4 Ways business intelligence software can help with forecasting

In the face of dynamicmarket and economic conditions, companies need to use a number of measures to stay ahead of the market. Forecasting is one effective tool.

Prescriptive analytics allow companies to use past behavior to predict future activity. Businesses that make an effort to forecast future trends have an unquestionable advantage. Not only will it put you several steps ahead of your competitors, it will help you stay agile during uncertain times. As a result, forecasting is an established component of a business’ strategy planning. Business Intelligence software can assist businesses in shaping growth strategies and can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of forecasting. Here's how:

1. Accuracy

Tech Republic notes that revenue forecasting should answer questions relating to what you’re going to sell, to whom you’re going to sell it and when you will make the sale. Accuracy of your data and forecasts is key in order to put the right product in front of the right customer at the right time, as well as optimise procurement and distribution to increase profitability. Business Intelligence software solutions are known for their ability to operate in real-time and give you the most up-to-date data. By having an accurate snapshot of your historical sales patterns, you are able to accurately project future revenue, sales and customers in order to keep you ahead of the market.

2. Comprehensiveness

The existence of multiple data storage locations is common within businesses nowadays. Typically, businesses use different applications to process different types of data, and because of this, data is stored in different locations, such as, ERPs, CRMs, spreadsheets and more. When the time comes to build reports and forecasts, it is not uncommon for sales managers to lose track of certain information, because they simply don’t remember where some data is stored. Therefore the quality of their reports and forecasts suffers. Business Intelligence software is equipped with the ability to store data from multiple sources in one location. And if, for instance, data is not stored in the program, it can be imported quite easily and saved within the database. This will enable sales managers to build comprehensive, high value reports.

3. Timeliness

All too often, sales managers spend weeks building sales forecasts. The lack of a single data repository causes sales managers to spend days tracking down information and compiling them, prolonging a process that could have been done within minutes if supported with the right technology. With BI software in hand, you can store many different types of data in one location. Aside from this, BI software is equipped with simple interfaces and configurable functionalities to enable users to understand the system and use it efficiently. As a result, data compilation is expedited, allowing sales managers to draw insights quickly and produce timely forecasts.

4. Clarity

The most important aspect of reporting is its clarity and readability. Some sales managers, to save time, present reports the way it was built, without simplifying it for non-technical readers. Business leaders and board members are then unable to comprehend the report and the meeting accomplishes little or nothing. A report may be complex, but its output should have the capability to mask this complexity by presenting the data in a simple and easy to comprehend manner. BI tools are focused on delivering clear reports using simple visual representations that can present the data in a simple manner. With clear reports, it will be easier for sales managers to draw out existing trends and project future trends. Subsequently, your forecasts will also be presented clearly, enabling business leaders to quickly comprehend it and take action.

Overall, Business Intelligence tools have been proven to increase the accuracy, clarity, and comprehensiveness of data and the timeliness of the forecasting process, to ultimately deliver high-quality forecasts.

Source: Phocas software

There’s no doubt that gathering competitive information is challenging for any product manager, particularly if your competitors are small private companies or you have no budget.  You may have already done the obvious - scoured the competitor’s website, signed up for Google Alerts or a newswire, attended a webinar and possibly purchased the competitor’s product. You have exhausted these ideas - now what? Here are some proven methods I gathered over 15 years in the field that are sure to work for you.

1.Find friendly customers

2.Network with competitors

3.Build a strong relationship with Sales and Customer Success

4.Contact bloggers and industry trade magazine authors

5.Review competitors’ job postings

6.Search Google Images and YouTube

A market entry strategy is a key tool for clarifying what you aim to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it when entering a new market. While an export plan tends to focus on just a few products or services, your market entry strategy will provide you with a roadmap for your whole business.

A typical market entry strategy can take six to 18 months to implement. That timeline is well worth the effort as it will ensure you have the best distribution channels in place, that you are launching the right product and that your goals align with those of your stakeholders.

Here are five steps, recommended by Carl Gravel (Director International Expansion at BDC) you can follow to build a winning market entry strategy and start exporting into previously unknown territory.

1. Set clear goals

Be specific about what you want to achieve in your new market, including the level of sales you can expect to reach. Keep referring back to these goals as you flesh out your strategy to help you stay on track and confirm that your opportunity, products/services and overall business goals are aligned.

2. Research your market

Use every means at your disposal to get to know your new market—including going there in person. Gravel suggests attending trade shows as a participant or exhibitor to meet people, learn about the competition and make business contacts in the area. Market research is a specialism. Especially when it comes to selecting and entering new markets.

When getting to know your market, it’s important that you learn about it in every dimension—not just business

-wise but also socially, culturally and politically. If you’re entering a region with a different language or cultural norms than Canada, think about how you’ll communicate with key contacts.

Explore all the rules that could affect your product and how you produce and deliver it. You’ll also need to understand your labelling requirements to ensure your packaging complies with local regulations. Learn about different distribution channels, too. At this stage, says Gravel, it’s advisable to seek information and counsel from embassies, consulates and industry associations.

3. Study the competition

A detailed competitive analysis based on your research and visits to the target market will help you make key decisions—for example, if you need to modify your product or service to customize it for that market. Competitor analysis also is a specialism not every organisation posesses in house.

Gravel says most businesses underestimate the degree of competition existing in new markets. Getting the expert advice of a consultant www.Hammer-intel.comcan help clarify the challenges.

4. Choose your mode of entry

There are many ways to enter a new market. You can use the services of a distributor or agent located there. You might become a franchisee or acquire an existing business. You can even construct an entirely new brick-and-mortar facility.

Gravel says in his experience a lot of companies start by going into the U.S. first—and most choose to partner with an existing distributor. If you choose that path, make sure your strategy includes a unique value proposition for the distributor. Your partner will want to understand what’s in it for them, and how your product or service is different enough to stand out in the marketplace, but not so different that buyers won’t understand what it is.

5. Figure out your financing needs

Find out if you'll need to get any financing to support your export venture. You may also want to get insurance that protects your company against losses when a customer cannot pay. EDC offers credit insurance that can help you avoid cash flow issues when an international customer fails to pay.

6. Develop the strategy document

Once you’ve worked out the details of your strategy, you’ll be ready to write it out. Once created, this document will be your blueprint going forward, detailing your goals, research findings, contacts, budgets, major action items and timelines, and how you’ll monitor and evaluate your success on an ongoing basis.

“Be as structured as possible,” says Gravel. “Once you have a plan, it is easier to follow the action items and not be overwhelmed.”

He also advises having your accountant, lawyer and an external specialist review your strategy. You want to ensure you haven’t missed something that will prevent you from entering the market or require you to pull back after you get there.

Source: Business Development Bank of Canada

Delivered by Hammer, market intelligence (www.Hammer-intel.com)

BC (Business & Competitive) Intelligence

Business Intelligence is zo´n begrip dat zich nauwelijks letterlijk laat vertalen. Bedrijfsintelligentie zou in de buurt kunnen komen, maar valt net als andere vormen van intelligentie moeilijk precies te duiden. Bedrijfsinzicht of -begrip komen wellicht nader in de buurt. Andere benaderingen (van andere auteurs) voegen daar bedrijfs- of omgevingsverkenningen als alternatieve vertaling aan toe.

Om Business en Competive Intelligence goed te begrijpen maken we hier gebruik van een analytisch schema (tabel 1.1). Daarmee wordt het mogelijk de verschillende verschijningsvormen van BI te onderscheiden en daarmee de juiste variant bij het juiste probleem toe te passen. Belangrijk is dat het hierbij gaat om stereotypen! In de praktijk komen mengvormen voor.

Het uitgangspunt is dat BI wordt gezien als een informatieproces waarbij met behulp van data, kennis of inzicht wordt geproduceerd.

Tabel 1.1

In de tabel is een bedrijfskundige van een technologische benadering te onderscheiden. BC Intelligence behandeld BI vanuit de bedrijfskundige processen die dienen te worden ondersteund. Er bestaat ook een technologisch perspectief op BI. Het uitgangspunt van deze benadering is veeleer te profiteren van de mogelijkheden die informatietechnologie biedt om bedrijfsinzicht te verkrijgen.. Op de andere as in het schema worden data over de interne bedrijfsvoering (interne data) van data over de bedrijfsomgeving (externe data) onderscheiden. We spreken met nadruk over onderscheiden in plaats van gescheiden categorieën. In de gebruikspraktijk blijken de categorieën namelijk wel te onderscheiden maar nauwelijks te scheiden. Ze kunnen niet zonder elkaar en zijn vaak ondersteunend of complementair.

Business Intelligence

Hoewel het onderscheid arbitrair is en de term BI net zo goed voor het totale quadrant gereserveerd zou kunnen worden (met CI als deelverzameling) hebben veel BI projecten betrekking op de cellen A en C.

BI gaat dus vaak op het optimaliseren van bedrijfsprocessen waarbij het accent ligt op het verwerwen van bedrijfsinzicht uit data over de onderneming zelf. Deze data genereren doorgaans kennis over de huidige situatie van de onderneming. Kennis die voor strategievorming en optimalisatie van bedrijfsresultaten (denk aan Performance Management) onontbeerlijk is.

De technoloische component van BI wordt  door cel C gerepresenteerd. Helaas heeft deze invalshoek bij veel dienstverleners de overhand. Het accent ligt daarbij op de inrichting van een technologische infrastructuur die adequate kennis over de onderneming en haar prestaties mogelijk maakt. In cel C kunnen daarom zowel ETL-tools, datawarehouses als ook analytische applicaties worden gedacht.

Redactioneel BI-kring:

In de cel A hebben wij eigenlijk nauwelijks een categorie gedefinieerd.  Wat mij betreft zou daarPerformance Management thuis horen. Die term zou ik dus willen toevoegen. Als Key words kun je denken aan: Key Performance Indicators, Performance Process Management, Organizational Performance,  PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) Cycle, Performance Planning.

