market research is a way to get a bigger picture of Competitive Intelligence. It can help you better understand the landscape of your business and your brand’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison with your competitors. This can help you identify the opportunities to grow your business by developing products that fill gaps in your market and give you a competitive advantage over your competitors.
It can also be used to help your company avoid strategic surprises through environmental scanning and industry analysis, such as PESTLE analysis. PESTLE can be more comprehensive than SWOT and cover factors such as social, economic and technological factors, as well as legislative and environmental ones that may impact your business. This analysis can be conducted on a short-term or long-term basis depending on your industry and the pace of change, but it is crucial to stay aware of your competitive landscape so you can take the appropriate steps to remain ahead of the curve.
