You can now download the slides or the recording of our recent webinar: Accelerating Competitive Intelligence Collection: Mining Web Metrics    

What makes VOTC (Voice of the Competitor) research different than a typical Win-Loss study? Why is your typical Win-Loss study missing as much as 50% of the insights that you need to grow and find new opportunities? Simply put, the target of the research effort.  By moving the focus from you to the competitive landscape, VOTC helps you understand: If your Dead No Decisions are really a loss to a competitor. Why you weren’t “invited to a deal” that you should have been. Whether you are winning or losing in the first 57% of the modern sales cycle. Whether your partners are the key to your success or your failure. Where competitors have found new opportunity with a product like yours. If you would like to learn a bit more about how we tackle VOTC projects, or even see an example, drop us an email at info@cascadeinsights.com. In the meantime download your own copy of Voice of the Competitor (VOTC) to gain a better understanding of how VOTC research is different.  

We’ve launched another Inbox Education Series.  This time focused on understanding the differences between VOC and VOCC research. Each Inbox Education Series is focused on a set of questions that competitive intelligence and market intelligence professionals have on a regular basis. Over the span of a few weeks, each series below will educate you, via email, on various ways to take better advantage of a given set of competitive intelligence or market intelligence tools. You can sign up here –     

Over the last few months we’ve been putting together a few educational series on various aspects of Competitive Intelligence and Market Intelligence collection. Over the span of a few weeks, each series below will educate you on various ways to take better advantage of Google Trends, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Here they are. Going from Google Trends to Competitive and Market Insights Mining Twitter: Going from Tweets to Insights 3 ways to turn LinkedIn into a Competitive Intelligence and Market Intelligence database Now go ahead and sign up!

Given we’ve recently moved into 2014 I thought I would pass along what some of our most popular competitive intelligence and market intelligence content was from last year – 2013. Ordered by Page Views: Competitive Intelligence Analysis with Porter’s Five Forces The “Competitive Intel” Podcast: Episode 47: Interview – David Nixon – Sr. Director Competitive Intelligence – Oracle Mining Indeed for Competitor or Market Momentum The “Competitive Intel” Podcast: Episode 48: ERRC Framework – Blue Ocean Strategy Four Signs of Stick Fetching vs. Competitive Intelligence Tip #3 on Gathering Competitive Intelligence on Private Companies – Dig Deeper The “Competitive Intel” Podcast: Episode #43: Mining LinkedIn for Competitive and Market Insights The “Competitive Intel” Podcast: Episode #31: Elicitation vs. Interviewing Going Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence – now in it’s 4th edition The “Competitive Intel” Podcast: Episode #45: Plugging Frameworks together to generate better analysis Thanks to everyone for a prosperous 2013.  Wishing you and yours the very best in 2014.

Voice of the Competitor’s – Customer (VOCC) – Research You need to understand why they bought from the competitor. And why they might again. Voice of the Competitor’s – Partners (VOCP) – Research You need to understand why partners bond with the competitor and why they choose that relationship over you. Voice of the Competitor’s – Influencers (VOCI) – Research You need to understand why they are so interested in promoting another company’s products.  

Play here.

Slides here.  

Voice of the Competitor (VOTC) – Research  To learn more: Sign up for a 3 part, email based series on VOTC, or download our short eBook on VOTC research. What does it mean to listen to the voice of the competitor’s customer? In short it means conducting Voice of the Competitor (VOTC) research. By contrast, Voice of the Customer (VOC) research is well known in market research circles. In fact, VOC research has launched many a focus group or survey over the past few decades. VOTC research however is strongly correlated with competitive intelligence and market intelligence efforts. To understand how VOTC research can provide a necessary counterweight to VOC efforts we need to compare each approach. VOC: Interactions are focused on current customers Research outcomes are focused purely on identifying enhancements to an existing solution or product – from the perspective of current customers alone. VOTC: Focused on the competitor’s customers (VOCC), partners (VOCP), influencers (VOCI), and even co-opetitors. Research outcomes are focused on identifying disruptions and competing solutions before it’s too late. What makes VOTC different than VOC? Simply put, the target of the research effort. In fact, the target in this case is centered on those very things that can harm your company’s long-term survival prospects. Market Disruptions Technological Shifts Commoditization of Existing Product and Service Lines Societal and Economic Shifts Globalization And last but not least: Competitor Activity and Future Investments If you would like to learn a bit more about how we tackle VOTC projects, or even see an example, drop us an email at info@cascadeinsights.com. We’ll be happy to chat.  

Recorded on December 10th, 2013. You can play the recording here.

You can download the deck here.

