Competitive Intelligence 101: Overview & Step-By-Step Guide (2024)

Niko Pajkovic

“No one went to school for competitive intelligence.” It’s a common saying in the CI community, and it’s true — rarely do compete professionals have formal training in the field.

Because of this, getting started in competitive intel can be challenging. 

And that’s exactly what inspired us to create this guide. In the following sections, we’ll cover everything you need to know about competitive intelligence and walk you through a six-step process for launching your first program.

Let’s get started!

Looking for tactical steps to launch a compete program? Download our nine-step guide 👇

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of legally gathering, analyzing, and leveraging information (intel) about your market, competitors, and buyers to improve your organization’s performance and market position.

When done right, competitive intelligence helps companies spot upcoming opportunities, anticipate market shifts, and stay ahead of competitors.

What is Competitive Enablement Then?

Competitive enablement takes competitive intelligence one step further. It’s about transforming raw competitive intel into actionable insights and delivering them to the right people at the right time.

Unlike traditional CI practices, which can result in static, outdated reports, competitive enablement focuses on producing dynamic competitive information that can be leveraged by your entire organization. 

Because of this, competitive enablement involves an ongoing combination of:

• Intelligence gathering: Collecting and analyzing up-to-date competitive information from multiple sources.
• Insight creation: Translating raw data into actionable guidance, often in the form of competitive content. 
• Insight distribution: Delivering these insights to the right people, in the right format, at the right time.

Why is Competitive Intelligence Important Today?

Competitive intelligence has never been more important than it is today. Corporate competition is intensifying, customer expectations are soaring, and technological advancements — namely those in AI — are lowering barriers to entry across nearly every industry.

According to Entrepreneur.com, approximately 250,000 new business applications are submitted monthly in the U.S. alone!

Because of this, business leaders are increasingly turning to competitive intelligence to navigate these changes.

Competitive intelligence can help your organization:

1. Make Better Strategic Decisions: CI enables you to make strategic decisions based on real market/competitor insights, eliminating guesswork in many areas.
   
2. Help Sales Close More Deals: CI equips your sales team with the information they need to compete more effectively and close more revenue.
   
3. Understand Your Market Position: CI reveals how buyers perceive your unique value compared to competitors, enabling more effective positioning and messaging strategies.
   
4. Develop Differentiated GTM strategies: CI helps you develop and execute go-to-market strategies that stand out from competitors, giving you a unique edge in the market.
   
5. Uncover New Market Opportunities: CI will help you spot whitespace opportunities before your competitors do.
   
6. Navigate Industry Changes: CI allows you to anticipate and prepare for market disruptions before they impact your business.
   
7. Stay Ahead of Competitors: CI allows you to develop proactive, targeted responses to your competitor’s strategies. 

Visual learner? Check out nine-step guide to launching a competitive intel program below 👇

What’s the Difference Between Competitive Intelligence, Competitor Intelligence, and Market Intelligence? 

Before we dive deeper into this guide, let’s distinguish between three commonly confused terms in business intelligence:

• Competitor Intelligence: This area focuses exclusively on competitive analysis between rival firms. It’s about investigating what your direct competitors are up to.
  
• Market Intelligence: This area covers analysis of overall market trends, customer behaviors, and industry dynamics. It’s about zooming out to understand your market as a whole.
  
• Competitive Intelligence: This approach combines both competitor and market intelligence to examine your entire competitive landscape holistically.

Who is Responsible for ‘Doing’ Competitive Intelligence

Without a doubt, competitive intelligence is a team sport, but every team needs a captain. In this case, that’d be one of the following:

Dedicated Competitive Intelligence Team: A specialized CI team may lead the charge. For example, at Klue, we have a dedicated Competitive Intelligence Manager, Hunter Sones, who coordinates our overall CI efforts.

Product Marketing: When there’s no dedicated CI team, the responsibility often falls to product marketing. A recent report by the Product Marketing Alliance found that 78.6% of surveyed companies said that CI is handled exclusively by their product marketers. 

Sales and Sales Enablement: While not usually the main owners, sales and sales enablement teams play an important role in the CI process. They translate insights into actionable sales tools, ensuring it is distributed effectively amongst their team. 

Are There Different Types of Competitive Intelligence?

At Klue, we use a model called the Four Layers of Competitive Intel. Each layer features its own type of competitive information. When stacked together, these layers combine to create high-quality competitive insights about a rival company. Let’s break down each layer:

1. Foundational Intel: This layer involves gathering publicly available information about your competitor found via websites, monitoring alerts, marketing materials, and public financial data. This layer answers questions like:
   1. Who is your competitor’s ICP?
   2. What products and features do they offer?
      

2. Derived Intel: This layer is about contextualizing competitor information against your own business and industry. It involves assessing how your product compares to a competitor’s, as well as sourcing industry information through press releases, interviews, and other documents. This layer answers questions such as:
   1. How do they position themselves in the market?
   2. What’s their go-to-market strategy?
      
