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Knowing who your key competitors’ customers are for B2B products is extremely valuable, both as a first step in attempting to win those customers over to your own product and so you can be aware of efforts to do the same thing to you. This intelligence can also help you conduct market analysis by revealing factors such as the adoption rate of a competing product, which industries are using it, and in what geographies. Searching Out the Evidence Competitive intelligence efforts to reverse-engineer a customer list are not monolithic. The best approach is typically to create those lists one line at a time, based on evidence that a specific company is using a specific product. A key source of that evidence is that most B2B products require specific skill sets, which both companies and individuals tend to reveal by generating telltale digital signals. Companies that use a specific product often explicitly seek experience with it in job postings. Individuals tend to reveal such experience in LinkedIn profiles and online resumes that can be searched through sites such as indeed.com. Similar information is available through Twitter, user groups and conferences for specific technologies, and support forums. Drawing Conclusions from What You Find The most obvious value of a competitor’s customer list is that it reveals potential clients you might win, as well as potential rivals that may try to take away your customers. Perhaps even more importantly, however, a set of customer lists can contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the market for your product. As you start to assemble competitor customer lists, a picture emerges of where specific products are and are not being used, as well as related trends over time. That information can be correlated with the size of the customer companies, where they are located, what ...

Market Influencers: Identification and Analysis Companies have dwindling direct influence over the public conversation about their products and services. At the same time independent influencers also drive buying decisions amongst audiences therefore identifying them and how they shape the market is a worthy and vital task for competitive intelligence organizations. The Rise of Influencers in Shaping Market Behaviors Internet-based information increasingly guides B2B and B2C customer behavior, from product web sites to discussions and reviews. Within that sphere, individuals ascend to positions of influence through public trust and their reputation for expertise married with objectivity. The organic rise of influencers through channels such as blogs and social media means that they are not necessarily simple to identify, even if they have a great deal of impact over shaping the public discourse that surrounds a company, product, or service. Competitive intelligence techniques are well suited to determining who these influencers are and how they affect perception and buying decisions. Identifying the Influencers with Significant Impact In many companies, management regards the changing market landscape around these influencers as the province of PR or marketing organizations. While those groups certainly have a role, determining who influencers are and the sphere of their impact can be outside core PR or marketing expertise. For example, using open source intelligence techniques, you can identify the people driving a given conversation. QA sites such as Quora and Focus.com are great resources for that effort, and measuring an influencer’s digital reach helps you quantify how important he or she is to your market. For example, a high number of Twitter followers, high follower-to-following ratio, and large number of LinkedIn connections suggest that an influencer has a substantial reach. Deriving Value from Insights about Influencers After identifying the pool of influencers that are important to a topic, the ...

Turning CI Inward to Protect Your Company Competitive intelligence professionals typically spend their time and attention looking outward at other companies. Rarely do they turn that perspective around to identify the information they are revealing to the world at large about their own operations. The tools and techniques we use every day to gather intelligence about competitors provide the basis for protecting against information leaks that may be compromising competitiveness. Considering How Information Makes its Way out into the World It’s a good bet that, in general, your competitors are using a similar approach to discover hidden information about your company as you are using to analyze theirs. Job postings, LinkedIn profiles, and all the other channels where you might inadvertently disclose information are certainly under scrutiny by analysts looking for a competitive advantage. It’s a worthwhile exercise to perform an analysis of your own company using Internet-based open source intelligence, just as if you were an outside party. Doing so draws on well-established expertise that every competitive intelligence organization has, so it can be done fairly easily and at little cost. Gathering that information generally reveals outward flows of information that would otherwise remain hidden, and which can be plugged or at least mitigated. Identifying Specific Information Leaks While the specifics are different for every organization, common inadvertent disclosures exist. For example, employees often engage in a sort of branding exercise of their own careers using resumes and LinkedIn, and outgoing interns build their own credibility by publicizing their work at your company. Slide presentations and documents made publicly available (even those from confidential meetings) often reveal a wealth of private information. Looking a bit deeper, data about web searches against your domain can be very revealing. For example, a log entry that shows a search such as “confidential ...