Cascade Insights will be hosting two competitive intelligence and market intelligence webinars in December. The first is on December 10th at 10am – Mining Twitter: Getting from Tweets to Insights The second is on December 17th at 10am – Accelerating Intelligence Collection: Mining Web Based Communities   Each runs 20 minutes with 10 minutes for Q/A.

As presented on 11/21/2013. Download the presentation here.  

I travel quite a bit given what we do, and in general I am on a plane at least once a week. Hence I get somewhat of a “bird’s eye” view of the tech that finds itself into the hands of my seat mates on a regular basis. With the above in mind let me provide a brief history of “Tech in the Air” since 2000: 2000 to 2005 Laptops were always pushed back into laptop bags half way through a flight from PDX to BOS.  Simply because the batteries only lasted 3 hours.  So much for “all day battery life” back then. 2005 to 2010  Laptops made it through most of the flight, but only if you set the brightness at Level 1. 2010/11  Tablets begin to appear.  First only with business users….And battery life was rarely an issue 2012/13 Tablets appear in the hands of a number of my seat mates…And not just in the hands of business users, but in the hands of families that are going to Disney World. Now let us pause for a moment.  What’s happening this month? Oh that’s right – Gate to Gate device usage becomes a reality, unless of course you are holding a laptop.  And gate to gate only works if you are holding a smartphone or a tablet. So what have I seen on the 4 flights I’ve been on since the FAA made the change? Already, many more tablets, and a lot fewer laptops. In short, while the jury is still out, and I’m sure someone is compiling a study on this trend as I write this, early signs indicate that…. It’s amazing how much power 40 minutes can hold when you are deciding what to put in your “laptop bag” before you leave for the airport.

Recruitem is a fantastic tool that makes it brain dead simple to build X-Ray Queries that target Google+, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. What’s an X-Ray Query you ask?   X-Ray Queries are complicated Google Search Queries – like the following: “”competitive intelligence” “mountain view” “ca”-intitle:”profiles” -inurl:”dir/ ” site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/” And these queries produce output like the following: Why should I care? First off, unless you have a “high-end” LinkedIn account such as LinkedIn Recruiter, what you see of the LinkedIn universe is going to be limited.   For example with a “Basic” LinkedIn account you are only going to be allowed to see full profile data for 2nd degree connections and not 3rd.   To illustrate the importance of this, my connection graph on LinkedIn currently connects me to 1,682 people as 1st degree connections but up to 17m+ people as 3rd degree connections. Secondly, you can search for certain things a bit more effectively using this method.   For example searching based on educational level is relatively straight forward with this tool.  Whereas with LinkedIn’s standard search you aren’t provide with educational level as a standard search filter and this data has to be merely thrown in as a keyword search with mixed results. Third, if you have a “Basic” LinkedIn account you are limited by the number of profiles that you can see – at the time of this writing – 100. But is there more? Personally we don’t think that you should limit your use of open source intelligence, and in particular use of LinkedIn, merely because you don’t want to “pay the freight” of a LinkedIn Recruiter or Premium level account.  For example we give our analysts LinkedIn recruiter accounts and we think you should as well. But we do know that at times people are ...

MillionShort provides an interesting perspective on a typical search query. With MillionShort you can quickly exclude the top 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, or 1 million sites that match your search query. Give it a spin and take the back road with your next search query.  You might be surprised what you find along the way. By: Sean Campbell Scott Swigart

We recently launched a email based educational series focused on Twitter. In the three part series – delivered directly to your inbox – you’ll learn how to more quickly generate market and competitive intelligence insights from Twitter. You can sign up here.

As presented on 11/13/2013. Download the presentation here.

We think of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) as the technical centers of gravity in companies, and they are. But other business leadership roles are becoming increasingly technical. A simple analysis of current job postings shows the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Vice President of Sales are now required to be the next most tech literate in the C-Suite.   How do we know? Job sites like Indeed.com aggregate millions of job postings from thousands of sources. We looked at the intersection between a role (CMO) and a set of technologies (business intelligence, cloud, saas, mobile, crm, erp, social media, technology, etc) to determine, “per capita” what percentage of job posting for a C-Level role require technical knowledge and capabilities, resulting in the following matrix:   It’s no surprise that CTO and CIO rank so high. After all, technology is their reasons for existence. What’s maybe less appreciated is how tech savvy sales and marketing leaders are now expected to be.

We recently launched a email based educational series focused on LinkedIn. In the three part series – delivered directly to your inbox – you’ll learn how to turn LinkedIn into a market and competitive intelligence database. You can sign up here.