Voor wat betreft C kunnen we verwijzen naar bovenstaande tekst:Datawarehousingen OLAPzijn daar de centrale elementen.Key words zijn dat databases, ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load), , architecture, data dictionary, metadata, data marts.

Met betrekking tot OLAP zijn key words:analytische applicaties, reporting, queries, multidimensionale schema’s, spreadsheet, Kubus, data mining.

Competitive Intelligence

CI is het proces waarin data over de omgeving van de onderneming in een informatieproces worden getransformeerd in ´strategisch bedrijfsinzicht´. Hoewel de term Competitor en Competitive Intelligence vanaf de tachtiger jaren wordt gebruikt heeft deze benadering ook in de jaren zeventig al aandacht gehad onder de noemer 'environmental scanning'.

CI speelt een belangrijke rol in strategische maar ook andere bedrijfskundige processen. Prestaties van de onderneming, concurrentiepositie, mogelijke toekomstige posities als ook innovatievermogen kunnen slechts worden bepaald met behulp van kennis over de bedrijfsomgeving.

Redactioneel BI-kring:

Competitive Intellience heeft dus te maken met alle informatievoorziening die wordt georganiseerd om de concurrentiepositie van ondernemingen te kunnen bepalen, beoordelen en veranderen. Het raakt dus direct aan strategie, strategische intelligence, concurrentie-analyse, concurrentiepositie, en alle intelligence die nodig is om de positie van de onderneming in de omgeving goed te kunnen beoordelen.

Het organiseren van CI is in organisaties nog steeds zwaar onderbelicht. Het blijkt moeilijk structuur aan te brengen in de noodzakelijke informatieprocessen als ook om ze uit te voeren. De inrichting van een ´systeem´ dat dit proces zou moeten realiseren staat in het middelpunt van de aandacht maar is voor veel organisaties ook nog een brug te ver. Een verantwoorde ontwikkelbenadering vergroot de succeskansen echter aanzienlijk.

Data over de bedrijfsomgeving zijn vaak ongestructureerd van aard en in de organisatie voorhanden. De kunst is deze data beschikbaar te maken voor de besluitvorming. Wanneer de data niet in de onderneming beschikbaar is verschillen de technieken en instrumenten die moeten worden ingezet om deze data te ontsluiten van de bij BI gebruikte technieken. De technieken varieren vandocumentmanagementsystemen tot information agents die zelfstandig het internet afzoeken naar interessante bouwstenen (data!). Bij het structureren en analyseren van de ongestructureerde documenten wordt text mining gebruikt (in geval van www; web-content-mining).

Redactioneel BI-kring

Om competitive Intelligence adequaat te ondersteunen en met name ook primaire data beschikbaar te maken ten behoeve van het proces zijn Collaboration tools populair. Het gaat hier over kennismanagement achtige systemen en shareware toepassingen die de data-, informatie- en kennisdeling faciliteren. Key words: kennismanagagement, shareware, sharepoint, knowledge management.

Overzicht data categorieen BI-kring

Cel A format

• Performance Management

Key words:Key Performance Indicators, Performance Process Management, Organizational Performance,  PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) Cycle, Performance Planning

Cel C format

• Datawarehousing

Key words:databases, ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load), , architecture, data dictionary, metadata, data marts., Big Data

• Online Analytical Processing

Key words:analytische applicaties, reporting, queries, multidimensionale

 schema’s, spreadsheet, Kubus, data mining, dashboarding.

Cel B format

• Competitive Intelligence

Key words:strategie, strategische intelligence, concurrentie-analyse, concurrentiepositie, competitor intelligence, technological intelligence, environmental scanning, environmental intelligence.

• Content (Competitive Intelligence als product)

     Key words:

Cel D format

• Collaboration

Key words:kennismanagagement, shareware, sharepoint, knowledge management.

• Search methodologies

                 Key words:documentmanagement systemen, spider technologie,

ongestructureerde informatie, information agents, text mining, content mining. Search technologies.

Integraal tav hele schema (intelligente organisaties hebben het hele model integraal geimplementeerd)

• Intelligente organisatie

Key words:Management informatie, Intelligente organisatie, lerende organisatie, organisationeel leren, leren, Intelligence change management.

Bron: Egbert Philips

As firms face growing competition for customers, they naturally seek to compare themselves with their peers and competitors, but there is a trap: Leaders don’t compare themselves.

In the past, it was common to benchmark organizational performance against “industry averages,” and being “above average” was considered good. Today, “above average” is no longer good enough; fickle customers demand exceptional experiences. Delivering those experiences requires exceptional performance; anything less means that another company may steal your customers.

When we talk with leading modern application delivery organizations, we find that new benchmarking trends are emerging, making traditional benchmarking less attractive. Why?

• Benchmarking is for followers, not leaders. Organizations want to be “unicorns,” like the Etsys, Netflixes, Googles, and Salesforces of the world. They don’t want to be losing “horses.”
• Most benchmarking approaches target the IT of the past, not BT. Benchmark methodologies and data were created and heavily used when software delivery capability was considered a cost, not a differentiator. In business technology, software is a key differentiator, and BT leaders want to be the best and continuously improve.
• Agile, continuous delivery is less about standards and more about creativity and adaptation. Agile and CD have no set standards; 65% of expert firms using Agile mix and match various practices from various frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and XP. One size does not fit all in terms of metrics; with no standard process, organizationstructure, or technology, it’s even harder to compare data between companies.

So what do leading organizations do instead of benchmarking themselves against external organizations? They:

• Compare where their company is to where their customers need them to be. Customer needs and satisfaction drive the comparison.
• Analyze and use data in new ways. New metrics for AD&D, such as post-production metrics, are used in conjunction with more traditional preproduction metrics to drive the analysis. Talent metrics are used to decide how to assemble teams in the most efficient way.
• Prioritize and improve performance. By analyzing value streams, teams uncover their most pressing improvement needs — not whether they are better or worse than external competitors. This drives much better alignment.

with competitors anymore. Instead, they compare their current performance with where they need to be as a leader, and that’s what the business expects.

Source: Forrester

Working together, both serve an important purpose in today’s ever-changing and increasingly competitive business environment performance

In today’s fast-paced business world, the sheer number of terms (and their associated acronyms) is enough to baffle even the most seasoned professional. It doesn’t help that many terms that sound similar are used interchangeably, even when they refer to vastly different concepts.

Case in point? Business intelligence and competitive intelligence. On the surface, it seems like they are the same thing – and in fact, they serve a similar purpose, in that they help guide decision-making – but they actually refer to separate functions and types of data. Failing to understand the difference between them could result in a great deal of wasted time and effort, not to mention embarrassment if you present the wrong information to your boss or a client.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is, largely, analysis of an organization’s internal data. It involves collecting large amounts of raw data regarding all aspects of the business, from productivity to profits and losses, and transforming it into actionable insights. Companies use business intelligence as a means to identify and develop new business opportunities, and make improvements to existing processes, products, and services.

One of the major benefits of business intelligence is that it allows companies to view both historical and current data in context, which allows them to make better predictions. It’s also vital to effective measurement; businesses that use performance metrics or benchmarks as gauges for progress toward business goals rely heavily on business intelligence. Business intelligence has applications across all levels of an organization, from product development and pricing to staffing, strategic planning, and process improvement.

The term business intelligence is often used interchangeably with business analytics. Some make a stronger description between the two, defining business analytics as the use of quantitative and statistical tools, while intelligence focuses more on qualitative analysis, such as asking questions and interpreting reports. However, most argue that business analytics is a key function of business intelligence, and that true BI cannot be achieved without analytics.

Competitive Intelligence

While business intelligence focuses on a company’s internal data, competitive intelligence focuses on the external factors that influence the operation. Competitive intelligence means looking at the state of the market in which a company operates, to identify trends, potential threats, and points of differentiation.

Often, competitive intelligence includes looking closely at a company’s competitors, and looking for their strengths and weakness to identify potential opportunities. It involves taking the information that’s been collected and turning it into actionable insights to gain competitive advantage; for example, analyzing a competitor’s poor performance in a particular market can provide a blueprint of what not to do, and some ideas o

f how to penetrate that market more successfully. CI practitioners are quick to point out that in order for data to be considered true competitive intelligence, it must be actionable. Simply having knowledge of your market is not competitive intelligence; having knowledge that you can use to improve your business’s position is.

It’s also important to make a distinction between competitive intelligence and corporate or competitive espionage. Competitive intelligence is gathered using publicly available information, and is completely legal. Corporate espionage, or gathering information about competitors via questionable means (such as posing as a potential customer, hacking, or poaching employees) is not only unethical, but illegal in many cases.

Two Pieces of the Puzzle

Business intelligence and competitive intelligence may have technically different definitions, but they are very closely related. Some even consider competitive intelligence to be a subset of business intelligence, as the information gathered for competitive analysis is important for decision-making and can add valuable insights to data collected as part of the BI process. For example, a company experiencing a downturn in sales might look to competitive intelligence for answers. If a competitor recently launched a new product or major marketing campaign, it could explain the dip in sales – and the executives have a starting point for developing solutions to increase sales.

That being said, BI and CI actually require different skill sets. Business intelligence is the more technical of the two disciplines; practitioners have extensive knowledge in data management, database design, and quantitative functions. Competitive intelligence, on the other hand, relies more heavily on strategy and analysis, with less emphasis on “crunching numbers.” Still, both functions work closely together, and serve an important purpose in today’s ever-changing and increasingly competitive business environment.

Source: http://www.performanceg2.com/blog/business-intelligence-vs-competitive-intelligence/

The first requirement for being competitive is to know what others in your space are offering or plan to offer so you can judge the unique value proposition of your moves. This is just common sense. The second requirement is to anticipate response to yourcompetitive moves so that they are not derailed by unexpected reactions. That’s just common sense, too.

The third requirement is to ask the question: Do we have common sense?