3. Critical Intel: This layer involves packaging competitor information so that it can leveraged as a tool by your organization. Packaged formats can include battlecards, intel digests, Slack channels, and more. This layer addresses questions like:
   1. What are this competitor’s strengths and weaknesses?
   2. What objections do we commonly face when competing against them?
      
4. Experienced Intel: This layer is about capturing competitive information from real-world interactions your reps are having with buyers, including win-loss interviews and sales interactions. This layer provides answers to questions like:
   1. Why are we winning or losing deals against this competitor?
   2. What objections related to their competitors are coming up?

Getting Started: How to Launch a Competitive Intelligence Program 

While competitive intel can benefit many areas of your business, it should start by supporting revenue teams, particularly sales. A well-structured CI program will provide your sales team with the insights they need to win more deals and close more revenue.

To build a competitive intelligence program that delivers consistent value and directly impacts your bottom line, follow these six steps.

Step 1: Get Leadership Buy In

Before you can launch an official competitive intelligence program, you will need to secure leadership buy-in.

In our experience, leadership teams care a lot about their competitors, but they may not see the immediate value of a structured competitive intelligence program. 

To address this challenge and gain sponsorship for your program, here’s what we recommend:

• Define clear objectives for your program and make sure they align with organizational priorities. Your competitive intelligence program should serve as an accelerant for your business objectives — especially those prioritized by revenue leaders.
  
• Next, develop a 30-60-90 day rollout plan with clear timelines and measurable milestones that tie directly to these priorities.
  

Whether you’re expanding into a new region, targeting a new ICP, or looking to improve customer retention, competitive intelligence can help you achieve these things more efficiently. Make this crystal clear in your proposal!

Listen to how Andy McCotter-Bicknell launched his competitive intelligence function at ClickUp👇

Step 2: Develop a Competitive Intelligence Strategy

With buy-in secured, you’ll need to build on your initial roll-out plan and create a strategy. Here are two things you can do to get started:

1. Analyze your CRM data to prioritize competitors
2. Conduct stakeholder interviews for qualitative insights

Let’s dive into each. 

Analyze your CRM data to prioritize competitors

To create an effective competitive intelligence strategy, you’ll need to first prioritize which types of competitors to focus on. 

Don’t fall into the trap of prioritizing competitors simply because they’re mentioned frequently in meetings and Slack channels. 

Instead, take a data-first approach, and start with competitors that have the greatest impact on your bottom line. 

Your CRM data is the best place to find this information. Here’s how we recommend approaching this:

1. Calculate your baseline competitive win rate across all competitors
2. Find out which competitors appear most in deals
3. Calculate your win rate against them [wins/loses*100]
4. Look at the ACV of these deals to identify which competitors impact revenue most
5. Keep tabs on competitors making more or fewer appearances quarter-over-quarter

By focusing on competitors that directly impact your revenue, you’ll address deals that are at stake right now. This approach will provide immediate support to your sales team while fast-tracking the positive impact your program will have on revenue.

Understanding which competitors are cutting into your potential revenue is the first step to closing your competitive revenue gap and focusing your CI efforts effectively.

To automate this process, consider using a competitive intelligence tool like Klue’s Threat Analysis feature. This tool will provide automatic details on win rates and revenue lost to specific competitors, helping you prioritize your efforts for maximum ROI. 

Watch a quick demo of Klue’s threat analysis tool below 👇

Conduct stakeholder interviews for qualitative insights

While CRM data will help you prioritize competitors, stakeholder interviews will provide you with important context and direction. Here’s how we recommend approaching this:

• Interview at least 10 stakeholders from various departments and seniority levels within your company
• Ask them directly where they think your CI efforts should focus
• Gather insights on which competitors they see as the biggest threats
• Address overlooked competitors or common FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) issues
• Finally, leverage these interviews by looking for quick-win opportunities that align with the insights gained from your CRM analysis. 

Learn about the tactics Tracy Berry uses to launch a compete program in 90 days

Step 3. Gather Competitive Intelligence

Now that you’ve prioritized your competitors and defined your strategy, it’s time to start gathering competitive intelligence. There are two main types of intel you’ll be collecting:

External Intelligence: This is publicly available information you can find online. Key sources include:

• Review websites like G2 and Capterra
• Social media and content marketing
• Competitor websites (product pages, pricing, support threads)
• Analyst reports & briefings

While external data is easily accessible, don’t fall into the trap of thinking a quick Google search is enough. 

You’re going to want to dig deep into your competitor’s websites, social channels, and reviews, and ideally set up a monitoring system. Many teams use Google Alerts for this. However, we recommend using a more sophisticated alert system like the one offered by Klue.

In addition, Klue offers a Review Insights feature that eliminates the manual work associated with analyzing competitor reviews. 