A number of companies focus on competitor research.  But how do you tackle competitor research when you find yourself losing to a constellation or a complete ecosystem of products, all working in harmony, rather than a single point solution? The first step is to look at it from the perspective of the market – i.e. your customers and their customers. In short, how do these customers typically address the job your product was designed to solve? One way to get line of sight on their decision making is to looking at job posting trends. For example the following graphic shows how frequently various developer focused technologies (open source projects, commercial products, programming languages, etc.) appear together in the same job posting. You can see clearly, for example, that Java and Subversion show up together in job postings all the time. If we marry this with additional knowledge about the capabilities of each solution in specific, their weaknesses when used in tandem, and the overall cost to the customer to use two or three solutions as part of an integrated stack, we can begin to see the competition for what it really is – an army of more than one. Lastly, the graphic is also a good example of how a product like Tableau can take data visualizations to a whole new level when producing research output.

Indeed is a tool that we’ve come to rely on across a number of different projects.  While there are caveats in it’s use as with any tool, Indeed’s data set is quite capable of generating some interesting insights. For example take this simple query. title:cloud Job Trends Title:cloud jobs Someone looking at this in 2011 would hard pressed to make the point that cloud services are not on the rise.  Especially given the data above is focused on job postings that have the world “cloud” in the job title, not just in the description. Or this graph (switched to a relative view), that shows how many job titles include the phrase “SQL Server” as in “SQL Server Admin”, “SQL Server Developer”, etc. in a given job posting. title:”sql server” Job Trends Title:”sql Server” jobs Or even how a trend such as DevOps is evolving. devops Job Trends Devops jobs In short, don’t forget to develop insights from both traditional and modern data sources. Sean Campbell Scott Swigart

Register here. Abstract: Job Postings serve a single primary purpose. To generate a solid candidate for the position in question. Given this job postings can regularly provide insights as to what investments a competitor is going to make, how often companies are hiring to support the deployment of a new product they have acquired, and how competitors are fairing in terms of product uptake in the open market. Hence having a solid understanding of how job postings can be easily aggregated and mined is a key market and competitive intelligence skill. During this webinar you’ll learn how to: Aggregate job postings from various sources Mine job postings for relevant information about competitors and markets

Mining Job Postings – Play.

This is a transcript of the CI Life Podcast, Episode 37. If you’d rather listen to the podcast, click here. [music] Sean Campbell: Welcome to another episode of CI Life. In this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about a site that you may not have heard of.  The site is Coursera. Given how important it is for CI professionals and Market Intelligence professionals, and really any business professional to stay on top of things and expand their education, we thought we’d talk about it. Scott, you and I are both pretty big fans of it. We’ve both taken courses on it and have evangelized it. They probably should give us a commission, I think at this point, for how much we’ve talked about it. Scott:  Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting thing. Coursera, so the word “course,” R‑A. C‑O‑U‑R‑S‑E‑R‑A. The idea behind Coursera is they have partnered with I don’t know how many universities it is at this point ‑‑ dozens, maybe approaching 100 ‑‑ and the idea is that universities run courses on here; 6 week courses, 8 week courses, 10 week courses. It’s a regular university professor, so University of Maryland, Princeton, University of Geneva… Sean:  Right. It’s places you’ve heard of.  It’s not Phoenix University, no offense to Phoenix University graduates, right? Scott:  Right.  University of London, international programs…I’m just looking at the list. They run a regular college course on here, so there might be a statistics course on Coursera taught by a Princeton prof, and it has 70,000 people signed up. Sean:  Now, not all of the students are fully active, I might add. Not all of them are full time students per se, but even if you assume some massive percentage drop‑off, that’s way more than can fit in your typical lecture hall. ...

This is a transcript of the “Competitive Intelligence” Podcast, Episode 36. If you’d rather listen to the podcast, click here. Sean Campbell: Welcome to another episode of CI Life. In this episode, we’re going to tackle something a little bit different for us, although we tend to say that almost, I think, at the start of every podcast, because we like to have some variety in this. Let’s imagine, for a second, that we’re in charge of iOS 7. iOS 7 is interesting, because even if you’re not a real Apple fan, or you don’t follow tech, iOS 7 is at that point in the product evolution of iOS where they’re now under threat. Android is being used more and more, it’s had a long run as a product. You can find other analogies to this, where products have had numerous iterations, and eventually they face more and more staunch competitors. What we want to do here is talk about, let’s put CI in somewhat of a specific product context. If you were in charge of iOS 7 development, what kind of CI would you be looking to do? What CI might you have already done, since iOS 7 is now in beta? We want to give folks some context, by using somewhat of a hypothetical analogy here, how does CI get used when it leaves the bounds of the CI team? How do you see product teams, and individual teams in a company, use CI? Let’s start with one of the very first things we tell people they always have to do. You’d be interviewing customers who use the competing solutions. Scott Swigart: When there’s some instance where somebody has looked at your product, looked at the alternative, and chosen the alternative, do you really know why? Just because you ...