In my work in competitive intelligence I have met many managers and executives who made major decisions involving billions of dollars of commitments with only scant attention to the likely reaction of competitors, the effect of potential disruptors, new approaches offered by startups and the impact of long-term industry trends. Ironically, they spent considerable time deliberating potential customers’ reactions, even as they ignored the effect of other players’ moves and countermoves on these same customers. That is, until a crisis forced them to wake up.

In my experience, the competitive perspective is almost always the least important aspect i

n managerial decision-making. Internal operational issues including execution, budgets, and deadlines are paramount in a company’s deliberation, but what other players will do is hardly ever in focus. This “island mentality” is surprisingly prevalent among talented, seasoned managers.

The paradox is that companies spend millions acquiring competitive or market “intelligence” from armies of vendors and deploy the latest technology disseminating the information internally. Some estimate the market for market research alone at $20 billion annually. Specific competitor information is another $2 billion. On the other hand, management never questions the actual use of this information by employees in brand, product, R&D, marketing, business development, sales, purchasing or any other market-facing function. Instead, management implicitly assumes the information is being used, and used optimally. Leadership is happy to ask that proposals and presentations be backed by “data.”  Every middle manager is familiar with the requirement for a 130- slide deck of tables, graphs and charts in the appendix for presentations to top executives.

Yet no one asks: which of the information purchased at high cost from the outside army of research vendors and consultants was ignored, missed, discounted, filtered or simply not used correctly?

What Did Peter Drucker Really Say?

Peter Drucker is often quoted as coming up with the managerial bromide, “What gets measured gets managed.” Yet this does not actually represent his thoughts on measurement. Some have argued that he never actually said that at all; others have claimed that the quote has been mangled, and that in context, it was part of a larger lamentation that managers would only manage what was easy to measure, rather than what was important or useful. Regardless, it’s clear from Drucker’s writings that he worried that management often measures the wrong things, and believed that some critical aspects of management can’t actually be measured.

And the impact of competitive information on an organization’s decisions is one of those things that c

an hardly ever be measured. It is neither direct, nor unambiguous. Since impact can’t be measured and therefore results can’t be directly attributed to the competitive information, management resorts to measuring the wrong thing, exactly as Drucker feared. For example, in several companies I worked with, management measured output. How many reports did the analysts issue? How many research projects were completed within budget and on time? This is the equivalent of searching for your car keys under the street lamp simply because that’s where the light is.

The failure to measure the impact of competitive data leads to an interesting dilemma for companies: even when it’s obvious that the company has missed an opportunity or been blindsided by a threat because they failed to consider competitive data, managers are at a loss how to improve the situation.

Improving decision quality – measured as the extent to which decision makers use all available competitive information- requires focus on usage rather than production of intelligence. This is a major mindset leap for most companies but if offers a way to improve decisions without directly measuring the elusive impact. Just ensuring that managers look at and consider competitive perspective should in principle, improve decisions. How can companies achieve that?

A Simple Yet Powerful Suggestion

Improving competitive intelligence usage requires an “audit” of major decisions – at the product/service or functional level – before they are approved by management. This competitive intelligence sign-off is simple to institutionalize. It replaces the haphazard dissemination effort of mass of information (much of it may be just noise to the user) with systematic competitive perspective.

Would a manager submit to a “sign-off” voluntarily? Maybe. Over the years I have encountered many managers who wanted to stress-test their plans and thinking against third parties’ likely moves via war games. But war games are the more advanced step, and they are typically not systematically applied in an organization. A competitive “audit” or review is the more basic level. The potential cost saving or growth opportunities afforded by institutionalized competitive reviews of major initiatives and projects can be significant. A byproduct of these reviews would be better use of costly information sources, or rationalization of the cost of these sources.

Drucker did say, “Work implies not only that somebody is supposed to do the job, but also accountability.” If managers choose deliberately to ignore the competitive perspective, they should be held accountable. And it is only reasonable to ask top management to apply the same principle to itself: a systematic, mandatory, institutionalized strategic early warning review may keep major issues on the table.

Think about it this way: If competition reviews were mandatory at Sears, Motorola, Polaroid, AOL, Radio Shack and A&P, to name a few, would they have failed to change with the times? We would never know. Common sense suggests a company shouldn’t wish to find out.

Author: Ben Gilad

Source: Harvard Business Review

For a site that only requires 140 characters to get your message across, there is a lot of confusion about how to effectively use Twitter to monitor competitors, and how to analyze that information to create an awesome social media strategy.

Competitive Intelligence and Twitter:

Why even use Twitter?

Almost every major brand has jumped aboard the Twitter wagon, but just showing up is not enough. You’ve seen them in your newsfeed, possibly from a company, or perhaps from your Mom who just signed up to the service: the dreaded Pointless Tweet.  Pointless Tweets are messages that do not provide value to your reader. Repeating your marketing message or Tweeting inspirational quotes is not a way to engage your customers.

Used properly, Twitter provides a platform for you to engage with customers and potential customers, provide instant customer service, and establish your company as an industry leader.

How to find competitors through Twitter.

To search for competitors, and discover who they engage with, simply type their names into the Twitter search. You can see the competitors’ Tweets by clicking ‘People’, and learn who is Tweeting about them by clicking ‘Tweets’.

Want to get fancy?  Twitter also has an Advanced Search feature that lets you track by location, or search for Tweets with links from a specific user, or even for Tweets that are only positive or negative.

What information should I track?

1. Number of followers
2. How frequently your competitor Tweets
3. The engagement impact of each Tweet – How many retweets, replies, and favorites
4. How often your competitor responds to customer inquiries
5. What times of day they are Tweeting

This should be tracked daily in an excel spreadsheet, or you can take the simple, automated route and sign up for Rivalfox’s upcoming beta release. Over time, the data will provide you with valuable insights, e.g. which type of Tweets create the most engagement and whether the time of Tweets correlates to more followers. Armed with this information, you can fine-tune your own awesome Twitter strategy.

Creating Awesome Strategy

When it comes to Twitter strategy, you do not need to reinvent the wheel.  Utilize what works for your competitors and change what doesn’t.  The most important goal is to share thrilling creative content, provide excellent customer service, and to engage potential customers by reaching out directly to their screens.

Source: rivalfox.com, 13 oktober 2015

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Naylor, Ellen (2013). Optimize Competitive Intelligence Collection: From Public Intelligence to Human Intelligence, 41 Slides.

Naylor, Ellen (2012). Primary Intelligence Collection: Interviewing and Elicitation, 35 slides.

Naylor, Ellen (2012). Sales a Goldmine for CI: collaborating with sales, 21 slides.

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Nelles, Alexandra (2013). How to Enhance Competitive Insights Using Internal Social Media. 18 slides.

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Payne, Jim (2013). How to build and maintain your internal expert network to capture actionable insights. 13 slides.

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Sikich, Geary (2013). How blending business continuity, strategy and risk management mitigates Black Swans and Shapeshifters. 27 slides.

Simard, Albert (2013). Competitive Intelligence: an island of structure in an unstructured ocean. 33 slides.

Sinha, Harsh (2009). Understanding the legal boundaries for competitive intelligence in India. 27 slides.

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Walker, Tim (2009). CI in a web 2.0 world, 25 slides.

Weiss, Sholom (2007). A System for Real-time Competitive Market Intelligence, 12 slides.

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Wichtendahl, Thorsten (2011). How Competitive Intelligence Can Lead to Better Decision-making in Mergers and Acquisitions, 35 slides.

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Wing, Melanie (2013). How Intelligence Teams Can Look Beyond Competitors to Optimize Company Success. 12 slides.

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Source: decisionintel.org

We have been developing a new competitive intelligence process for a client. The B2B company wants to better collect, analyze, and disseminate valuable insights on competitive strategy.

As with many competitive intelligence systems, especially in B2B settings, much of the most timely and otherwise unavailable intelligence will come from the salesforce. Similarly, the salesforce is in one of the best positions to take advantage of competitive intelligence to better position products, value propositions, and offers to customers to stymie competitive strategy. It is vital, however, to ensure the competitive intelligence process is not simply asking for competitive intelligence from salespeople, and then giving it back to them without adding sufficient value.

6 Ways to Enhance Competitive Intelligence from the Salesforce:

• To combat this possibility, here are six enhancements to competitive intelligence that originates with the salesforce to deliver new value:
• Aggregate information from multiple people to provide a view no one individual has in order to see patterns or spot trends.
• Perform additional and deeper analysis on the raw information to create new understanding.
• Communicate information to senior leadership that salespeople feel intently, but that is typically lost in the corporate shuffle (i.e., a regional or niche competitor who is not big enough to get corporate-wide attention).
• Disprove or verify early rumors salespeople have reported to address the word on the street.
• Exploit the availability of non-sales sources to enhance the raw intelligence and deliver new information to them.
• Make if more efficient for sales to gather and especially share competitive intelligence with a process that funnels competitive intelligence to them when they need it.

Source: Brainzooming

Discover the Advantages of Benchmarking

In every industry, there are certain standards that employees and consumer come to expect from any company worth their salt. How do you know if your business is meeting those standards? The answer is benchmarking.

While every business is unique and no two comxpanies will follow the exact same path to success, benchmarking gives you a solid starting point for measuring your operations. By analyzing your competitors and comparing your processes and offerings to theirs, you’ll be better able to keep up with industry trends and meet the demands of the modern market.

“It’s highly important for leaders … to know what the industry is offering, what’s changing and the new systems and technologies they need to adopt to stay on top of the game,” said Sahin Boydas, founder and CEO of RemoteTeam.com. “Leaders who operate without monitoring benchmarks end up being left behind — there’s always a price to pay for ignoring what’s happening in your business environment.”

Here’s what you need to know about the process and benefits of benchmarking in your business operations.

What is benchmarking?

