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Episode #99 of the B2B Market Research Podcast – Predicting Competitor Growth – 3 Tools for Analyzing the Buyer’s Journey. We cover: Competitive intelligence tools for analyzing relative search engine rankings and web traffic data. How the B2B buyer’s journey is rapidly changing. Why it is imperative to leverage the predictive capabilities of competitive intelligence tools. Subscribe to our newsletter for more B2B market research and competitive intelligence tips. Speaker: Sean Campbell – CEO of Cascade Insights [Modified Transcript] In this episode we’re going to talk about a few different tools that you can use to predict competitor growth and in essence analyze the front-end of the B2B buyers’ journey. This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Cascade Insights specializes in competitive intelligence services for B2B technology companies. Our specialization helps us to deliver detailed competitive intelligence insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. To learn more about us, visit our company profile. Also, don’t forget to check out our free resources and sign up for our newsletter. With that, let’s get into the topic of today’s podcast. I recently gave a presentation at the SCIP International Conference in Atlanta, where I shared a number of different tools that organizations and competitive intelligence professionals can use to analyze the B2B buyer’s journey. I also discussed how important it is to understand how the buyer’s journey is changing. In fact, it’s changing dramatically in terms of how customers buy. I’ll be addressing this as well in today’s podcast. Competitive Intelligence Analytics Tools: Search Ranking & Web Traffic With competitive intelligence tools, you can analyze metrics such as the search position and traffic volume of competitors’ websites. These insights truly matter. In fact, the CI analytical tools I’ll be discussing are even somewhat predictive. For example, if traffic is increasing to a competitor’s website that’s 5x your ...

Business people commonly discuss how to emulate Apple’s success. Let us be clear, there’s probably little that many businesses can learn from Apple. In point of fact, both of Apple’s wildest successes have held the seeds of their own undoing. Just as Apple’s success at the dawn of the personal computer era was eclipsed by Windows PCs, the iPhone and iPad are being overtaken by Android devices. The Reality of Shaping New Market Segments Apple’s strategy has always included end-to-end control over the ecosystem, as opposed to the multi-vendor approach associated with Windows PCs or Android devices. With the iPhone and iPad, that model made Apple enormous amounts of money and redefined the industry. How did they do it? In short, they got lucky. They seized a once-in-a-decade product opportunity by modifying an existing product. In other words, they jumped into smartphones by modifying the iPod. If your industry is ripe for a once-in-a-decade innovation, and you already have a product ready-made to build on, then you too can be like Apple. In opening new potential in the smartphone segment, Apple also set the stage for competitors to benefit, which has contributed to the rise of Android devices. The Oft-Overlooked Writing on the Wall Analysts tend to conflate the brilliant user experiences of products such as the iPhone or Tivo with an apparent invulnerability. In reality, the risk of being displaced by alternatives is present for any product, no matter how innovative and unique it may be. Being a first mover is ultimately a temporary advantage, even though it may generate dramatic success for a time. First movers such as Apple often seek to control the ecosystem to protect the intellectual property of their innovation. That approach leaves them vulnerable to open, multi-vendor alternatives, which have advantages such as economies ...

To understand what a competitor is likely to do, put yourself in their shoes. That’s the core idea of wargaming, a framework for setting strategy that dates back at least to Frederick the Great. Using a variety of approaches that range from thought experiments to computer modeling, teams answer the question, “if I had the competitor’s challenges and constraints, how would I go about winning?” The Role of Wargaming in Your Competitive Intelligence Practice When you play the role of a competitor, your focus on winning from their point of view helps you avoid underestimating their chances of success. That can be an excellent approach to refine a strategy, and this added perspective can be immensely helpful to validate planning around a product launch or a series of product investments, for example. Participants should have some experience with other competitive intelligence frameworks, such as Porter’s Five Forces and Four Corners Analysis. More important still, the team should have an intimate understanding of the competitors, in terms of both quantitative measures such as market share and growth, as well as qualitative ones such as corporate culture and motivation. Structuring a Wargaming Exercise During the wargaming exercise itself, participants are put in a pressure cooker, and some attention should be paid to the fact that they are being asked to play a “devil’s advocate” role, hypothetically attacking their own real-world interests. The first step in the process actually benefits from that fact, as the team analyzes the landscape and perfects a series of moves your company will take to elicit a reaction from competitors. In the next stage, participants test the plans they have put in place, attempting to countermand them in the hypothetical role of a competitor, possibly using computer models to put scenarios to the test. Finally, the team goes ...