As presented on 08/29/2013. Download the presentation here.

Understanding the Innovator’s Dilemma – Play.

Steve Ballmer will be retiring as Microsoft CEO in the next 12 months. Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 as its 30th employee and has held the CEO reigns at Microsoft since January of 2000. Under Ballmer’s tenure, revenue grew from $25 billion to $75 billion, and the company is well diversified with continued strong growth in business software. Microsoft is also going through an enormous transition from on-premises software to cloud based offerings – a metamorphosis that every long standing Fortune 500 software company is having to grapple with. Despite these successes, the company has failed in much of the consumer segment. It’s not as though Microsoft didn’t see smartphone and tablet trends coming. As far back as 2000, Microsoft was releasing Windows CE and Pocket PC operating systems and partnering with HP/Compaq on devices such as the iPAQ (you read that name right) PIM, and later, smartphones. Microsoft was also trying their hand in tablet computing as early as 2004 with Windows XP Tablet Edition. But the devices failed to excite and Microsoft’s efforts have been swept aside by Apple and Google. Tablets and smartphones have been so transformational that Microsoft’s Window’s PC operating system and, to a lesser extent, Office, are now under threat – a fact not helped by Microsoft’s disastrous release of Windows 8. Microsoft’s next CEO will inherit enormous assets but Microsoft has hit a stall point in its PC business. Historically, companies (or at least businesses in companies) don’t recover from that. For a great read on the topic of “Stall Points”, I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Stall-Points-Companies-Growing-Yours-Doesnt/dp/0300158513

This is a transcript of the CI Life Podcast, Episode 35. If you’d rather listen to the podcast, click here. Sean:  Welcome to another episode of CI Life. In this episode, we’re going to tackle a subject that I think is really important, for basically every CI team that works inside a company. Especially a larger company. Which is the role of internally oriented human intelligence.  And by that we mean, talking with someone versus searching the Web. Human intelligence is an interesting piece of the CI process, because at the end of the day there are certain types of externally focused human intelligence efforts that may be harder for you to do from inside of a company. But internally focused human intelligence is something that anyone can do. I’m constantly amazed, honestly, by the number of times when you ask people, “How many people have you contacted recently, inside your company, to gather human intelligence?” and sometimes the answers are quite small. Scott:  Really small, as in, zero. Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. When we go out and do human intelligence, we talk to a lot of people outside of the company, for example, the competitor’s customers, their partners, those kinds of things. But we also try to also interview people inside the company, in a wide variety of roles. It’s always apparent to us that when we bring in these broad viewpoints, they know things that the person who commissioned the project doesn’t know. Some of the intelligence is already in the company, it just hasn’t been collected. Sean:  One of the things I wanted to do here is talk a little bit about the roles inside of your company where CI might exist. Let’s just talk about salespeople. If you do not have a salesperson in your speed dial ...

This is a transcript of the CI Life Podcast, Episode 34. If you’d rather listen to the podcast, click here. Sean:  Welcome to another episode of “CI Life.” In this episode, we are going to talk about something that the CI community talks about quite a bit. In essence we want to talk about developing the “What,” the “So What” and the “Now What” of your analysis. With that, let’s talk at a high level about the three. The “What” this is classic intelligence collection. What are my competitor’s doing? Where have they been? What do they have as assets? Then you have to develop the “So What.” For example don’t just send in findings that paint a simple picture ala a SWOT analysis. Don’t send in spreadsheets. Do something meaningful with it. Paint a picture and crack the code on the competitor’s business efforts. Then you get to the “Now What,” which a lot of people talk about however they tend to leave it as a fluffy little cloud. So lets break that down a little bit as well. Scott:  Yeah, definitely. Like you said, the “What” and the “So What” are important. Effectively developing the “So What” means that you are putting the data you have in context and explaining why it matters. “Now What” is where things get more interesting and challenging. Unfortunately, competitive intelligence, as a discipline, at least historically, has been entirely focused on “What” and “So What” and has really said “Now What” isn’t our problem. Sean:  Let’s unpack that a little bit. Because I think it has to do with kind of where CI fits inside the organization, and sometimes even the archetypes of people who take on the role of leading a CI group. Scott:  Exactly. The general thought about CI is that ...