Benchmarking in business means measuring your company’s quality, performance and growth by analyzing the processes and procedures of others. If you believe there’s something that can be improved within your organization, you can see how your business stacks up against the “standard” and plan out a path for betterment, whether that means cutting costs, boosting efficiency and productivity, or growing revenue. The ultimate goal of benchmarking is continuous improvement, something all businesses should aim for. Comparing your business to others can help you generate ideas that you can adopt to get ahead.

Key takeaway: Benchmarking helps your business establish an internal or external standard to measure itself against for the purposes of continual improvement.

Types of business benchmarking

A business can use benchmarking to measure numerous areas of their operations against internal and external standards. There are three primary types of benchmarking:

1. Internal benchmarking

Internal benchmarking is all about improving your business by comparing it to historical data. Whether you’re comparing organizational departments or different branch locations, you can use internal benchmarking to uncover the best, most efficient practices and share them across the company.

According to Boydas, internal benchmarking can help eliminate waste of both time and money in a business. Internal benchmarks that businesses should focus on may include things like employee performance and effectiveness, as well as how employees make use of the tools provided by the business.

“Monitoring internal benchmarks is one of the most effective ways to build resilient teams,” said Boydas. “Benchmarking data helps businesses identify the most effective ways to make use of employee talent, how to organize tasks to make it easy for both employees and management, and what part of the organizational processes should be discarded.”

2. Competitive benchmarking

As the name suggests, competitive benchmarking is about setting certain goals based on what your competitors are doing. By studying the practices and standards of similar businesses to match or, ideally, exceed the industry status quo, your business can gain a competitive edge.

Competitor benchmarks can impact everything from employee salaries, services provided to customers and even employee morale, said Maida Zheng, senior advisor at The Logos Consulting Group.

“If you want to stay ahead of the competition and create the most desirable work environment for your employees, understanding what your competitors are doing is not only common sense, but imperative,” Zheng told Business.com. “Employees will know they should stay with a company if they have an opportunity for growth — monetary and skill — and they know their employer is keeping up or staying ahead of competition.”

3. Strategic benchmarking

One step beyond competitive benchmarking is strategic benchmarking, in which a business seeks to emulate specific performance standards of world-class organizations. This may involve cross-industry inspiration, like when Southwest Airlines modeled its maintenance, cleaning and boarding processes after the time-bound, defined tasks of a well-oiled NASCAR pit crew.

Key takeaway: Business benchmarking can be used to measure progress and growth in many key operational areas. The most common types are internal, competitive and strategic benchmarking.

Benefits of benchmarking in business

Benchmarking is not a one-and-done exercise; to truly benefit from this practice, a company must engage in consistent, ongoing measurement of their key activities to ensure they’re moving toward their goals.

Businesses that make benchmarking a regular practice can:

• Keep improving internal operations. Benchmarking your processes and procedures, especially against internal standards, can help your team become more efficient and productive year over year.
• Understand what’s working and what isn’t. A deep, thorough analysis of your business’s past performance will allow you to identify trends and patterns that you may not have noticed as they were happening. Looking at this data will give you a clear picture of what behaviors and practices improve overall business results and which ones don’t.
• Adopt or improve upon competitors’ practices. When you study your competition, you begin to understand what they’re doing that makes them successful, as well as areas where they falter. By adapting competitors’ best practices to your organization’s needs and deviating from the things customers or clients don’t like, you can optimize your position in the market and better appeal to your target audience.
• Reduce costs by increasing efficiency. Benchmarking is most often used to improve performance through efficiency. Cutting out waste in your processes, be it monetary costs or time and effort spent, will help you streamline your operations and ultimately help you retain more of your revenue.
• Focus on practices and offerings that promote customer satisfaction and loyalty. Gathering feedback and data from customers (either your own or your competitors) will give you greater insight into what they like and don’t like, and what you can do to keep earning their business in the future.

Key takeaway: Benchmarking can help you improve multiple areas of your business operations, simply by measuring progress and giving you a clear goal to strive for.

What is a typical benchmarking process?

In its simplest form, benchmarking involves determining where you are, where you want to be and how you plan to get there. Here is a brief overview of the stages of the benchmarking process most businesses follow:

1. Plan out what you want to benchmark.

Benchmarking begins with identifying what you want to measure. Whether it’s salary, sales, team development or another area of growth, you’ll want to define the activities you’re benchmarking and the key metrics you’ll use to track progress.

2. Conduct research to collect relevant data.

Once you know what you want to measure, you can begin speaking with employees, competitors, customers and other business stakeholders who may be involved or impacted. Initiating one-on-one or group conversations or collecting survey responses from these parties can provide valuable feedback to inform your benchmarking process.

You should also conduct research on where other companies or departments currently stand. For instance, if you’re benchmarking salaries, you’ll want to look at sites like Glassdoor and Payscale to see what other companies pay for the same roles and titles in your organization. Understanding the industry or departmental average can help you better set your own benchmark for measuring your company’s performance.

3. Analyze the data to assess where you are and where you want to be.

Using your research and gathered data, you can figure out where your current performance sits compared to other companies or departments and determine an appropriate and realistic goal for improvement. Laying out your data in an easy-to-digest format (e.g. graphs or charts) can give you a holistic picture of any gaps in your performance and how far you’ll need to go to meet your desired benchmark.

4. Develop an action plan.

This is the implementation phase of the benchmarking process in which you’ll develop actionable steps you and your stakeholders can take to reach your goals. Defining success and an action plan upfront gives you a clear path to hitting your benchmarks.

A good place to begin is by leveraging common goal-setting approaches like SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time-Bound) and HEART (Habit-Forming, Emotional, Actionable, Realistic, Time-Bound). By using either of these approaches, you can break down your big-picture benchmarking goals (“increase sales”) into smaller steps with concrete deadlines (“reach out to five new prospects per week over the next quarter”).

5. Monitor your progress.

At regular intervals, check the progress your team is making against the defined goals in your action plan. This may be weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, but it’s important to track your metrics consistently. If you’re meeting your benchmarks, it means your plan has been successful and you should continue. If you’re not, you may need to revisit your plan and course correct.

While these steps can be adapted to many different business operations, your company may want to develop its own unique benchmarking process based on the specific goals you want to reach. Depending on your current state and where you want to go, some steps may be more involved or require external partners to help.

Key takeaway: To begin benchmarking, identify the metrics you want to track, asses where you currently stand and define what success looks like. Then, create an action plan and regularly track your progress.

Example of benchmarking

Not sure where to begin with your benchmarking process? Here is a hypothetical example of how it can work for your organization:

A company uses the same ticketing system for its customer service department and its IT department. When the chief operating officer looks at the dashboard statistics, she notices that the IT team closes 80% of its tickets within three days, which is significantly faster than the customer service team.

She initiates a benchmarking process for closed tickets and studies what the IT team is doing to achieve its results. The COO learns that whenever a ticket comes in for IT, the department head assigns the ticket to the team member with the most expertise in that area, while customer service tickets are assigned to whichever employee is currently available.

The customer service team adopts the IT team’s practice of ticket assignment by expertise and sets a goal of cutting their average ticket close time in half by the end of the following month. After a few weeks of following this practice, the customer service reps were working through more issues each week and successfully hit the IT team’s close time benchmark.

Key takeaway: The benchmarking process allows a team or company to determine what specific practices are helping other departments or competitors achieve certain results. The team or company can then adopt those practices to achieve similar improved results.

How to make benchmarking work for your business

If your business is looking to begin the benchmarking process, the most important thing you can do is get your employees involved in the process. Change is a difficult but necessary part of reaching your benchmarking goals, and it’s important that everyone on your team is on board with what they need to do, when they need to do it and how.

Giving everyone a seat at the table and letting their voices be heard will help you encourage and foster creativity, Zheng said. Great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, and you may find that a lower-level employee comes up with the best plan for improving a particular process.

“Don’t get stuck in a rut thinking that only the senior managers can offer innovative ideas,” said Zheng. “Create a mechanism where any employee can make the company better and accordingly reward them for bringing ideas to life.”

Key takeaway: Get your employees of all levels involved in the benchmarking process. This will not only generate the greatest number of diverse, viable ideas, but also encourage buy-in from your team. 

Author: Nicole Fallon

Source: Business News Daily

“‘You’ve been Ubered’ will become part of our lexicon to describe industries blindsided by the future,”says Tony Chapman, a Canadian consumer and branding expert, in reference to the challenges that “Big Taxi” is currently facing due to the growing popularity of the Uber rideshare app.

In fact, every industry now has to face the fact that you “are either Uber, or you’re being Ubered.”

So, while it is important to look at what your direct competitors are doing when evaluating the competitive landscape for your ecommerce business, it’s even more important to be aware of key trends that will shape where your market is headed.

To help you create a competitive business strategy that keeps your business agile and adaptable to continuously evolving market conditions and competitors, let’s take a look at what some business strategists and analysts are recommending to startups and entrepreneurs.  After all, most businesses will need to adopt startup strategies in order to remain relevant 10 to 20 years from now. 

Understanding Your Competitive Landscape

To understand the big picture of how your business can thrive in the future, it helps to look at your competitive landscape from many different angles. The handy SlideShare presentation from Startup Next (see full presentation above) on market sizing and competitive analysis recommends to evaluate 3 competitive categories in your environment which include:

1. Direct competitors

• Big retailers in your industry (e.g. Amazon and Walmart)
• Other businesses that “solve your unique problem” (including smaller, niche mom and pop shops or even Etsy shops)

2. Indirect competitors

• Economic and political trends (e.g. customer privacy)
• Regulation, government legislation and trade agreements

3. Future threats

• Cultural shifts (e.g. usage of mobile devices overtaking desktop computers)
• Tech innovations (e.g. wearables, 3D printing and virtual reality)
• Possible changes that your business partners or suppliers are planning

Once you know who those competitors are, it’s time to evaluate the market opportunities and consumer touchpoints related to each of them.

