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In most types of competitive intelligence analysis, human sources should play a role. As you interview people you will gain perspectives that aren’t available on the Web. This runs counter to the intuition of many people that everything is online somewhere, if you know where to look. There is simply no substitute for talking directly both to people in your own company and to those outside. Developing an Overall View of the Human Intelligence Enterprise Even many seasoned competitive intelligence analysts put self-imposed limitations on themselves, in terms of whom they believe they can contact for information. On the continuum of sources, you can certainly talk to your own sales and marketing teams, although there may be some limitations from management with regard to customers and partners, and it can be challenging to contact competitors and their customers. All of these sources bear investigation, however. This scope of inquiry is often affected by the personalities and preferences of the analysts, which is a valuable consideration for those running competitive intelligence organizations as they choose team members to complement each other. It also highlights the value of bringing in outside competitive intelligence consultants in some cases. How to Get Started and Whom to Talk to The easiest way to get started in collecting human intelligence for a given project is to consider people in your own company. Sales reps are an obvious choice, since they are often the nerve endings of the company, with lots of customer contact, which can yield insights about what competitors are saying about your company and what objections end customers raise. Sales teams also have a vested interest in the competitive intelligence enterprise being successful, since it can make their jobs easier. Talking to partners, distributors, and resellers is also a potential treasure trove of insight. ...

Many competitive organizations that have relatively developed processes for investigating larger public companies have a difficult time getting information about small private ones. The digital footprints of private companies can be significantly different—filings with the SEC (or its equivalents outside the US) are not an option, and press coverage is often significantly sparser. The guidelines described here can help make your research more successful. Focus on Individuals Instead of the Larger Organization When investigating a private company, start with people rather than the company as a whole. A small organization may send a small signal, but the individuals running the company are likely to be actively trying to get exposure. Individual Twitter feeds, LinkedIn profiles, blogs, and so on may be some of the best resources available. It’s not unusual for the president of a small company to post information such as revenue figures on Twitter, for example. The smaller the company, the more important this guidance is. At 200 employees or so, aggregated information about the company starts to emerge from resources such as LinkedIn, but no such patterns may be available at all for a very small company. Different approaches may be called for to find information about locations, sales figures, etc. The Importance of Going Local It is worthwhile to seek out local media near headquarters for the best coverage. Even a small company can be a significant story in its local news market, particularly outside of larger cities. In fact, this is often good advice for larger companies as well, since some stories that don’t have the horsepower to make it onto the national or international stage may reveal information about new facilities, major deals, and so forth. The History of a Web Site Can Reveal a Lot Archive.org can be very illuminating. How a company ...

As described in the book of the same name by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff, co-opetition is the concept of mutual benefit to one another by separate businesses. For example, a streaming service such as NetFlix might add value to Apple TV (since iTunes is download-only), and likewise, Apple TV might drive business to NetFlix. Potential Shared Benefits by Complementary Businesses As the Apple and NetFlix example above indicates, it is entirely possible for two companies to benefit each other, even with operations that are in the same general market segment. The dynamic may provide a more complete product or service offering, as is the case for Apple here, or it may help drive customers to your product or service, creating a broader total addressable market, as is the case for NetFlix. Another common illustration of the complementor concept is that it has become common for makers of ERP, CRM, or other enterprise software to include hooks for social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. The enterprise software maker benefits from those connections, but has little if any real control over them. Hazards from Connections Outside Your Control The most obvious potential hazard of co-opetition is that the company that complements your business today could emerge as a direct competitor tomorrow. Likewise, any missteps by that company (or even the company’s outright failure) could have a negative impact on your business, and you could be powerless to change it. A more subtle issue is that the company that complements your offerings could, in many cases, change the rules of engagement. Twitter recently added restrictions to the use of their APIs by others, allowing external apps to submit tweets, but not to aggregate or syndicate Twitter content without permission. This change gives Twitter more control over where readers see Twitter ...

Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, is well known for its focus on fostering disruptive innovation. From a competitive intelligence standpoint, a secondary focus is at least as important—how to differentiate between a disruptive innovation and a sustaining one. Just as a substitute in Porter’s Five Forces is hard to identify but potentially game-changing, recognizing disruptive innovation is a powerful, vital capability. Some Characteristics of a Disruptive Innovation Consider the impact of drone journalism on the established news industry as it becomes more pervasive with changes to FAA regulations coming in 2015. Gauging drone journalism’s potential as a disruptive technology, start by considering whether it is simple, reliable, and convenient, at a low price point. Is it a combination of existing technologies, does it focus on a small or niche market, and does it focus on addressing a single problem? With the exception of a low price point, these factors do apply. In fact, comparing the cost of a small drone with that of a traffic helicopter, for example, the drone is considerably less expensive. A smaller news organization for whom a helicopter is out of reach might be able to afford a drone, or even several, more cheaply than a helicopter. Factors that Point to a Sustaining Product or Service Innovations that are more aptly considered sustaining than disruptive are likewise associated with certain characteristics. For example, is it focused on extending or enhancing an existing product or service? Does it target larger markets, and is it complex, with significant support requirements? Small radio-controlled drones have the potential to provide completely new approaches to reporting, while at the same time, they are built to be simple to use, right out of the box. Neither flying a device similar to a model airplane, nor streaming video from a small portable ...

Analyzing the factors that drive profit in a given industry, a powerful ability for a competitive intelligence organization, is the focus of Porter’s five forces framework. In this article, we look at how these five forces can be used to reveal the nature of a market, using the airline industry as an example. Force 1: Industry Competition – Rivals Rivalry with competitors has an obvious impact on profit within a market segment. The airline industry has a large number of participants, with product offerings that are only slightly differentiated among those providers, and growth of the total addressable market is quite low. Together, these factors tend to make commercial air travel extremely competitive, helping to explain the difficulty of driving up profitability. Force 2: Suppliers There are relatively few companies that supply large commercial aircraft, and there is some room for differentiating products, such as with innovative materials and engine technologies that increase fuel efficiency. And while industry growth is fairly low, those other factors tend to enhance the profit potential for aircraft makers, although they are obviously dependent on the often-troubled airlines. As a result, those suppliers tend to have widely varying profit over time. Force 3: Buyers Consumers purchasing air travel have such sophisticated Internet-based tools at their disposal that they continue to place extreme pressure on the airlines’ profitability. Buyers typically think of air tickets as being an undifferentiated commodity, and those buyers have the ability to switch among airlines from one purchase to the next without any added cost. These factors tend to put further challenges on airlines, in terms of profitability. Force 4: New Entrants In the airline industry, the arrival of a new airline can be disruptive, particularly since new carriers tend to focus on high-value route corridors and bill themselves as bargain carriers. ...

One of the key places where competitive intelligence shows its practicality is through battlecards. By assembling key information such as value propositions, competitor pain points, and responses to likely customer objections in one place, battlecards give sales teams a competitive edge. Positioning sales to win demands that you avoid shortcuts to make sure these documents are thorough and accurate. Why Making a Good Battlecard is a Challenge Sometimes beloved and sometimes derided, the battlecard is perhaps the most canonical competitive-intelligence deliverable. Part of their unique identity and value is that battlecards are not strictly objective—rather than simply acknowledging a deficiency in your product, for example, a battlecard focuses on helping the sales team maneuver around that weakness. A battlecard’s responses to customer objections must be able to take the edge off of strong arguments against real deficiencies in your product. Anticipating those objections and crafting responses to them ahead of time demands both art and science, not to mention getting inside the heads of your sales teams and their customers. Common Shortcomings to Avoid A common weakness with battlecards is to create a one-size-fits-all deliverable intended to fit all circumstances. Most companies have multiple sales organizations; inside sales, for example, has different needs than outside sales. And a sales engineer may want deep-dive technical comparisons, whereas an account manager needs information about how the sales motion gets started, what the entry point is, and what customer roles to target with what messages. A related issue is that competitive intelligence organizations sometimes try to fit all battlecards into a common template, rather than tailoring them to individual needs. If a critical examination reveals that your battlecard is simply your positioning document regurgitated into a new form, you haven’t created any real value. Send the Sales Field Well-Armed into Battle Insight is ...