Improving Outcomes of Win-Loss Analysis No matter how you go about win-loss analysis, you are looking to get to the heart of the question, “Why are customers buying (or not buying) from company X?” Some fairly straightforward techniques from other areas of competitive intelligence practice can help make the process simpler and more successful. At the same time, information discovered during the course of the project is very useful, beyond the win-loss analysis itself. The Elusiveness of Loss Data The most common way of initiating a win-loss analysis is to filter out a set of customer engagement records from a CRM database or other repository, according to criteria such as a date range or product type. Most companies then hire an outside firm to interview contacts in the sample to determine why certain entries are wins and others are losses. Samples should include at least as many losses as wins, since why certain sales slipped away offers unique insight into marketing and sales weaknesses. Unfortunately, that’s where many analyses fail—a lack of solid information on losses to follow up on. That’s no surprise; sales people are not motivated to spend precious time documenting failed engagements, and they may even feel that they would be opening themselves to criticism. Alternative approaches are in order. Looking Outside the Citadel, at Sales that Went Elsewhere A more creative view of the situation reveals that loss data is all around. In a fair number of scenarios, sales to a competitor are a loss, even if the company conducting the win-loss analysis was not considered. In fact, lack of contact with a potential customer is an important data point to consider, in determining how to make more exhaustive contact in the future. Since the CRM system of a company that wasn’t considered for a sale ...

What Competitive Intelligence Can Learn from Investigative Reporters News reporters use an intriguing mix of tools that directly correlate to competitive intelligence work, particularly in terms of mining the web. In short, investigative reporters have deep expertise in gathering data from its hiding places and making sophisticated conclusions from it. The competitive intelligence field can learn a lot from theirs through events such as the Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference, which we recently attended. Scraping Data Rapidly from Web Pages with Scrapely Screen scraping lets you rapidly gather information from a site and put it into a different form. Tools like Scrapely, a Google Chrome browser extension, let users rapidly gather even very large data sets from websites, in many cases simply by highlighting a chunk of data and selecting a command from the right-click menu. The tool outputs a neat table automatically, which you can then export to Google Docs. For more complex page formats, Scrapely includes the ability to create a parser from a set of examples that can be automatically applied to similar pages. Note that you should check the terms of use for any data source you intend to use with Scrapely or other data scrapers before using them. Automating Information Grouping with Google Refine In most cases, competitive intelligence practitioners don’t suffer from a lack of data; more often, the challenge is to make sense out of an ocean of it. Computer algorithms are the clear answer, and no one creates those better than the folks at Google. When you have 1,000 headlines and 20,000 Tweets on a competitor, Google Refine can analyze them automatically and place them into clusters, according to topic. The time savings associated with an automated approach such as what you can do with Google Refine can easily make the difference between having ...

Making Intelligence Smarter: Analysis of Competing Hypotheses A portion of competitive intelligence work is simply gathering source information. However that information’s value depends in part on how well analysts can develop defensible conclusions from hypotheses that are often at odds with each other. Borrowing from public sector intelligence practice, the analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH) framework tests different interpretations by plotting hypotheses against evidence using a two-dimensional matrix. Populating the Horizontal Axis: Hypotheses The first step of the ACH approach is to gather hypotheses about a potential future event, business situation, or competitor move, and create a column in the matrix for each hypothesis. Potential entries for this horizontal axis could come from sources such as brainstorming sessions, blog-based commentary, social media, interviews with subject matter experts, and many other common intelligence sources. There is often a hierarchical structure to the hypotheses. “Windows 8 will rapidly achieve large market share” could be a top-level hypothesis, with sub-hypotheses such as “small businesses will be slow to adopt Windows 8” and “Windows 8 will accelerate upgrades from Windows XP.”. Populating the Vertical Axis: Evidence Companies weighing their responses to events must consider multiple hypotheses. Following the example above, a software company deciding what resources to apply to supporting Windows 8 will want to have an understanding of the likely adoption of the new OS within its customer base. To support that understanding, pieces of evidence are populated along the horizontal axis of the matrix, so that the impact of each can be considered against the hypotheses. Pieces of evidence to be used for ACH can come from any source used in competitive intelligence research, including open source intelligence (such as job postings or resumes from LinkedIn), first-party interviews, and industry events. General marketing materials such as feature lists or price points are ...