It is a basic truism that producing customer value in excess of your cost to provide it creates profit. Michael Porter helps unpack the deeper mechanics of this process with the value chain analysis framework in his book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. In theory, every step of a company’s activity should add value, as a contribution to the larger whole, and analysis of those steps provides insight into profitability. Main Activities that Comprise the Value Chain Porter’s framework begins by breaking up the work done by a company (or an industry) into five primary activities, with the premise that value is generated within and between these activities: Inbound logistics refers to the tasks and systems to get raw materials or other inputs from suppliers; value can be added by effectively handling matters such as purchasing, transportation, warehousing, and inventory control. • Operations is the activity to transform those inputs into the finished product, which can be improved through plant layout, production control, automation, etc. Outbound logistics concerns getting the finished product to the customer, with opportunities for efficiencies in areas such as order fulfillment, how the product is stored and distributed, and how waste is controlled. Marketing and sales ensures that customers are aware of your product and helps compel them to buy it; value opportunities include advertising and differentiation within a given market segment. Services enhance the product’s value through offerings such as installation, post-sales support, service plans, training, and so on. Support Activities Where Innovation Can Bolster Value Porter suggests that, through innovative management and execution, value can be generated from activities that are—at first glance—merely overhead, or “the cost of doing business.” For example: Procurement activities can help obtain the highest-quality goods possible for the lowest possible cost.  Technology development can improve processes for ...

Effective positioning within a market segment requires an understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of your company and its offerings against the competition. While benchmarking is a key capability to fulfill that goal, common misunderstandings about the goals and practices around benchmarking can limit success, even by skilled competitive intelligence organizations. Refining the Definition and Process of Benchmarking It’s tempting to reduce the benchmarking process to simply identifying what your product can do that a competitors’ can’t, and vice versa. While those comparisons can be illuminating, you must look deeper than features and capabilities, setting the goal of developing a holistic understanding of an offering’s competitive position. That perspective includes every aspect of a customer’s pre-sale, sale, and post-sale experience. To keep the breadth of the benchmarking study under control, discipline is needed to avoid making exhaustive comparisons between the products or services under study. Rather than listing differences for their own sake, restrict the focus to “differences that matter” in the marketplace. Asking Questions about an Offering’s “Job” to Reveal its Competitive Identity Context based on usage plays an instrumental role in defining the competitive reality that surrounds a product or service. Because customers make purchases to fulfill specific business needs, your benchmarking effort must ask, “what job did the offering enter the market to accomplish?” How does it perform that job, compared to competitors, and are you considering competitors that target that same job (or that may soon do so)? Moreover, how does the product or service get accessed or consumed, and how well is that characteristic suited to the job the offering seeks to perform? How do customers experience the fulfillment of that job—for example, does the offering meet changing requirements gracefully, or does it place rigid usability demands on the customer? Expanding Comparisons, Beyond the ...

Weighted Ranking Analysis for Competitive Intelligence A substantial portion of competitive intelligence practice is applying structured methodologies to decision making, both to improve the quality of decisions and to build consensus around those decisions. As introduced in The Thinker’s Toolkit, by Morgan D. Jones, weighted ranking is a powerful set of critical thinking tools that can be applied in this manner. This approach is highly applicable when hard choices need to be made. Setting the Foundations for a Structured Decision Deciding among a group of industries that your company could potentially enter is a classic competitive intelligence decision that can be helped by weighted ranking. People generally have little trouble deciding between two options, such as when the eye doctor asks you which of two lenses you see more clearly through; when the list of options to choose among (in whatever context) gets five or ten items long, people tend to get overwhelmed. In our industry-choosing example, the team should start by establishing a list of the industries to be considered, before identifying which ones are healthy or viable (this latter effort can be handled using frameworks such as Porter’s Five Forces). Next, the conversation can turn to specific reasons the company should or should not enter each industry. Identifying the Critical Criteria for the Decision Just as important as identifying a clear list of industries to be considered, it is also vital to methodically identify the criteria for examining each industry as a potential choice. The presence of opportunity is not the same thing as being a good fit, because no company can compete effectively in every industry. Factors involved in this list of criteria include such considerations as how fractured the industry is, in terms of how many companies presently dominate it, as well as the growth potential ...

