Trends in Competitive Intelligence Pt. 2

Tim Rhodes

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others. Bill Gates

Successful competitive analysis programs are cross-functional. That collaboration is critical to a CI process that is comprehensive, efficient, secure and—most importantly—delivers value: competing product insights to development teams; go-to-market strategy to marketing; how-to-sell against to sales and market insights to management. Everybody benefits from an integrated CI program. It requires dedication, drives efficiency and powers innovation. 

Building a company culture that includes competitive intelligence doesn’t happen overnight. Best-in-class CI programs have processes in place for collecting and sharing intelligence. While inspiration often comes from one champion, the key to building a company culture that emphasizes CI is a strong leadership commitment.

Dedicated resources and tools
Competitive analysis is not a one-of-many task, something tossed off in response to perceived threat or a desperate pre-pitch scramble. I’m a strong proponent of changing titles internally from “competitive intelligence” manager/director that includes either “competitive strategy” or “competitive advantage” language. CI analysts are increasingly tasked with contributing to the development of strategy to create a competitive advantage, not just in product positioning and sales enablement but also in sales messaging, content creation, go-to-market strategy and overall sales strategy.

Product Marketers with a CI mandate must have the time and the tools required to make their efforts meaningful. Intel collection cannot rely on search and alerts. If it is to have value, competitive intelligence cannot be hidden in stale wikis. If your team doesn’t have the intel when they need, it doesn’t matter how good it is—your efforts are wasted and the deal lost. That’s a damaging outcome for morale and the bottom line. The content you create—competitive battlecards, sell-against guides or competitive white papers—must be available and reliable anywhere, all the time. 

Dedicated process
Version control is also a significant problem when the process relies on Word docs, PowerPoint decks and SharePoint repositories, official or not. Ad hoc sites are created then fail to get updated with more current versions as the original content creator may not even know that these repositories exist. At best, this confusion results in numerous email inquiries searching for the current content; at worst, it means trust is irrevocably broken when sales reps use outdated (and potentially inaccurate) content and suffer competitive losses.

A good CI process builds in a secure way to collect, store and share competitive assets. All you have to do is Google “battlecards” and the word “confidential” and you will see firsthand where battlecards that were meant to be internal have been posted to the open internet. 

Building a powerful CI program takes time, commitment and the right tools; but mostly, it takes collaboration. There is so much information swirling around that to collect what’s relevant, connect it to the abundant internal insights you already have and harness the power of all of it in a useable way, takes the power of the awesome people on your team. Give them the tools to share and crowdsource, collaborate and connect the dots and you’ll win. Set up dedicated CI channel in Slack or Yammer, schedule regular CI sharing sessions between departments, especially sales and account teams and reward CI wins. Cultivate the culture and you will see measurable results.  

Blog > Competitive Enablement