A Startup Approach For Evaluating Future Competitors And Market Opportunities

“We need a different way to represent the competitive landscape when you are creating a business that never existed or taking share away from incumbents by re-segmenting an existing market,” saysSteve Blank, a serial entrepreneur, Stanford professor and author whose book The Four Steps to the Epiphany was influential in the launch of the Lean Startup movement.

So, if every business now needs to think like a startup in order to avoid “getting Ubered,” why not begin evaluating your market opportunities like a startup right now?

Image via SteveBlank.com

To do so, Blank recommends putting your business at the center of your competitive analysis diagram (versus plotting it out on an x, y axis – with your startup at the top right) and then branch out to key adjacent market segments that exist today. This will help to identify where you think your new customers might come from in the future.

He calls this a “Petal Diagram” and his argument for this approach is that he always thought of his startups as “the center of the universe.” The example diagram above is for a startup education software platform. But the same format could be applied to any retail or ecommerce business.

So, say your ecommerce business sells specialty sports equipment. You may want to add market segments that you don’t cater to right now but might in the future – thanks to new technologies. For example, advances in 3D printing technologies will allow you to sell to customers in countries to which you don’t currently ship your products. Or, you may be able to work with new distributors or manufacturers with whom you don’t currently have business relationships.

Blank says that there is no limit to the number of “petals” or adjacent markets that you can map out. And for better visualization, he recommends that the size of the petals can be scaled to the size of the market opportunity for each segment.

Image via SteveBlank.com

“The petal diagram is where you [startups an entrepreneurs] develop your first hypothesis about who your customers are,” says Blank.

While you probably already know who your existing customers are if you are running a thriving ecommerce business, it’s still important to consider that your future customers may look and behave a lot differently.

And although the purpose of the petal diagram is to show potential investors why they should put their money into a startup, the same diagram can help your leadership team decide where to place their biggest bets and/or to allocate budgets towards R&D for future business growth.

Tools For Evaluating Your Competition Online

Image via Pixabay

Whether you want to size-up your direct competitors, or research current and evolving industry trends, there’s an app or (sometimes free) online tool for that.

Below are a few suggestions for where you can gather useful competitive intelligence data.

1. Upstream Commerce
While you do have to pay for this service, Upstream Commerce offers “automated, real-time intelligence analytics” and insights to help you evaluate competitive pricing, merchandising, promotion and product intelligence – across a number of retail industry categories. The company boasts that its data is easily customizable to help you build detailed, filterable results.

2. Channel IQ
Similar to Upstream Commerce, Channel IQ offers competitive intelligence analytics for price monitoring, product intelligence and more. But what sets it apart is that it offers competitive brand intelligence and protection tools. This includes paid search brand protection – allowing you to monitor PPC & keyword “brand-jacking,” so that your competitors can’t “illegally divert your traffic using your registered trade name.”

3. The Google Keyword Planner tool (or other similar free tools) and Google Trends can help to evaluate consumer demand (via search queries) for your competitors’ products. These tools can also help you evaluate demand for specific products that you or your competitors carry.

In addition, by signing up to receive Google Alerts via email whenever your competitors are covered by media or bloggers online, you can stay up-to-date on when they launch new products or when the company is receiving positive or negative press.

4. Social media monitoring platforms
In addition to looking at online search behavior, it’s important to look at what people are actually saying about your brand – and whether the conversation is moving in a positive or negative direction.

There are a lot of social media monitoring platforms available for listening to what customers are saying on social networking sites. Some of the more popular ones include: HootSuite, TweetDeck andSysomos. Here’s a helpful blog post from Ryan Holmes, the CEO of HootSuite on how to “listen” to the competition via social media.

5. eMarketer.com
While the research, insights and benchmark reports written by eMarketer analysts are crafted with a marketing slant, the company’s ecommerce and mobile commerce reports provide rich, aggregated data from some of the most important research companies that study digital trends today.

And even if you can’t afford to pay for their full reports, if you sign-up for their free newsletter and search through their public articles, you can access a lot of the most important highlights and charts for use in your own competitive intelligence analysis and strategy development.

6. Alexa.com and other web analytics tools
While the insights that you can glean from the free version of the Alexa tool are limited, you can still gain a high-level overview of:

• how your competitors’ websites rank online (both worldwide or in your own country),
• how their website performs overall (via graphs highlighting the bounce rate, pageviews per visitor and average visitor’s time spent on the website), and
• where they may be investing in online marketing efforts via the top “upstream websites” graph (i.e. the top websites that send traffic to your competitors’ websites).

The paid version of the tool is more robust – giving you further intel into sites linking in, keywords driving traffic to the site and overall website comparisons.

7. comScore and HitWise
These tools also do a lot of what the paid version Alexa tool does and are pretty popular for gathering online consumer behavioral data. And like Alexa, both products will enable you to look at traffic on your competitors’ sites – offering variations on how people get there, what popular search terms were used and who those people are. But the way the data is collected is different: comScore data is collected via a panel of users who opt-in to be tracked, and HitWise data is collected based on aggregated ISP user data.

If you have the budget, then I’d say pay for both of these tools. If not, the free Alexa tool is a great place to start.

8. Finally, although Mary Meeker is a person (and a very influential one at that) and obviously not an app, her annual Internet Trends Report has become an important destination for anyone who wants to know what’s happening online today – or prepare for will happen in the future. So, I suggest you add her slide deck to your “future threats” intelligence arsenal.

For a list of even more competitive intelligence tools, check out this post on the Shopify blog.

FreePint, the international research and consulting service for information and knowledge professionals, released an independent product review of Intelligence Plaza today. The Intelligence Plaza is a comprehensive web-based market and competitive intelligence software tool developed by Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA), which is used by over 40,000 business managers worldwide.

Chicago, IL, January 07, 2015 --(PR.com)-- FreePint, the international research and consulting service for information and knowledge professionals, released an independent product review of Intelligence Plaza today. The Intelligence Plaza is a comprehensive web-based market and competitive intelligence software tool developed by Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA), which is used by over 40,000 business managers worldwide.

The Product Review of Intelligence Plaza by FreePint takes a look at Intelligence Plaza in terms of:

1. Sources, Content and Coverage - How Intelligence Plaza provides users with a comprehensive web-based market and competitive intelligence software tool.

2. Technology – What are the search functions of Intelligence Plaza, how the interface works and how it can benefit any organization.

3. Purchasing and Value – What are the cost and the value that Intelligence Plaza would bring to any organization.

FreePint’s in-depth Product Reviews are often used by information managers when evaluating tools and as a key part of their purchasing decision.

In an excerpt, the Review explains, “Intelligence Plaza is a great choice for organisations already using Microsoft SharePoint as it is strongly integrated within a SharePoint Interface. The stand out strengths of Intelligence Plaza are the options to set up feeds from internal and external feeds of your choosing, making each company’s view unique and tailored to their information needs and wants. The package also enables each user to tag chosen stories and you can choose a variety of delivery options. Intelligence Plaza is fully operational on all platforms from PC to tablet and smartphone. The Intelligence Plaza “Market Intelligence Team” are fully committed to ensuring that every customer gets the most from that data available. The typical company size that uses Intelligence Plaza can be from 100 to thousands of employees.”

“We have seen a trend in the marketplace where more and more companies are moving towards Microsoft SharePoint, and it is of utmost importance for our clients to have a choice. With GIA, they can choose between SharePoint products and non-SharePoint products, thus avoiding the need to build something internally, when a world-class off-the-shelf market intelligence software solution for SharePoint already exists. Intelligence Plaza for SharePoint is an outcome of collaboration between intelligence advisors, intelligence software experts and SharePoint specialists. It is an actual SharePoint software product that is fully compatible with the corporate intranet platform, and meets internal IT requirements and offers all the features of a proven intelligence software for market intelligence practitioners. Business users in their turn, benefit from all the built-in functionalities. These include for instance, personal email alerts and dashboards, that are all packaged in a user-friendly interface,” said Petteri Verronen, Vice President of Technology at GIA.

http://www.pr.com/

In today's digital marketing world, competitive intelligence often takes a back seat to all the key performance indicators (KPIs) on which marketers are focused—open rates, social engagement metrics, lead-to-sales opportunity conversion rates, etc.

That inward focus on how well you are doing with your revenue-driving marketing tactics is critical. But it can lead you to celebrate the wrong things. Don't let your KPIs overshadow the importance of knowing exactly how your digital marketing strategies are performing in relation to your peers who are competing against you in the market.

If you forget to look at the bigger picture, you'll miss a perspective that, well, separates the best marketers from the mediocre ones.

You can easily keep tabs on how your campaigns measure up against others in your industry without hiring an expensive third-party research firm. Of course, there may be times when you do need customer research and use a fancy detailed matrix of your competitors for in-depth analysis for identifying new products or for market sizing.

But I'm talking about a quick and easy dashboard that measures you, the marketer, against your competitors.

Why Spy?

Competitive intelligence helps you...

• Increase your chances of winning in the marketplace
• Shape the development of your digital marketing strategy
• Create a strategy for new product launches
• Uncover threats and opportunities
• Establish benchmarking for your analytics
  Most businesses do not have the luxury of having a dedicated employee, let alone a dedicated team, to gather and analyze gobs of data. However, you can easily track basic KPIs to inform decision-making at your company.

Having analyzed the digital marketing strategies of numerous companies of various size and in various industries, including e-commerce, SaaS, and travel companies—and their competitors—I suggest the following for benchmarking.

Website Performance Metrics

To track the performance of a website, gather data from sites such as SEMRush, Pingdom, Similarweb, and Alexa. While that data is not always accurate when you compare three or four competitors at once, you can spot trends.

