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This is the transcription from our recent webinar on competitive intelligence emerging trends “How CI Programs Are Shifting During the Downturn”. Which you can watch on-demand here.
In business, it’s a battle. And for the next few months, maybe even year, the battle is going to be tougher than ever. As a Competitive Intelligence platform, we tend to gravitate to war-time tactics for inspiration.
When organizations are strapped for resources, there are fewer deals to be had and competitors are shifting their strategies – knowledge can have the most impact. This is when competitive intelligence is needed most.
There is a distinct difference between peace-time Competitive Intelligence and War-Time Competitive Intelligence.
The notion of competition is going to expand, it is not necessarily going to be the key competitors that you are used to competing with, you are going to be competing with everyone else who is looking to expand their market and looking for new avenues of sales.
For Competitive Intelligence teams, this is a really important time to build your program correctly so that you’re setting yourself up to be successful when these battles come.
What we’re seeing across a large number of our customers is that CI teams are shifting between strategic and tactical intelligence. Teams that were primarily focused on the tactical approach of serving sales teams with battlecards are now shifting to more strategic efforts. They are capturing information, changes to the market landscapes, and information on customers and prospects. Knowing about competitors isn’t enough anymore, it’s about understanding the full systems that are affecting the business.
We must know our competitors, customers, and the market. All are necessary.
This is critical for your program to add value across the entire organization. And it involves pulling in information from every front; sales team with prospects, CS team with customers, and what’s happening in the broad market. To enable your entire org, you need to be connected and sourcing intel from your entire org.
How you pull in that information is also really important. We’ve seen a lot PMM and CI teams shift to become a single-source of truth for insights beyond competitive: including COVID-19 impact, customer & prospect insights
Here are some specific examples of what our customers are trying, as well as ourselves.
On the customer side, we’ve seen new topic boards created. Mostly to cover overall market changes.
People are spending efforts tracking, collecting, and centralizing information on the market as a whole, not just competitors. This shift also requires new tactics to capture intel from the field. This is the major differentiation. If you rely solely on your old ways of collecting data, you will miss the things you don’t know.
A new Competitive Intelligence trend emerging from COVID-19 is the need to track which of your competitors will still be operating. Merger & Acquisition boards are being used to track who’s being bought, consolidated, or is a prime target for acquisition.
Competitive Intelligence teams are also trying new tactics to collect intel from the field. They’re the most direct path to learn exactly how your competitors are responding to COVID-19 and whether they are offering discounts or new services. A major focus is being made to capture field data more efficiently.
Enable teams to contribute directly and create content. Some companies are encouraging salespeople to send any information (no matter what) which gets put into a ‘rumor lane’. This way, it remains unverified but it allows the CI team to get a better understanding of what the field is hearing and allows them to get a pulse on their competitors. Sometimes rumors turn out to be true.
It seems many PMM and CI teams have been providing extra messaging support to sales in order to navigate communications as well. We have all seen a tone-deaf email come through that inevitably becomes an example of “what not to say”.
You can also learn a lot by listening to how competitors are messaging about COVID-19, the good, the bad, and the ugly. This knowledge can inform your own messaging efforts. We are seeing CI teams spending time to build out messaging documentation and messaging support for their sales teams to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Within our own organization, we use this board to capture how COVID-19 is directly affecting our market.
We create a new card each week that captures what our salespeople are hearing from prospects and what our support teams are hearing from customers. We then analyze these on a weekly basis to see the changes that are happening over time to track trends and adapt accordingly. As the market changes, so do we.
Our salespeople have the first point of contact for hearing what your competitors are doing, what they are saying, what services they are offering, what kind of discounts they are offering so a huge focus on how we can collect information from the field more effectively.
The goal of a growing Competitive Intelligence program is to drive the most value across the organization as possible. Right now, that means scaling competitive support to all the teams that need it.
This gets particularly tricky in a remote-only world. The in-person training and shoulder taps aren’t happening and this results in collaboration gaps and costly loss of tribal knowledge. What you need is to provide a systematic way to enable all internal and partner teams. Easy right?
The good news is this remote environment has also resulted in a new appetite for CI across all teams and people want to be connected and involved. Scaling insights remotely are about engaging just as much as they are about distributing. You can leverage this interest to work in your favor.
One of the most common ways we have seen product marketers and CI professionals putting this into practice is the increased use of intel digests as a communications tool to keep the organizations up to speed on market changes. CI teams are building newsletters for different stakeholders within their organization based on what they would find useful. Like other competitive intelligence trends emerging, this serves to engage CI with the entire organization.
An example we have seen from our clients, and something we have put into practice ourselves is the development of CI Committees.
The purpose of this is two-fold. It brings together key leaders from across the organization to source intel from a broader set of teams. It also encourages engagement and usage of CI content. Nurturing the relationship with your stakeholders creates a trickle-down effect.
See what Gartner recently published on the topic of the CI committee.
Sales teams are still being enabled with competitive content. That’s not going to change. And under the circumstances, it’s likely deals are going to get more competitive. This means that reps need to outperform their competitors. Every. Single. Time. We must give Sales the right ammo to win.
What we’ve seen is that Competitive Intelligence teams are trying to become more strategic in HOW they enable their salesforce.
Pipelines have been wiped. Because of this, Sales teams need to close a higher rate of deals to hit quota.
Data can be used to inform which competitors are the biggest threat to pipeline – what content should be prioritized, and where CI teams can be proactive about enabling their sales teams rather than reactively.
Sales impact analysis or competitive threat analysis helps you to understand which competitors are the biggest threat not just by deal volume but also revenue.
Understanding where curators are spending time building content versus what salespeople are actually consuming is huge. Look at where your consumers are spending their time in terms of compete content/what they are searching for and compare that to the amount of time spent to create it. If you see heavily used content that hasn’t been updated –> clear sign that you need to and vice versa.
Many of the competitive intelligence trends emerging point to the importance of enabling support teams. Retention is becoming one of the most important growth strategies for subscription businesses. Customer Success team responsibilities company to company can be very different. Some CS teams own the customer relationship, some own the commercial responsibility of the renewal and/or upsell. Regardless of where CS sits and to whom it reports, they are typically the main point of contact for a customer. This also means they are the first line of defense to competitor attacks.
Given their relationship with clients, your Customer Success teams are the most likely to be put on the spot. They are also the best positioned to pick up signals on when a competitor has been in contact.
What we’re seeing is customers repurposing their top of pyramid competitive content built for sales. What we mean by ‘top of pyramid content” is explained by our Super Theoretical Sales Battlecard Framework.
Enablement content at the top of the pyramid is the first step to beating a competitor, it’s about how to identify when a competitor is in play. At the bottom are technical details, feature by feature comparison.
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Here are 13 Examples of Competitive Intelligence Trends Emerging from COVID-19.
Access the full recording of this webinar hosted by our Director of Marketing, Katie Berg, and VP of Product Marketing, Vincent Lo. Watch “How Competitive Intelligence Programs are Shifting During the Downturn”.
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