Want to get closer to your customers? Try understanding their competitive options to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Understanding your competitors’ offerings in your respective marketplace, a company can understand how it can deliver against either another competitor or ‘no sale’. My belief: the goal of a competitive intelligence (CI) function is to improve how to deliver to customers. It pays to be mindful of what competitors mean to customers instead of hyper focused on particular competitors per se.
This quote from Tara-Nicholle Nelson in Harvard Business Review from May 11, 2017 sums it up well: "The question is not who your competition is but what it is. And the answer is this: Your competition is any and every obstacle your customers encounter along their journeys to solving the human, high-level problems your company exists to solve."
In that lens of listening to customers by listening to competitors, here are some CI Best Practices that I have found helpful:
Sources
A wealth of publicly available information exists on competitor organizations: their advantages and gaps in how they serve their customers. If you can access this information yourself, it is a good bet that your customers turn to these same sources when evaluating their own options - and evaluating your company too!
To me there are four types of sources:
Direct information from the competitor itself: press releases, new customer announcements, website, marketing content, sales collateral.
Field intelligence: word-of-mouth from your customers, from your own employees
News and Social media: A variety of (typically) online sources: news articles, social networks, third-party reviewers.
Purchased reports: Industry reports or market datafeeds.
People/Process/Technology:
People: While more established organizations have the luxury of resources and structure, small organizations still need some level of competitive intelligence function. Larger organizations may have fully dedicated CI professionals or teams.
For smaller companies, CI may be less formally organized but still offers significant value. Flexibility is key: people in market research, marketing, or strategy wear the CI ‘hat’ as one of many. Identify the one person who may be a point of contact for competitive intelligence, as one of their responsibilities.
Process: Overcoming internal barriers to effective information sharing is the most critical for effective intelligence in larger organizations. Identify key stakeholders and regularly revisit CI goals and Key Intelligence Topics (KITs) with supporting Key Intelligence Questions (KIQs) within each Topic. This provides for feedback and course correction on how activities to start, stop or continue. And gets that information into the hands of internal stakeholders who need to understand the array of customers' choices.
In contrast, smaller organizations may not need a structured process. KITs and KIQs are still a useful framework. That said, simply knowing what to do with competitor data – whom to forward field intelligence, where to centrally store competitor information – would be important in that environment.
Technology: Content dissemination and storage. In organizations of any size, a host of CI-tailored SaaS tools are available for purchase such that even a small business can readily stay on top of the competition at low cost. I’ll leave it up to others to review pros and cons of specific solutions, but for my money, storing and sharing content, and executing alerts are primary functions that marketers would want to know to ensure an impactful, timely action on competitive conditions.
Automation can streamline the level of effort needed to quickly gather, analyze, and share competitor information. Information can get to those who need it more easily, though with less time for focused research and analysis.
Timing:
When and how shares the insights about competitors depends on the nature of the threat to existing or new customer prospects.
Regular monthly/quarterly update: tracking customer sentiment about competitors, and your place relative to them. (Note that “No sale to anyone” is a competitor as well!). This can be in the form of a dashboard or template to reproduce for period-over-period comparison, and can be best be combined with a regularly produced internal marketing reports.
Predetermined announcements: Knowing that a competitive threat is coming to your customer base can be crucial. For example, “we know that [competitor] has said they are coming out with a new [product], possibly at the next [big tradeshow]. Based on what we know, we should have a plan in place to learn about the actual item when it is released so we can quickly counter-message to our customers.”
Unexpected competitor events: When a ‘fire drill’ situation comes to pass (e.g. a competitor announces a new huge project win), competitive intelligence can reassure internal leadership and customers that your company is fully aware of the news item. Day-of messaging to the sales team, who are likely hearing from their customers already, is critical, to avoid the perception of being caught flat-footed.
Concluding thoughts:
I’ve described some based on my experiences contributing to, managing, and creating competitive intelligence activities. Understanding how to structure competitive intelligence for your own organization’s needs can avoid the trap of gathering data on the competition while not asking internally what it means for your organization’s customers. Competitive intelligence does not mean competitor obsession, rather a way for a company to serve customers better.
Jason C. Grillo is an independent marketing consultant living in Greater Boston. You can reach him at jason@terraluces.com
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