What can you use Competitive Intelligence for?

Competitive Intelligence sounds interesting but what can you use it for?

There are many reasons for Competitive Intelligence and I am currently adding more to my portfolio but there are a number of basic uses that may get you thinking.

Competitive Intelligence is a vital tool when dealing with Business Development, Scenario Planning, Mergers and Acquisitions, Intellectual Property, Corporate Governance, recruitment and strategic business wide long term decisions. Drilling down to greater detail:

Your Competitors Product or Service

One of the simplest tasks Competitive Intelligence can perform is to take a look at your competitor’s service provision. Buy their service (or get a Competitive Intelligence Firm to do it for you) and see how it works.

• How is it put together?

• How was it priced?

• What was the quality of their product/service?

• What was the after sales support like?

• How did the sales team deal with you?

• What were the Terms of Business?

• How were you treated in reception?

By putting yourself in their shoes and answering these and other questions you can define your competitor’s strengths and weakness. From here you can replicate their best ideas, incorporating strengths and look to exploit the weaknesses.

Business Development and Marketing

Look at your structure and organisation. Where can Competitive Intelligence help identify new areas to secure business and influence client service and retention? A close analysis should uncover common threads among types of clients and industries represented.

How long have your clients been working with you? What’s happening in your clients industry? Do you know and understand your rivals client base?

Is anyone within your business targeting what the rivals across the street are doing? That last rumour or piece in the press about a rivals client; what did you do about it?

Is the entrepreneur that has the ear of the local business editor, really doing what he says he is and is his story he portrays the truth?  Is it worth doing business with him?

By answering questions such as how that demand is being met today, by whom, how satisfied buyers are with the current providers and how credible you are in a new or existing product / service will give you a greater chance of success or avoidance of a big mistake.

Lastly, look within your business to draw parallels among each department working on business development. The information your business developers source during a networking event can be very valuable, but only if it is accessible in a useable format, analysed and acted on.

You can develop system where intelligence assists your business developers in the preparation for business development meetings with potential clients from a basic briefing report to ongoing analysis.

Competitive Intelligence can help you find potential clients in the first place and more importantly allow you to understand the client, giving you a greater chance of winning the deal and keeping them happy for years to come.

The better the information provided by Competitive Intelligence the more chance of cross selling to existing clients.

When replying to proposals Competitive Intelligence can help you understand why the client has asked certain questions, where their pain really is and what they are really looking for in your services.

Always know your business’s and your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. This information is helpful in responding to potential new business.

Using Competitive Intelligence, you can anticipate which competitors are also vying for the business, how you compare, and how best to position your strengths and exploit the others’ weaknesses.

Does your main rival win business on price or quality of service? What are their customer services skills like? Do their clients like them and if so why?

Scenario planning

Do you know what your marketplace will look like in three years, five years, ten years?

• Who foresaw a legal service offered by Tesco’s?

• Who thought Apple’s Ipod would remove the need for CD singles?

They did; and yes; they have Competitive Intelligence functions.

No one knows for sure, but by going through a planning exercise, you may know more than you realise.

With a Competitive Intelligence function, you can predict which scenarios are expected to unfold and then prepared for a response.

By narrowing potential outcomes and building plans for them now, you can be better prepared for the impact on future business. Within scenario planning the basic questions you should consider:

• What will the future of your industry look like in 5 to 10 years? Who will be the key players and influencers? Which industry could offer a substitute service?

• What actions / positions, taken now, would increase your chances of success in the majority of these scenarios?

• What early warning would signal when / if each of these possible futures were coming true?

• What other actions positions should you take as soon as possible when it looks like one of these scenarios is coming true?

Mergers and Acquisitions

Competitive Intelligence cannot stop mergers between two competitors from taking place but it is possible that you may know beforehand and will have already determined what to do about it with a focussed and prepared mind.

Competitive Intelligence can assist you to identify, encourage and screen potential acquisition candidates and investment opportunities especially in times of uncertainty.

Most acquiring business’s often seek to reduce costs, spread investment risk, accelerate growth while focussing on product lines, bottom line profit and revenue, but without an Intelligence ability less consideration is given to critical scientific, technical, research and development aspects of the companies they are trying to purchase.

Competitive Intelligence can assist with this as well as determine trends, warning of potential problems, assess strategic and cultural fit across the associated companies, identify potential predators, rival bidders, examine the regulatory climate by surveying the business landscape, analysing and ranking the players in the game.

It can also help when it comes to strategic alliances by assisting in defining the value proposition as well as identifying tangible and intangible assets.

Intellectual Property

Integrating Competitive Intelligence into a product development cycle can provide guidance, direction strategies and decisions.

Competitive Intelligence and due diligence helps streamline the Research and Development process by identifying areas that deserve resources and attention, aligning efforts with your clients corporate strategy, uncover competitor activity that can impact on the success of a patent and product development.

Corporate Governance

Corporations are encouraged to monitor their processes and repair them when things go wrong.

Most issues surrounding corporate governance are not usually associated with a crisis situation or indeed actual ethics but more to do with data management.

Competitive Intelligence allows you to establish a strategic transparency within organisations offering safe guards against unethical, questionable or otherwise poor actions and decisions.

Competitive Intelligence methods and mechanisms can empower the senior team to access critical independent information and analysis to view the external market place.

Competitive Intelligence helps them educate the firm and interpret signals and make timely and rational decisions.

New service or regional office

Do you move into new geographical markets or a new business arena, with the introduction of a new service or product? Competitive Intelligence can assist you in making the right decisions by answer questions like:

• Who are the rivals you will be are facing?

• How are the key individuals to approach

• What are their strategies?

• What relationships you will need to develop?

• How can you counter these strategies?

Competitive Intelligence can also anticipate the moves of your rivals into new market segments and most importantly the impact such moves may have on your customers base.

Appointment of a new team member

You are seeking a new recruit. Where do you look? You may not have a trusted Search Specialist in the area and if you use your usual one, they may not know the people in the area, so they can not guarantee success and unless you are lucky it will take at least 3 months to find the “right” person.

The “right” person could be the person that presents themselves better than the other candidates at an interview.

Competitive Intelligence can help in your recruitment strategies by monitoring who the best practitioners are, where they are and what it may take to get them in your team. At the very least when a Search Specialist presents you with a list of possible candidates you may have some background on them already.

I hope this article has given you a taster of what you could do with Competitive Intelligence.

I am very happy to discuss, talk about this subject.

Graeme Dixon, Director of www.Cast:csi.co.uk, a Professional Recruitment company specialising in MBA level placements Professional Services Director of www.aimstrategic.com, one of the UK’s premier Competitive Intelligence practitioners.  Midlands Chairman of the Association of MBAs, Graeme has nearly 10 years Military Intelligence and 14 years Professional Recruitment and Headhunting experience.