Open source intelligence can make you more effective every day, in a wide variety of tasks—not just competitive intelligence. Sales, marketing, planning, and executive roles benefit from a sharper understanding of what others are doing in the industry, and effective use of free information from your web browser is a key approach. We use a lot of specialized tools for niche tasks, but here’s a few that we use every day. LinkedIn LinkedIn offers a wealth of open source intelligence. In many companies, especially tech companies, the majority of employees have LinkedIn profiles. The company pages are also a wealth of information. The site also provides very robust search, making it an excellent first stop for information on a company, market segment, or other topic of interest. The breadth of coverage on LinkedIn makes semi-statistical data gathering, as well. This factor is enormously helpful for topics such as: where employees are physically located, hiring trends, and the specific size of organizations within the company, such as sales compared to the company as a whole (or yours). In fact, we have even reverse-engineered competitors’ customer lists using public data available on LinkedIn. SlideShare Slightly less well-known but also extraordinarily useful, SlideShare.net bills itself as aspiring to be “the YouTube of PowerPoint.” This enormous repository of slide presentations gives you access to information carefully collated and assembled by presenters for ease of understanding. Whereas a company’s Web site might provide meager insight, SlideShare tends to have information from sales presentations, technical sessions, and even invitation-only events that would otherwise not be available to you in any form. Often, you can even find analyses done by external consultants that provide a perspective that those inside the company wouldn’t provide. Quora Often dismissed in competitive intelligence but growing richer every day, social Q&A sites ...

Questions of ethics are always a point of interest in competitive intelligence (CI), and workshops on this topic are a staple of industry conferences. Guidelines such as the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) Code of Ethics are a great start, as are legal or ethical guidelines established by your company or customers. Our discussion here adds to that type of formal policy with discussion that can help CI professionals establish their own ethical foundations. Scenario: Avoiding the Temptation of Identity Games Most of us have at least considered whether we would get an advantage by hiding our true intent when we are gathering competitive intelligence. Whether as simple as turning a conference badge backward or as complex as inventing an elaborate cover story, not disclosing who you are violates a core ethical requirement. It’s worth mentioning that the same is true online, and creating fake social networking profiles for the purpose of collecting CI is out of bounds. Note that these ethical considerations are binding even if you know for certain that competitors are being unethical toward you. The tendency to do otherwise follows from the “business is war” mentality, but we should all recognize that even in war, participants are subject to rules of engagement such as the Geneva Convention. Scenario: Overhearing Sensitive Information Imagine that the person next to you on an airplane is talking on their cell phone about sensitive information that could benefit you or your client. They may be talking about flaws in their product, for example, or challenges they are having in selling. What do you do? In this case, we would not feel ethically bound to stop them from disclosing the information. That person has an obligation to protect the sensitive information, and this situation represents a failure on their part to ...

Industry events are outstanding opportunities for gathering information from competitors, customers, partners, and distributors. There’s a gold mine there for the taking, in terms of how to develop and position your products and services in the marketplace. Still, that same hyper-focused nature of these events means you need a well organized approach to take full advantage of the opportunity. Making Your Approach Smooth and Steady There’s a lot happening at industry trade shows, all at once, and there’s a limited amount of time. Being methodical is the key to transforming that frenzy of activity into a bonanza of insight: Unimpeachable ethics: Be frank and truthful about who you are and why you’re there. In our years of experience, we have found that people manning booths are eager to share information, and they appreciate it when those who approach them are honest and well-informed. Thorough planning: Know what you’re doing before you arrive. Ahead of time, you should establish questions that you want to have answered, and by whom. That plan needs to be updated at least nightly during the event, since new information will keep coming in. Smart approach: Choose the right time to walk up to the booth. Watch for an opportunity when you’re not part of a crowd, especially when traffic is light such as early in the morning, during lunch, or at the end of the day. To polish your delivery, practice at a booth or two less important to your goals. Engaging with the People at the Booth Your first goal in gathering intelligence is to get the people working at booths talking, and starting with a simple question, such as “what are you demonstrating?” can be the best way to break the ice. Focusing on getting them to talk in their own sphere of expertise ...