Important metrics to monitor include the following:

• Website visits: The average number of visitors per month can easily size up how popular you and your competitors are.
• Bounce rate and site speed: Correlate these two metrics. That's how you can determine whether you need to make changes to your own website. For example, if your website has a high page-load time compared with your competitors, that will impact your page rankings, bounce rate, and overall customer satisfaction.
• Geographic sources of traffic: Look at what percentage of visitors comes from what regions. That's critical if your company plans to expand beyond its current geographical presence. It will also allow you to spot global opportunities by finding gaps in distribution when looking at all competitors.
• Website traffic by channel: See where your competitors choose to spend their time and money. For example, a company that has a higher percentage of visitors from email probably has a large prospect database. If you look at their website, you can examine how they collect data for their email marketing programs. Are they getting website visitors to sign up for newsletters or special offers? If not, they may be purchasing prospect data from a data provider. You can adjust your own strategy to ramp up marketing campaigns in areas where your competitors are not actively engaging prospects, or to increase spending in areas where they are outperforming you.

Benchmarking reports from industry research reports are also helpful for tracking average open, click-through, and conversion rates.

By putting together your newly found competitor insight and your own metrics, including your past performance, you can establish your own benchmarking.

Mining for More Data

Where are your competitors spending their advertising budgets? How are they using social media and PR? What jobs are they posting? Those answers are not hard to find, and they provide powerful insights.

• SEO/PPC research: Tools are available to help you determine what ads your competitors are running and how they rank for particular keywords. Check out SEMRush, SpyFu, and WhatRunsWhere. You can also look at their overall spending for PPC campaigns. Depending on the source, however, the accuracy of this data can be as low as 50%. So use it for gauging overall direction, but don't rely on it entirely.
• Social media: This is probably the hottest area of marketing and the hardest to assess. Mining data on social channels is especially tough when tracking consumer brands. It's best to monitor your competitors' activities monthly, and make sure to look at the posts ad promotions that companies generate. When updating or changing your strategy, you should have a solid understanding of what social media channels your competitors are using, types of posts they are making, how frequently they are using social media, and how successful they are (including number of users and levels of engagement).
• PR: Press releases, financial reports, and thought-leadership blog posts distributed by your competitors provide great insight into their partnerships, possible marketing spending, and other initiatives.
• Job postings: From time to time, take a look at LinkedIn or other job sites and you can get a good idea of where and how the company plans to expand.

Frequency of Competitive Analysis

The answer depends on the type of business that you have and the competitive landscape.

For example, if you are selling a product in the SaaS Cloud space where you have 10 competitors, most of which are leading innovators, it makes sense to track their every move. However, if you are a B2B company and you have only one or two competitors in the manufacturing sector, you probably can get away with doing some basic benchmarking once every quarter.

It is advisable to do a competitive analysis prior to changing strategy, launching a new product, or making tactical plans for the next quarter or year.

Don't Be Afraid: Know Where You Stand

Here's the bottom line: Don't get too excited about your 5% jump in email open rates, or passing a "likes" milestone on Facebook. Have the courage to see whether you are really a marketing rock star by benchmarking yourself against your competitors. Your business needs to know what your competition is doing. And I don't mean just knowing your competitors' products and pricing.

With the insights you'll get from these tips and tools, you will be able to create a solid strategy, spot-on tactical plans, and (at the very least) a fantastic presentation to your executives or board.

Source: MarketingProfs

In this article, you'll learn...
• How to gain competitive intelligence from public sources
• Tools to monitor online advertising and SEO tactics of their competition

Marketers want to know what their competition is up to. Setting up Google Alerts and following your competitor's Twitter feed can get you only so far, and the old "hide your badge trick" at tradeshows is just annoying. Does it ever work... or does it just arouse suspicion?
So what's the best way to gather competitive intelligence?
Some of the information you want is not public. Other information is just hard to find and takes some work. Luckily, with the troves of information now online, plus some new tools, it's never been easier.
January is auspicious in the history of covert intelligence-gathering. At a lunch on January 24, 1946, President Harry Truman appointed the first Director of Central Intelligence.
In honor of that just-passed anniversary, we're going to look at some CIA-style techniques for spying on your competition. I won't tell you all of my secrets, nor pick favorite tools, but here are five bits of tradecraft.

1. Ad Spying
Ever wanted to know where your competitors are advertising and what they are saying? Maybe you come across their banner ads here and there, but how big of an investment are they making? Are there places where they are advertising and where you should advertise, too?
Some tools let you actually see where companies are advertising. Two of the more prominent are AdBeat and WhatRunsWhere. These tools crawl sites every day to find out what ads are running, and you can find out just what ad creative your competition is running and where.

2. SEO Keyword Spying
Knowing what keywords your competition is bidding on can be very valuable. Sure, you can try out keywords and see what ads pop up, but a much better way is to use a tool to automate the task.
Two tools that do so are SpyFu and iSpionage. Enter a keyword or domain, and you can find out which keywords your competitors are bidding on, what ad copy they're using, and which landing pages they're using.

3. Web Traffic Spying
SimilarWeb is a cool tool that lets you look at the traffic to and from any website. My favorite way to use it is to see what sites are sending people to my competitors.
By looking at the top referring sites (which you can see for your own site with Google Analytics), you will gain some insight into content that's sending clients to your competition. Maybe there's a blog that mentions them. Maybe they have some type of referral or affiliate agreement.
You also get a nice summary of their overall traffic, what geographies it's coming from, how much is coming from social media, and some other nice nuggets of info.

4. SEC Filings
The lives of most CIA researchers are not as eventful as Robert Redford's in Three Days of the Condor. Not everything in the spy world is cloak and dagger. The Agency employs hundreds of analysts who read newspapers, financial filings, and other public documents to see what they can find.
SEC filings can reveal a lot about a public company. Aside from the usual financial information, over the years I've found the following: office lease expenses, severance agreements, technology licensing deals, and details of acquisitions.
Make sure to read the footnotes; that's where a lot of miscellaneous and interesting stuff is hidden in plain sight.
James Underwood, author of Competitive Intelligence for Dummies, has a quick tutorial on how to find and navigate the various SEC filing documents. He includes a tip on a smoking gun that can really be valuable: "Always check to see if the auditors have filed a 'Going Concern Letter' on the company. That usually means that they have serious concerns about the future viability of the company."

5. Job Sites
Don't ignore job sites. You can find out a lot about a company's focus and strategy. Your competitor is looking for a bunch of mobile engineers? Ten new sales reps in Germany?
Glassdoor is a site that solicits employee and interviewee feedback, so you can learn a lot about a company's culture there. You can also sense the health of a company.
I looked up a company that had just raised a nice Series C round of financing (sounds good!), but I saw a comment about a big layoff (not so good!).
Glassdoor also lets you set up alerts, so you get this stuff in your inbox. Even the CIA is on Glassdoor: "A mixed bag" at 3.9 stars out of five.

Remember, spying takes patience and diligence. In the words of espionage novelist Graham Greene, "Most things disappoint till you look deeper."
Have other ideas? I would love to hear about them, spy to spy.

Source: Marketingprofs.com, February 6, 2015

In July 2015, Novartis launched its new heart failure drug, Entresto, which Forbes in 2014 predicted would be a blockbuster — with expected sales of $10 billion annually — as the potential market in the US exceeds 5 million people with a heart failure condition. Yet, in the first quarter of 2016 the company sold only $17 million of Entresto in the U.S. market.

The failure stemmed from resistance in the U.S. by both insurance companies and cardiologists to a new and expensive drug (which costs more than $4,000 a year, compared to pennies a day for existing drugs). Pharmaceutical companies spend millions upon millions preparing meticulous plans for new drug launches – and yet their route-to-market strategies haven’t changed in decades, even though the reality of the market has.

The really frustrating thing is that so few companies learn from such mistakes; the usual response is “hindsight is 20-20” and the failure is chalked up to bad timing. Maybe a brand manager is moved to a different department, but little else changes – the same consultants are hired, the same “best practices” are pursued – and organization itself rarely actually learns. The failures continue.

In May of 2015, a food-safety commissioner of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with 205 million people, was claiming that a package of Nestlé’s popular Maggi noodles had been found to contain seven times the permissible level of lead and had recalled the batch.

Maggi’s sales accounted for quarter of Nestlé’s $1.6 billion sales in India. It has been one of the most powerful and trusted brands in that market and held a commanding 63% market share. The event that started in Uttar Pradesh rolled like an earthquake over Nestle and resulted in five-month ban on Maggi. Nestle lost $277 million in sales and paid $70 million in a recall. The damage to the brand name has been even larger — half a billion dollars. Paul Bulcke, Nestle’s CEO, was quoted by Fortune as saying, “This is a case where you can be so right and yet so wrong… We live in an ambiguous world. We have to be able to cope with that.”

Nestlé was not able to cope with that – but a competitor was. Baba Ramdev, the yoga guru owner of the fastest-growing local consumer goods company in India, launched a competing product, advertised as “healthier” than Nestlé’s and at a lower price point than Maggi.

We must start to think differently about how business, management, and strategic intelligence works. What companies today need isn’t meticulous plans, but to constantly reassess the business and its markets and competitors. In other words, the goal for strategic intelligence is not to collect market information to make plans, but to use that information to generate insights that in turn support ever-changing perspectives. Eventually, these perspectives may result in action. Or not. The test of a capability is not in management action but in management learning. Avoiding a $500 million mistake is surely just as valuable as launching a $500 million product.

What builds management perspectives? What insights will cause an executive — in R&D or Marketing or Finance — to not only change his or her perspective, but to be able to juggle different perspectives? In his best-selling book, Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock states “The job of intelligence is to speak truth to power, not tell [the powers] temporarily in charge what they want to hear.” But what is truth in an ambiguous world? Is there just one?