Internal Intelligence: Internal intelligence is the information that comes from within your own company. This includes:

• Sales team feedback from customer calls
• Call recording software
• Prospecting emails competitors send to your clients
• Company Slack/teams competitive intel channel 
• Win-loss interviews

Without a doubt, internal data will provide you with the juiciest qualitative insights about your competitors – tough product feedback, objections your reps face day-to-day, and the real reasons why you’re losing or winning deals.

Listen to Hunter Sones explain how he’s launching win-loss at Klue👇

Step 4. Organize and Analyze Your Intel

Congrats! You’ve officially gathered a mountain of competitive intelligence. Now it’s time to organize and analyze it so you can separate the signal from the noise. 

Organize:

1. Centralize your intel: Use dedicated competitive intelligence software to store all your competitive information in one place or set up a well-structured spreadsheet to house all your intel. 
2. Categorize and tag: Implement a system to categorize intel by competitor, product, or market segment for easy retrieval.
3. Triage incoming intel: Use tools like Klue’s Triage Mode to quickly review and prioritize new information as it comes in.
4. Maintain data hygiene: Regularly review and update your intel to ensure it stays current and relevant.

Analyze:

1. Extract key insights: Focus only on information that directly impacts the strategic objectives you laid out in Step 1. 
2. Create competitor snapshots: Develop concise, comprehensive overviews of each key competitor, summarizing their strengths, weaknesses, and market position.
3. Dig into your win-loss data: Analyze your win-loss information to understand why your sales team is actually winning and losing deals. 

Step 5. Turn Insights Into Action

This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s time to transform your intel into actionable insights that teams can readily use and apply in their day-to-day work.

Below are our three favorite formats for delivering competitive intel: 

Battlecards 

Sales battlecards are concise, easily digestible summaries of competitive information that sales reps can quickly reference during calls or meetings. 

Here’s how you can get started:

• Start with your top competitor
• Create three essential cards: Why We Win, Quick Dismiss, and Objection Handling (for fillable templates of these click here)
• Use the Fact, Impact, Act Framework of the COMP-ACT Framework to structure your cards for maximum effectiveness. 
• Test your first card with a pilot group of sellers before wider distribution

Competitive Intelligence Slack/Teams Channel

Setting up a dedicated Slack or Teams channel will allow you to create a real-time hub for sharing and discussing competitive insights across your organization.

Here’s how to implement it:

• Create a #competitiveintel channel in your messaging platform
• Assign the management of this channel to your CI manager or product marketing team
• If you’re using Klue, automate this process by using our Slack integration

Competitive Intelligence Newsletter

A competitive intelligence newsletter helps synthesize key insights and ensures important information doesn’t get lost in the day-to-day communications noise. Think of it as your weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly roundup of all the competitive intelligence gathering you’ve done.

How to create an effective newsletter:

• Choose a consistent schedule (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly)
• Highlight key competitive intel gathered during the period
• Provide your analysis on why specific insights matter
• Keep the tone engaging and avoid dry, corporate language
• Keep your subject lines short and to the point!

Klue’s Josh Gladstone breaks down how to create a top-notch competitive intel newsletter👇

Step 6: Measure the Competitive Intelligence Metrics that Matter

Launching your competitive intelligence program is just the beginning. To ensure its ongoing success and demonstrate its value, you need to consistently track, analyze, and report on competitive intelligence metrics and KPIs.

While specific metrics may vary depending on your company’s goals and industry, here are some essential areas to focus on:

1. Content adoption: How often are your battlecards and other CI materials being accessed and used?
2. Competitive win rates: Are you winning more deals against specific competitors over time?
3. Competitive confidence: How confident do your sales reps feel when going up against competitors?
4. Revenue impact: Can you attribute increased revenue to your CI efforts?
5. Time savings: How much time are teams saving by having readily available competitive intel?

Remember, the goal is to demonstrate the tangible impact of your CI program on your organization’s bottom line. Regularly reviewing these metrics will help you refine your approach and justify the value of your competitive intelligence efforts to leadership.

Happy competing!

Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this guide.

But if you take away one thing, let it be this: effective competitive intelligence isn’t a one-off task — it’s a systematic and ongoing process that should be embedded in your company’s DNA.

By implementing a competitive intelligence strategy, you’re not just keeping tabs on your competitors. You’re:

• Enabling your sales team to win more deals
• Closing your competitive revenue gap
• Gaining buyer insights into the perceived value of your product 
• Developing differentiated go-to-market activities 
• Staying ahead of market trends
• Making data-driven decisions that drive your business forward

To truly leverage the power of CI, consider investing in competitive intelligence tools, like those offered by Klue. 

With Klue, you can:

• Automatically track competitors and gather intel from thousands of sources
• Organize and analyze intel from one centralized hub
• Create, manage, and distribute sales battlecards
• Measure the impact of CI on your win rates and revenue

Oh – and if you want to start building your competitive intelligence program right away, check out our free resource below👇

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