Competitive intelligence gathering typically requires going beyond online sources, to interviewing human subjects. Even if it’s well within your comfort zone to contact and get information from a group of strangers, the guidelines discussed here can make the process smoother and more successful. Contacting Human Intelligence Subjects To initiate the process of gathering human intelligence, you first need to identify the right people to interview. Be sure to get the widest practical range of perspectives by contacting a variety of sources in your own company, as well as outside market influencers, resellers, your customers, and even competitors’ customers. To increase participation and establish rapport, consider what motivates various individuals; some may simply want to be heard, while others may respond to personal relationships or hope to benefit from the research itself. Sources for Human Intelligence Best Practices As you interact with human intelligence subjects, it is worthwhile to take note of what works and what doesn’t, as an aid to establishing your own style and techniques. Beyond that, it is worthwhile to consider outside influences. Qualitative research techniques from the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals  (SCIP) website are a great place to start. Analyzing social networks of potential subjects using tools such as  NodeXL and  Twiangulate also yields a wealth of insight. LinkedIn is a great place to search for people who have the background needed to offer insights. Product and domain experts are also easy to find on Slideshare – with contact information. Finally, consider Brant Houston’s Investigative Reporter’s Handbook for tips from the journalism field. Addressing Your Biases and Those of Your Interviewees Early in the human-intelligence-gathering process, define how your own experiences, preferences, and allegiances related to a product, technology, or company could influence your findings. Also be cautious of confirmation bias, where tentative conclusions from completed ...

On planes, trains, and bedside tables, good business books are filled with the opportunities that flow from fresh insights. We make it a habit to read as many of them as we can, and we make recommendations at classes, conferences, and just about everywhere we go. This article  builds on a previous one on we offered about recommendations for your competitive intelligence bookshelf, because as time marches on, we all need new things to read. Finding New Approaches to Refine Everyday Challenges Profound insights aren’t the only transformative influences; small additions to the ways you are already handling competitive intelligence projects are often the keys to greater success: Research on Main Street (M Phelps) provides structured open-source intelligence techniques to uncover localized information, an invaluable skill set for researching specific market geographies and smaller companies. Wikis and Intelligence Analysis (K Wheaton et. al.) introduces the potential of wikis as a tool for collecting, synthesizing, and organizing intelligence. Harvard Business Review is a near-limitless source of insights about topics great and small; competitive intelligence practitioners can zero in on most topics using the Review magazine, website, podcast, and more. Looking Deeper at the Work of Michael Porter Michael Porter is widely regarded as the father of the modern competitive strategy field. Every competitive intelligence professional should go beyond Porter’s Five Forces by reading at least a few of his most important books: Understanding Michael Porter (J Magretta) is arguably the best place to start an in-depth study of Porter’s work, with useful summary and clarification that can make the primary texts more accessible. Competitive Strategy (ME Porter) is the classic text about applying a structured approach to predict competitor behavior; this book is a must-read for anyone involved in business strategic positioning. Competitive Advantage (ME Porter) complements the concepts in Competitive ...

Journalists, analysts, market researchers – how often do you hear these people referred to as spies? And yet, for the competitive intelligence professional, it’s all too common to hear, “Oh, so you’re a spy!” While CI certainly draws some techniques from the intelligence community, deep and clear differences exist, with regard to both ethics and practicalities. A better understanding of CI in the context of other fields can be achieved by considering parallels with quantitative market research and investigative journalism. What Spies Do that CI Does Not Organizations such as military intelligence and the CIA engage in at least three types of interactions with human subjects. The first of these is interrogation, where the subject is typically hostile but aware that they are being questioned. The second type is interviewing, where a willing participant is aware of the information being sought. The third type of interaction is elicitation, where the subject is not even aware that the agent is trying to get information. Of these three approaches, interviewing is the core part of the CI enterprise. Interrogation is obviously outside the realm of CI work. Likewise, while some CI practices (such as trade show intelligence) may venture into elicitation, the ethical demands of CI preclude misrepresentation. The Role of Market Research Techniques in CI As a discipline, CI draws heavily from approaches developed by market researchers. It is vital to consider the objectivity of your data-collection methods and to apply the optimal research approach. Is it best to do in-depth interviews, a Delphi panel, or perhaps some type of crowd-sourcing initiative? At the same time, crossover from the market research field into CI tends to be more qualitative than quantitative, and it is important to consider essential differences between conventional market research and CI projects. For example, market researchers focus ...