This is a transcript of the CI Life Podcast, Episode 33. If you’d rather listen to the podcast, click here. Sean : Welcome to another episode of CI Life. In this podcast, we’re going to tackle something a little bit timely, as the subject we are about to cover has been in the news in the last couple weeks. In short there always been a lot of discussion about how much the government monitors private citizens. There has also always been discussion about how much your business is transacting what it’s doing in the open, per se. And so, what we’re going to do is talk about an interesting subject, I think, given the news of the day which is how much can you expect to remain secret in this day and age? Is your product launch actually secret in any meaningful sense? Are your sales initiatives actually secret in any meaningful sense? And so, we want to talk a little bit about that and maybe with a little bit of the backdrop of what we’ve been hearing in the news about PRISM and things like that. I guess a good place to start is just how much secrecy can you expect? What are the trends? What does it mean if you’re a business leader? Scott:  Yeah, I think this is really pretty interesting. I know that when we have spent some dime down in the Valley, it used to be pretty common, years ago, where you’d meet somebody at a networking event and they’d say…”What are you doing?” And they would say, “Oh, I’ve got a startup but it’s in stealth mode. We’re in stealth mode right now.” It’s a funny thing because every time I heard that, I thought, “OK. Your success or failure has zip‑to‑dee‑doo‑dah to do with ...

This is a transcript of the CI Life Podcast, Episode 32. If you’d rather listen to the podcast, click here. Sean Campbell:  Welcome to another episode of “CI Life.” In this episode, we’re going to tackle a connection between two topics, business plan development and competitive intelligence. Some of this discussion comes from a course that I teach at the Atkinson Management School, but it honestly struck me that I haven’t seen a lot of people talk about this, and I wanted to connect the dots between these two topics. And, Scott, you and I have talked about this before. In short, how can competitive intelligence help someone who’s developing a business plan? Some of the areas that jump to mind immediately are looking at competitors, looking at industry forces, and adjacent industries, and obviously competitive intelligence as a discipline has lots of tools to bring to bear here. Scott Swigart:  Absolutely.  I think the obvious thing is that you are not building a business plan into a vacuum. You’re not setting up shop on a brand new planet, in which your potential customers have never seen anything like what you’re going to do and no competition exists. Sean:  Right. I would almost say that if that is actually 100 percent true, you’re probably going to fail, [laughs] because unless you have a lot of marketing money, and you have a lot of staff behind you, to be that much of a first‑mover in a market is a really challenging position to be in. Unless of course your product is truly a wonder of the world that we will be talking about 20 years from now. Scott:  And even for things that are disruptive, they’re disruptive because they eliminate the need for part of a value chain. They’re not necessarily ...

We’ve launched another Inbox Education Series.  This time focused on how to effectively mine LinkedIn for Competitive Intelligence or Market Intelligence insights. Each Inbox Education Series is focused on a set of questions that competitive intelligence and market intelligence professionals have on a regular basis. Over the span of a few weeks, each series below will educate you, via email, on various ways to take better advantage of a given set of competitive intelligence or market intelligence tools. You can sign up here –     

We’ve launched another Inbox Education Series. This time focused on how to effectively mine Google Trends for Competitive Intelligence or Market Intelligence insights. Each Inbox Education Series is focused on a set of questions that competitive intelligence and market intelligence professionals have on a regular basis. Over the span of a few weeks, each series below will educate you, via email, on various ways to take better advantage of a given set of competitive intelligence or market intelligence tools. You can sign up here –     

Is secrecy important to your business’s success?  I can say with some certainty, probably not, even if your business tries very hard to keep things secret.  And the reason is because outside of possibly some very high-level discussions and very early plans, “business secret” is practically an oxymoron. If your competitors don’t know what you’re planning, it’s simply because they decided that it wasn’t worth the money and time to find out.  It’s not because you could reasonably prevent them from knowing.  Not anymore. Some of the ways that information flows out of your building are nothing new.  Your employees do leave, and they do go to work for the competition, and they do carefully (or not so carefully) use their knowledge of your plans against you.  Nondisclosure agreements don’t protect you from much.  Consider a sales rep who, while working for your company, had (and was encouraged to have) all kinds of conversations with potential clients about how your product is the best, how it beats the competition and what features future versions of the product will have (selling the roadmap, as they say).  If, while working for you, they were free to have these conversations with people external to your company, without having those people sign an NDA, then this information is now public and they can continue to talk about it when they no longer work for you. What does this look like in practice?  Consider the story of Arista Networks.  There are 570 people working for Arista with LinkedIn profiles – but LinkedIn does this wonderful thing and shows you “Insights” about a company.  One of those insights is that 139 Arista employees formerly worked at Cisco.  Cisco has no secrets when it comes to Arista. Then there’s the World Wide Interwebs.  Just do a search ...