Monitoring what your competitors are up to is important, but actually activating competitive insights across your entire organization is where the rubber hits the road. Competitive intelligence only has value if the right information is put in the right hands at the right time.
That’s why, in 2022, marketing and sales professionals who want to build sustainable business advantages are focusing on leveraging competitive intelligence to help inform better decision-making on the front lines with sales and customer success.
Competitor Research is More Than a Google Search
While many companies research the competition from time to time, competitive intelligence, commonly referred to as CI, is more than a quarterly Google search for competitor updates; it is a deep and continuous understanding of your competitive landscape. It involves the consistent gathering of information on your competitors to build a complete picture of your market landscape: what’s happening currently, what will likely happen in the coming years, and how you stack up in your marketplace.
CI is the process of tracking, analyzing, and activating information related to your competitors. It is conducted with the intent of empowering internal stakeholders to improve decision-making and execution and helps mitigate risk, capture market share, and grow revenue.
Putting Competitive Intelligence Into Action
Your competitors are constantly evolving their messaging, pricing, product features and more. So, let’s talk about keeping your organization on its toes, enabled to stay one step ahead of any competitive threat it sees. What it takes are these three key steps:
Track
The first step in the CI process is gathering intel. When you explore your competitors’ digital footprints, you can uncover valuable insights such as product updates, messaging changes, new campaigns, pricing adjustments, news announcements and more.
If you don’t currently have a dedicated CI platform that pulls in and centralizes this data for you, one of the best places to look is hiding in plain sight–your rivals’ websites and social media pages. Your competitors’ online reviews and feedback forums can also uncover meaningful insights, and the same goes for job review sites like Glassdoor where employees often share intimate details.
You can also gather internal intelligence, leveraging the wisdom of those inside your company. This intel can be found through prospect conversations, communications on Slack, CRM systems and more. Conversations containing impactful CI are happening everywhere, and you need a single source of truth for all of this great intelligence!
Analyze
Now that you’ve got all this great data, you need to make sense of it as it relates to your own business. Cut out the signal from the noise. Break down the data, pull out the key trends, and contextualize your findings. The analysis step is all about establishing takeaways and conclusions that are relevant for your stakeholders, including your front-line salespeople and customer success teams.
Your analysis is an ongoing, real-time function, and automation is the key to success here! For example, set up automated alerts on negative reviews for your customer success teams so you can analyze the feedback in real-time. Be sure to understand the impact and context surrounding each piece of intel, as it will help stakeholders know how to best position your company over the competition.
There’s no doubt that your market is moving very fast, and only through deep analysis and effective curation of what’s important delivered through automation will you stay ahead.
Activate
Okay, now it’s time to empower your stakeholders with what they need to dominate!
Activating CI can look different for each department, from using insights to help the sales team win more head-to-head deals to making product tweaks to keep up with rivals’ new functionalities. Depending on who you’re delivering intelligence to, you’ll want to tailor your deliverable to meet your stakeholders’ needs. Every stakeholder will likely prefer a different frequency and format of intel, so it’s critical to keep that in mind as you build your collateral.
I prefer an every watering hole approach toward activation. This means you must distribute this powerful intelligence in the most popular internal communication channels already established, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email newsletters. And for sales, in particular, this might mean placing battlecards right into your CRM or Learning Management Systems (LMS).
You want this key information showing up for your stakeholders in the places they work every day. Don’t make them look for it.
An Essential Platform for Your Company
Every department within an organization can benefit from CI. Product managers can keep a pulse on competitors’ products to see how their own stacks up. Insights garnered from the competition’s product reviews and website updates can aid in product development.
Marketers can use a competitor’s content, social media posts, and advertisements to tailor their own messaging efforts to differentiate. Sales teams can take advantage of CI-driven sales enablement materials to better handle objections and landmines set during competitive conversations. The list goes on and on.
Now, imagine if you had a comprehensive CI platform that does this work for you–gathering intel, analyzing key findings, and pushing it to stakeholders all in real-time. A unified CI platform is the essential tool every company needs to amplify departments’ insights and identify market opportunities.
CI is a Win for the Entire Company
Rather than waiting for competitor information to be announced, embrace a competitive intelligence strategy. This proactive approach allows stakeholders to see a full picture of their competitors at any time resulting in substantial business advantage.
Your company wins in multiple ways. Sales closes more deals. Existing customers remain loyal to you. Product and marketing stay a jump ahead. Executives make better decisions and see strong market share results. Pretty valuable, eh?
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