Every organization presents moments of opportunity that watchful competitors can take advantage of. For example, during the end-of-year holiday season, operations at most companies in the US and many other parts of the world are virtually at a standstill. That near-hibernation may last four to six weeks or more, and it’s just one of many such times that create vulnerability, in terms of not being able to respond rapidly to actions taken by others. Common Periods of Lapsed Capability While the holiday season is both easily predictable and relatively long in duration, it pays to consider other predictable times when a competitor will have limited ability to respond. Another common seasonal distraction is the period of employee reviews and the turn of the fiscal year, which consumes tremendous resources in many companies over the course of weeks or even months. A wide variety of other, more sporadic causes of downtime also exist. For example, when a change in senior management or other reorganization happens, people in the affected section of the org chart tend to go into a holding pattern as they wait to see what changes are coming. Announcements of significant layoffs have a similar effect, through negative morale and employees investing energy in dusting off their resumes and networking. Taking Advantage of Competitor Downtime While a competitor is distracted, the opportunity arises for you to get a head start on any of a number of activities before the other company will have a chance to react. For example, if your company changes its offerings with a new initiative or product launch, a few weeks extra lead time before your competitor can adjust to the changes you have made to the market landscape can give you a significant competitive advantage in many cases. Another great example is making changes ...

Information about competitors’ pricing is a very common competitive intelligence request. This effort generally requires triangulation and assembly of data from multiple sources, although you might get lucky starting with open source intelligence from the Internet. You can start with a Google search of a competitor name and phrases such as “price list,” perhaps adding the operators filetype:xls OR filetype:xlsx OR filetype:pdf to return only Excel spreadsheets and PDFs. The Complex, Non-Uniform Reality of B2B Pricing An early consideration when investigating competitor pricing should be to note the differences between B2B prices—the topic primarily being discussed here—and consumer prices, which are typically readily available from retail websites such as Amazon.com. There is typically no straightforward source for “real” B2B prices. The prices for B2B products can be fairly large, often in the range of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. More importantly, the prices paid by different B2B customers often vary widely, with various discounting structures making MSRP just a starting point for your analysis. Thus, even the most reliable information sources must be corroborated to account for variations among customers. On the Need for Human Intelligence Directly interviewing both customers and resellers is vital to a complete understanding of competitor pricing. That effort must include how vendors incentivize resellers to sell their products, beyond the picture offered by price figures alone. This approach enables you to create a holistic picture of the pricing structure that includes reseller profit margins as well as discounts and incentives to both resellers and customers, rather than a simple price list. Also discoverable through human intelligence are value-added factors that don’t show up on a price list but can play a major role in winning the deal. For example, some resellers may offer early access to new products, fast turnaround times, or even ...

As a product or technology matures, the profile of a “new customer” changes, from the fast movers always on the bleeding edge, to the mainstream majority, to those that want tried-and-true commodity solutions. The Technology Adoption Lifecycle can be used as a competitive intelligence framework to illuminate how sales strategies should address those groups. In spite of the name, these concepts apply beyond technology. (In fact, they originated in a 1942 article about farm equipment.) Phase 1: Innovators The first customers are Innovators that look for products most people haven’t even heard of yet. Innovators can provide valuable feedback and insights about products that you have scarcely begun to offer to the public. At the same time, this group is very small (perhaps 2.5% of the eventual market), generally without much budget to spend. Therefore, too much focus on them is dangerous, and their importance may be largely as a stepping stone that influences the next group—the Early Adopters. Phase 2: Early Adopters (aka, Visionaries) A somewhat larger market segment (about 12.5%), Early Adopters demand breakthrough impact, and when they find it, they can lend a product credibility and start to generate revenue. They can be challenging to convince, and moreover, their influence tends to be limited to other Early Adopters. In fact, breaking through from this group to the broader audience of the Early Majority is the daunting divide referred to in the title of the book, Crossing the Chasm. Phase 3: The Early Majority (aka, Pragmatists) This group only wants to spend their time on technologies that work. Whereas Innovators and Early Adopters are happy to try an abandon many technologies, Pragmatists want something that they can likely stick with for quite some time. Because they are a large portion of the market (about 35%), succeeding here is ...