Intelligence analysts live in a different knowledge context from managers. Management may have to play an internal political game with issues that intelligence analysts don’t even know about! Moreover, insight is in itself an ambiguous concept: how can management and intelligence work together on creating insights that have real competitive implications? Strategic intelligence leaders in large corporations (as in government) have no idea, since they mostly work in a different sphere. This disconnect between the institutional production of (more and faster) intelligence and the personal use of intelligence by corporate decision makers seems the most vexing issue for corporate leaders. The solution is probably not easy, but it comes down to four radical changes:

• Manage talent differently. Executives must actively recruit and promote on tolerance of ambiguity mindsets where the unexpected builds perspectives.
• Use competitive intelligence differently. Companies must utilize the intelligence team specifically for insight management, not as an information search-and-distribute function. At the minimum, institutional intelligence’s crucial role should be supporting a change in perspective. Optimally, it will foster an organizational culture thriving on ambiguity outsmarting stability-seeking competitors.
• Work together. Easier said than done, but the parallel from the military is that the intelligence analyst should be side-by-side with the decision maker at all times, not down the hall or in a different building.
• Study personal use of intelligence. Corporations spend a fortune studying aspects of employees’ behavior, developing organizational learning, assessing performance, and providing feedbacks. They spend almost nothing trying to understand, chart and overcome obstacles for using intelligence inside the organization. This is not another “HR job.” It is at the heart of avoiding half-billion dollar loss like Nestle’s or nasty disappointments like that of Novartis.

Author: Benjamin Gilad, Magnus Hoppe (2016)

1. Learn from your competitor's tests, not just your own. We all talk about testing, but did you realize that you can double your efforts by gleaning ideas from competitors? If you see what works for them, you can test it for yourself. And if you see something that doesn’t work, you can deprioritize that test, and put more lucrative efforts first.
2. Identify key subject lines, phrases, creative, etc. Chances are, if it engages your competitors’ audience, it will probably engage yours, too. It’s worth sorting through creative examples to get ideas for what you can test next.
3. Quickly see what is new in marketing. It can be difficult to find the newest innovations, tools, or techniques that can drive your results and make your job easier. A competitive analysis tool can help you keep tabs on your competitors so you can identify when they are doing something that you can’t. Think about all the technologies we now use that were virtually unknown 10 years ago: real-time suggestion engines, dynamic image generation, and more. Just by asking, “how did they do that?”, you might uncover that your competitors are using a new tool or technique that you could implement to help drive your ROI too.
4. Prove you need a bigger budget. A competitive tool can help you see exactly how much effort your competitors are putting into their email channel. Based on those competitive insights, you can prove that you need a bigger budget to keep up.
5. Track benchmarks. It’s helpful to understand how you stack up against competitive benchmarks, such as read rates or share of voice. It can be even more helpful to know how those metrics change in different seasons and during different holidays. This can support your budget requests or even potentially help you restructure your program.

Data is at the very core of the business models of the future – and this means wrenching change for some organizations.

We tend to think of our information systems as a foundation layer that support the “real” business of the organization – for example, by providing the information executives need to steer the business and make the right decisions.

But information is rapidly becoming much more than that: it’s turning into an essential component of the products and services we sell.

Information-augmented products

In an age of social media transparency, products “speak for themselves”– if you have a great product, your customers will tell their friends. If you have a terrible product, they’ll tell the world. Your marketing and sales teams have less room for maneuver, because prospects can easily ask existing customers if your product lives up to the promises.

And customer expectations have risen. We all now expect to be treated as VIPs, with a “luxury” experience. When we make a purchase, we expect to be recognized. We expect our suppliers to know what we’ve bought in the past. And we expect personalized product recommendations, based on our profile, the purchases of other people like us, and the overall context of what’s happening right now.

This type of customer experience doesn’t just require information systems; the information is an element of the experience itself, part of what we’re purchasing, and what differentiates products and services in the market.

New ways of selling

New technologies like 3D printing and the internet of things are allowing companies to rethink existing products.

Products can be more easily customized and personalized for every customer. Pricing can be more variable to address new customer niches. And products can be turned into services, with customers paying on a per-usage basis.

Again, information isn’t just supporting the manufacturing and sale of the product – it’s part of what makes it a “product” in the first place.

Information as a product

In many industries, the information collected by business is now more valuable than the products being sold – indeed, it’s the foundation for most of the free consumer internet. Traditional industries are now realizing that the data stored in their systems, once suitably augmented or anonymized, can be sold directly. See this article on the Digitalist magazine, The Hidden Treasure Inside Your Business, for more information about the four main information business models.

A culture change for “traditional IT”

Traditional IT systems were about efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity. These new context-based experiences and more sophisticated products use information to generate growth, innovation, and market differentiation. But these changes lead to a difficult cultural challenge inside the organization.

Today’s customer-facing business and product teams don’t just need reliable information infrastructures. They need to be able to experiment, using information to test new product options and ways of selling. This requires not only much more flexibility and agility than in the past, but also new ways of working, new forms of IT organization, and new sharing of responsibilities.

The majority of today’s CIOs grew up in an era of “IT industrialization,” with the implementation of company-wide ERP systems. But what made them successful in the past won’t necessarily help them win in the new digital era.

Gartner believes that the role of the “CIO” has already split into two distinct functions: Chief Infrastructure Officers whose job is to “keep the lights on”; and Chief Innovation Offers, who collaborate closely with the business to build the business models of the future.

IT has to help lead

Today’s business leaders know that digital is the future, but typically only have a hazy idea of the possibilities. They know technology is important, but often don’t have a concrete plan for moving forward: 90% of CEOs believe the digital economy will have a major impact on their industry. But only 25% have a plan in place, and less than 15% are funding and executing a digital transformation plan.

Business people want help from IT to explain what’s possible. Today, only 7% of executives say that IT leads their organization’s attempts to identify opportunities to innovate, 35% believe that it should. After decades of complaints from CIOs that businesses aren’t being strategic enough about technology, this is a fantastic new opportunity.

Design Thinking and prototyping

Today’s CIOs have to step up to digital innovation. The problem is that it can be very hard to understand — history is packed with examples of business leaders that just didn’t “get” the new big thing.  Instead of vague notions of “disruption,” IT can help by explaining to business people how to add information into a company’s future product experiences.

The best way to do this is through methodologies such as Design Thinking, and agile prototyping using technologies should as Build.me, a cloud platform that allows pioneers to create and test the viability of new applications with staff and customers long before any actual coding.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that digital innovation is less about the technology, and more about the transformation — but IT has an essential role to play in demonstrating what’s possible, and needs to step up to new leadership roles.

Source: timoelliot.com, November 14, 2016

For more than 30 years, most large corporations worldwide have adopted competitive intelligence (CI) as a way to expedite good decisions. And yet for almost every company that uses CI in their decision-making, there’s another that disregards CI’s mix of industry analysis, rival positions, and market insight to their detriment.

We recently conducted a survey of CI managers and analysts who’ve been through our training program to see how much their findings influenced major company decisions, and why. We received 236 responses from 21 industries in U.S. and European corporations, from CI-trained analysts in marketing, business development, strategy, R&D, finance, and other fields. They had an average of 6.3 years of experiencing in using CI frameworks and tools, and 62% were from companies with over $1 billion in annual sales revenues.

We found that 55% of our respondents said that their input on major management decisions made enough difference to improve the decision. But 45% said their CI analysis did not.

Why did some analysts have their input incorporated, while others didn’t? Our survey suggested several key reasons.

First, many executives decide on a course of action and then use CI to ratify their choice. When asked, “What percent of your reports do you feel are just ‘confirmatory’ for an executive who already made a decision?” a full one-third of our respondents claimed “high” or “very high.” In these cases, the analysis may just be an obligation to be checked off a list.

We also ran several simple OLS regression models and tested more than two dozen variables to see if they affected which companies actually allowed their CI analyses to influence their decisions. At the end, we found four variables turned out to be highly significant in explaining the difference in impact.

1. The analyst was assigned a “sign-off” authority over major decisions. The single most effective way to ensure intelligence is used in any given decision is to give the analyst a say in moving it forward. In practical terms this means the analyst – not just the PowerPoint deck – becomes part of discussions leading to the decision. That is the one area where “intelligent organizations” differ most from others.

2. Management was open to perspectives that were different from the internal consensus. Management that was more open to different perspective was also more likely to ask the analyst for the “big picture” rather than just the data.

3. The analyst’s report called for proactive action more than reaction. Most companies are reactive by nature, and a lot of intelligence is about reacting to competitors’ moves. However, the decisions that matter more may well be those that are proactive. When the analyst provided proactive recommendations, the analysis had more of an impact.

4. The analyst was involved in product launches. We don’t know why analysts in this area felt particularly impactful, but we do know that competitive intelligence is highly popular in tactical areas, and that product launches are an area where companies are most worried about competitors’ responses; successful product launches depend on correctly gauging the response of other players in the market. These include, naturally, customers and competitors, but also the less obvious responses by distribution channels, regulatory authorities, and influencing agents. Lack of insightful anticipation of these reactions — which is where competition analysts have the greatest expertise — leads to many more failures than there should be. Perhaps the analysts involved with product launches are thus given more of a mandate than analysts involved in other kinds of activities.

None of these steps involves spending millions on the intelligence or hiring legions of analysts. And overall, these four variables explained a respectable 40% of the variability in having an impact on decisions. In terms of magnitude of the effect, the simple “sign off” requirement from management was clearly the leading contributor to explaining variability of impact.

For these decisions – the ones that were improved by competitive intelligence — CI analysts reported many applications of their insights. While product launches were over-represented, our respondents told us about a wide array of applications for their analyses. They were evenly distributed between pursuing opportunities (46%) and reducing risks (44%), and ran the gamut from product pricing and features, capex investments, manufacturing processes, market expansion, joint ventures, M&A, and more.

For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, respondents said that use of competitive intelligence had either saved or generated millions through discontinuing ineffective drug development efforts, walking away from bad deals and/or licensing opportunities, or accelerating new drug development based on what competitors were doing. For example, as one told us, “We accelerated our orphan disease program, based on accurate prediction of rival expected entry.”