For information about competitive intelligence as a discipline, the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) website is a great place to start. Its website provides a wealth of information resources, as well as opportunities for online networking and conferences. Beyond SCIP, we have a number of other favorite sources that we often recommend to our customers, colleagues, and students. We’ve rounded up a few in this article to get you started. Connect with People and Groups Using LinkedIn Rather than starting your inquiry with Google, LinkedIn may be a better choice. You can start by looking at profiles of people in the industry—including Sean Campbell and, Scott Swigart—and see what groups they are part of that might be useful to you. There are dozens of LinkedIn Groups that can help guide you in the right direction, including the SCIP group, which has been rapidly developing in the past year or so. You are likely to find interesting groups in areas other than competitive intelligence itself, such as market research, strategy and planning, and specific industries. A good approach is to sign up for a number of groups, get more notifications than you want, and then pare the list back to the best groups for you personally. Branch Out to Useful Organizations and Affiliated Resources Many of the online groups you will find on LinkedIn and elsewhere have formal organizations wrapped around them, which can lead you to additional resources. Good examples include the Market Research and Intelligence Association, the Association for Strategic Planning, and the Institute for Management Consultants USA. Organizations that focus on source collection, such as the Special Libraries Association’s Competitive Intelligence Division, are also valuable. These organizations all have opportunities and resources associated with them, including everything from podcasts to conferences and networking events. Note that you ...

Well-chosen business books are both intellectual pleasures and powerful tools. Those described here are the ones we constantly recommend to customers, pull out when we hold training sessions, and include on reading lists when we teach at the university. Most are available as ebooks, and all are readable enough to displace Angry Birds the next time you find yourself on a train or in a waiting room. Sharpening Your Usual Competitive Intelligence Approaches and Techniques Because sometimes, the freshest insights come from minor additions of perspective, our first category of books focuses on new twists to familiar best practices: The Thinker’s Toolkit (MD Jones). This great short read is full of bite-size critical-thinking techniques that can help you avoid being derailed by inaccuracies, biases, and wrong assumptions—your own and those of others. Profiting from Uncertainty (PJH Schoemaker and RE Gunther). Scenario planning reveals the futures a competitor is betting on, success factors they need to get there, and how that could box your company in. Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach (R Clark). Here is a rare success at bridging the gap to apply techniques from the public-sector intelligence community in the private sector. Understanding Patterns to Help Innovation Pay Off Innovation only creates success if properly directed. This second group of books gets to the heart of how detecting patterns in the market is the key to coaxing true business value out of innovation: Crossing the Chasm (GA Moore). Recognizing the patterns discussed in this book can help you avoid the failed trajectory of high-tech products that appeal to early adopters but never get mainstream traction. Innovator’s Dilemma (CM Christensen). Written almost in the style of a suspense thriller, this book shows why and how businesses need to capitalize on disruptive innovation to avoid becoming extinct. Seeing the Insights that ...

Building High-Value CI on a Foundation of KIQs We often see CI organizations define their goals with a focus on deliverables, such as battlecards and competitor profiles. It’s not surprising that people think in those tangible terms, but it puts the cart before the proverbial horse to decide how to represent results before knowing what form they’ll take. A better approach is to begin with key intelligence questions (KIQs), such as “how should we focus our marketing spend?” or “what features should we add to our product?” Avoid the Trap of Just Fetching Sticks Many CI roles and organizations exist before they have structured processes or even a clear charter. That can lead to a focus on low-value responses to deliverables requests instead of analysis. Worse, it can push CI into the role of an answer desk that fetches sticks for a living, servicing isolated questions such as “how many sales reps does competitor X have in the northeast US?” or “what was their sales volume of product Y last quarter?” A focus on fetching sticks also leads to success being measured by the wrong metrics, such as how many battlecards were produced or how many inquiry tickets were resolved. It’s a red flag if a CI organization is being asked for facts instead of analysis, synthesis, and insights. Beginning with goals based on KIQs can help avoid the danger. Base Projects on Goals Worthy of Analysis The first step to establishing a healthy CI operation is to identify which part of the company you are going to support (e.g., sales, marketing, engineering), and with what high-level goals (e.g., “accelerate sales,” “improve long-range planning”). Based on those goals, you can work with business units to define KIQs for a specific project, after which the CI organization can identify resources, plan ...

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 ...