A common theme across industries was the smart reallocation of resources. One analyst told us that their company had stopped development on a project that was consuming lots of local resources after the analysis indicated it wouldn’t be effective. They then re-applied those resources to an area with true growth potential — that area is now starting to take off. In a different company, an analysis led to the cancellation of an extremely high-risk R&D program.

This is not to discount the importance of ratifying a current course of action. In one of our favorite answers to our open-response question, an analyst described how CI had “identified only a single competitor, while determining others did not have the business case to continue a pursuit.” But it’s clear to us from this and other surveys we’ve done that the companies that get the most out of CI use it for a wide array of purposes – and actually let it shape their decisions.

Source: Harvard Business review

Unleashing the Power of Competitive Intelligence: How to Fine-Tune Your CI System for Maximum Impact

Does your competitive intelligence system run like an outdated app you’ve been meaning to update? Do you find yourself dealing with performance issues and lag time when it comes to keeping people informed? If so, it may be time to run a diagnostic on your CI process. 

Wat is een company profile of bedrijfsprofiel nu eigenlijk en waar wordt het door bedrijven voor gebruikt? 

Wat is een company profile?

In een company profile wordt op een systematische wijze een analyse gemaakt van een bedrijf. Onderwerpen die hierbij aan de orde komen zijn:

• Algemene feiten van het bedrijf
• Historie van het bedrijf
• Strategie
• Identiteit
• Doelen
• Competenties
• Product portfolio
• Organisatiestructuur
• Financials

Maar waar wordt het nu door bedrijven voor gebruikt?

In het bedrijfsprofiel worden zaken in kaart gebracht die u als organisatie zelf kunt beïnvloeden zoals bijv: bedrijfsstrategie, concurrentiestratie, R&D strategie, product portfolio of imago. Verschillende afdelingen binnen organisaties maken gebruik van company profiles voor verschillende doelen:

Ervaring heeft uitgewezen dat het gebruik van company profiles de effectiviteit van bijv een acquisitiegesprek, cross-selling, bedrijfsovername, leveranciersselectie vergroot en verkleint de kans op verkeerde keuze voor leveranciers. Wilt u meer weten of een voorbeeld te downloaden klik dan hier.

Bron: RK-Intelligence.nl, Ruud Koopmans, 4 November 2016

Ever get the feeling that you’re being watched?

If you do, you’re not paranoid. It’s likely your competitors are watching your every move with new technology that will give you a shear wake up 

call.

Following the old adage of keeping your enemies closer, they’re monitoring everything – from your company’s blog articles to customer tweets about your products or services. In many cases, they’re even tracking entire company websites and receiving email alerts or phone notifications when website changes indicate you’ve entered a new market or industry, among a slew of other things. Spooky, right? No, it’s called competitive intelligence technology and it’s becoming mainstream across all markets and industries.

 

What Are Competitors Looking for Online?

There are a few reasons why more companies are investing in digital competitive intelligence approaches. First, competitors want to know if you’re doing better than them. Depending on your industry, they’ll look for cues that could threaten their market share. This could be your product line, promotional tactics, a new partnership or something as small as new certifications or accolades. Every company wants to be the market leader and if they’re losing their competitive edge, they’re likely to pinpoint what’s holding them back by browsing the web since almost everything ends up online anyway.

The second reason why they’d keep tabs on your company online is to differentiate themselves. There’s no competitive advantage in mimicking others, but rather in doing something unique that’s hard to replicate. Aggressive competitors monitor your website to determine if they can compete through price, service, or new technology, to name a few approaches. When monitoring your company’s website, for instance, they’re watching how you’re communicating value or claim a market position. If they find that your company and other competitors mostly use videos to generate leads, they may want to use videos in a different way or do something totally unique to stand out and take away your leads.

Thirdly, and most importantly, competitors want to predict your next move. Even the smallest bit of data published online can be the key that unlocks what’s happening behind closed doors. Some clues lie on your own website, like a job listing in a new department or a new partnership recently announced. Even employees are capable of accidentally leaving behind clues on social media. Granted companies aren’t looking to hack into your website and start spying, but they do notice breadcrumbs left around the web about your company and use them to figure out where you’re heading.

Now, how exactly are they keeping up with your company’s moves? Every industry and company will focus on different things, but here are a few areas of interest that get the attention from many competitors:

1. Your Website and Marketing Content

This is the starting point for competitors and the more obvious one for anyone savvy enough to watch the competition. They head straight to the source (your website) and audit how your company is positioning itself and communicating value to markets served. They’ll do this by analyzing all of your marketing content (blog articles, white papers, videos, and landing pages) that speak directly to prospects. Doing this also puts them in the shoes of a prospective buyer, so they can compare their marketing efforts with yours to see what they can do better or differently.

Other times, competitors are digging around your site for specific information. More than likely, they’re using tools such as competitive intelligence software to monitor prices, product updates, and even company news like new locations or quarterly earnings. It may seem trivial and even a waste of time, but with every piece of new information they gather, it’s one step closer to figuring out how your company stacks up or what your next move could be.

2. Your Customers’ Feedback

If you’re wondering what your customers are saying online, your competitors most likely know more than you think. Customers often spill the beans on how a company truly operates (no matter if it’s positive or negative). Since they aren’t discreet about offering their opinion and have firsthand experience with your business, competitors will take this into account when trying to assess what you offer and how you offer it.

Depending on your industry, competitors search for reviews in a variety of places. Online tools today can search across the web and collect chatter about your company on forums, social media, and even consumer or partner websites. Twitter has become a popular place for crisp and blunt reviews about companies in 140 characters or less. Look at the tweets below for telecommunications provider Comcast regarding their tech support  and customer service practices:

Comcast’s competitors now have the upper hand on understanding how Comcast interacts with its customers and even how they train their own employees. Having this type of information serves as a guide for Comcast competitors to differentiate themselves and perhaps snap up current unhappy Comcast customers.

Recently, Comcast was under fire when a audio clip of a poor service call went viral. This shows that many aspects of a competitor’s customer experience leak online all the time. More companies are waking up to the idea that there are ways to collect this information and understand how their reputation compares to yours by gathering reviews and comments about each leak.

3. Your Hiring Strategies

It seems insignificant, but your company’s job openings and recent hires are hot spots for competitor snooping. Current job listings and tracking who’s potentially coming aboard can be strong indicators of upcoming strategies or areas of interest for your company. Think about it. When your company is looking to do something new or build on a current success, you need people with specific expertise to make it happen. Competitors are aware of that and will do the digging in order to confirm their suspicions.

Consider recent job openings and hires from technology giant Apple. In June 2014, MacRumors reported that Apple posted several job listings for Siri Language Engineers. These listings had requirements including “strong software development skills” and to be experts in a foreign language, specifically listing Japanese, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian among others.

Additionally, Wired reported in June 2014 how Apple is building a strong team to enhance Siri. They hired a speech technology researcher and former Microsoft employee as a senior director for Siri, as well as speech researchers from Nuance (a speech recognition vendor). With this information, Apple competitors can start putting the pieces together on how Siri is developing, perhaps in time for the release of the iPhone 6 and iOS8.

What Can You Do About It?

If you aren’t already monitoring your competitors, think about this:

According to a new business concept called Speed to Intelligence, companies are becoming increasingly concerned with how quickly they can get and use competitive information to strategize and move quickly. This means your competitors want to automate how they track your every move to get ahead.

Now is the time to level the playing field, so to speak. With new competitor monitoring tools available today, they’re watching what your company is doing around the clock by receiving email alerts or notifications directly to their phone. You can also use these technologies as a guide on where to start looking for competitive information, but first assess which areas for each competitor concern you the most in order to narrow your research and start monitoring what’s online. If you are concerned about a competitor’s product development initiatives for a specific feature, for example, automate how you follow competitors on LinkedIn and other professional job sites.

If you are already monitoring your competitors…

First, give yourself a pat on the back. Second, take the time to assess and optimize how you’re currently managing this process by asking yourself these questions:

• Is your intelligence gathering structured?
• Do you receive automated alerts when things change online?
• Is this process happening consistently?
• Do you spend enough time analyzing the information you’ve gathered?

If you answered “No” for any of these, then your process isn’t as efficient as it could be. In fact, your competitors could be finding gems of insight faster than you can. There are plenty of new tools and digital approaches to automate a lot of your research tasks so you can be proactive and dig even deeper into the competition following the Speed to Intelligence concept.

Competitors are watching you this very second, but that doesn’t mean you can’t watch them to see what they’re up to. What you find may be what you need to keep up with change and potential market disruptors.

By: Emmanuel Trenche

Bron: business2community.com

Asking the right question.

“We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.” – (attributed to) Friedrich Nietszche 

I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes competitive intelligence a unique endeavor, particularly since the activity itself has become widespread among many other positions (see post here). It’s not the analytical techniques – scenarios, war games, SWOT, benchmarking, technology forecasting, etc. are all applied by others in many different positions. It’s not the communication skills – every successful business professional aspires to be better at it. It’s not the process – over the years it seems that every competitive intelligence group has functioned differently based on their own unique situation and clientele.

I’ve come to the (tentative) conclusion that it’s the ability to ask the right question about the issue at hand.

No big deal, you say. Anyone with enough knowledge and understanding of the key variables of the situation can formulate the right question. But often the question you ask is predicated on your assumptions and situational biases. A marketing person will often ask a completely different question from the technical staff and the sales group. Even senior managers have individual assumptions and biases based on what they did that made them successful in the past.

I’m positing that what makes a competitive intelligence staff person different is their ability to step outside of a typical business persona, and determine potential biases and situations where “we’ve always done it that way.” They dispassionately define the key question that needs to be answered, and then identify the range of potential answer(s) that can be pursued.

Sure, you need the skills and techniques to take that question and come up with alternative answers that are relevant to your organization. But you can’t get the right answers until you ask the right questions. And that’s a much more unique and valuable skill.

Source: decisionintel, February 16, 2015