Gathering Competitive Intelligence: Creating a first-class competition program depends on your ability to collect and disseminate information about competitors. Information that stakeholders will actually rely on when buying to beat their competitors.

However, gathering information about competitors is not as easy as a quick Msn and Yahoo lookup done through messaging on your company’s Relaxed network.

Competitive intelligence teams must have a defined process for identifying their competitors.

After that, the goal is to explore them beyond superficial understanding. The third – and often the most difficult – step is to share this competitive information with the stakeholders who need it.

No matter how difficult these actions are, we will not force you to act alone. We’ve put together 6 steps to help your program gather competitive intelligence.

6 Steps to Gathering Competitive Intelligence on Your Business

Before delving into competitive intelligence research, develop in advance the strategy you need to track and what competitive intelligence issues arise.

This drawing board will save you from wasting your time and effort revealing insights that don’t really help your business.

Step 1. Determine your direct rivals

Clearly identifying your competitors is the first step in creating a natural competitive environment. Depending on your industry, you may have many or even few competitors.

In any situation, your primary goal should be to identify your most direct competitors. In other words: companies sell basically the same stuff as you, to the same customers.

The best way to limit the frequently appearing companies is to make an assessment of win and loss.

If you methodically keep in mind what sales reps do during deals and the comments your prospects make after an offer is won or lost, you’ll get quality results that highlight what could be the biggest risk to your business. .

But you don’t want to depend only on the qualitative side of the win-lose valuation.

The clearest way to map your executive’s competitors is to have your reps list the competitor area in your CRM, which will provide you with data-backed proof that this is most common in your deals and your winning prices compared to them.

Currently getting your reps to actually complete your opponent’s field… easier said than done. Raise your hand if the information in your CRM is more messy than in a toddler’s bedroom.

One of the most effective ways we’ve incentivized reps to clear the competitive realm is by including Klue combat cards in Salesforce.

Representatives will be initiated to mention the presence of a competitor throughout the offer opportunity phase. They will then instantly have access to your Competitive Battle Cards on that particular opponent using the Klue Battlecard Switch.

P.S. Learn how Mindy Regnell, Principal Market Analyst at Postscript, prioritizes her competitors.

Step 2. Determine key locations of rate of passion and research golas

The competitive information you can gather can often seem limitless. It is critical to be specific about the places you want to learn about your competitors, the internal groups you want to help with understanding, and the goals you intend to achieve with your competitive intelligence program.

With that in mind, your competitive intelligence research is more instructional and you don’t drown in a sea of nonsensical information.

With a clearer understanding of the goals you have set for yourself in gathering competitive information, you should also develop the methods you will use to measure the success of your program.

These can be both quantitative and qualitative key performance indicators, but it is very important to have a buying opportunity to show the impact of your program on the company’s goals. Or your collective initiatives are just throwing darts at night.

Step 3. Gathering external and interior competitive intelligence

There are many resources that you could use to gather information about your opponents. We prefer to damage them directly in internal and external competitive arrangements.

With a competitive intelligence device, you can have instant access to external information found on the Internet and, more importantly, a live master database that allows your entire company to share real-time internal information and store it for easier access.

Instead, here are some of the top competitive intelligence resources you could use to gather information about your competitors.

External Data

Information about your opponent is in every corner of the Internet, and here are a few places to dig:

1. Browse websites

You are who your customers say you are. User review websites like G2 Group, Capterra, and Trust Radius are competitive intelligence gold mines where customers reveal beans to your rivals.

It has a bit of everything: the discomfort factors that potential customers face and how well your competitor provides services, their satisfaction with the product, the quality of the solution, and a look at the size and industry of their customers.

2. Social networks and content

A company’s social media presence and the content they share gives insight into what they want to talk to and how they position themselves in the industry.

Corporate social media accounts are an essential internet marketing tool that provides a microphone to speak directly with their future and current customers, so you better be mindful of what they say.

Competitive intelligence gathered through a competitor’s content strategy can go beyond just the keywords they target and the topics they want to be experts in. Take a look at what they talk to in meetings, or better yet, what they profile. in case studies.

These content elements at the bottom of the funnel are used to close deals, so this identifies insight right into your competitor’s customer base.

3. Product, price and packaging of the product on competing sites.

Pricing is constantly in the spotlight of potential customers. Your sales team doesn’t want to get into nasty price battles, so it’s not hard to have battle cards with competitor pricing information and tips on how to position yourself in comparison.

The pricing information of the company must be available on their website or known to your sellers from previous competitive deals.

Support lines and FAQ web pages on your competitors’ websites are a clever competitive intelligence resource that provides information about the user experience (UX) of an item.

Make sure the group provides the best support in places where competing customers often experience problems. Marketing teams can also benefit from this information by developing projects to address these pain points that competing customers struggle with.

Internal Data

The idea that competitive intelligence teams are waving their magic wand with an easy favor by gathering external public information is a fallacy.

The most tidbits of collected information about competitors are internal resources coming from your own company.

Those offhand comments that salespeople listen to on a phone call or emails your competitors send to your current customers will give you the real gist of competitive insight that stakeholders will sink their teeth into.

However, the key to internal intelligence (and all competitive intelligence for that matter) is getting the confidence that people share what they listen to, that this competitive intelligence doesn’t get via email, Msn and Yahoo doc or chat line .

Step 4. Centralize Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence is as useful as individuals. Disagreements often begin to arise as employees keep their understanding of the competition to themselves, ignore what they’ve been listening to, or simply don’t know how to share it with their entire company.

Competitive intelligence teams should be not just scientists, but also custodians of competitive intelligence. Here’s how you can offer groups from a distance.

Imagine most likely a bookstore and guidebooks randomly dumped on the shelves. They are not classified by category or author.

Would you definitely find the guide you wanted? Probably no. Well, at least it’s not easy.

Competitive intelligence teams keeping external and internal information in an easily accessible location is an important first step in organizing the collection of competitive intelligence.

Step 5. Develop rival accounts

This way, your competitive information stays in an easily accessible place, making your life much easier. Now it’s time to earn so that stakeholders can also use this information. Let’s help them find the guide they want so they don’t leave empty handed.

By classifying arrangements by specific competitors, you will begin to develop a complete report on the companies you are against. This is a universal way for employees to get a comprehensive picture of a competitor.

Step 6. Share competitive understandings with appropriate stakeholders

While having a complete understanding of your opponent by creating accounts is a great next step, we can do more on Gathering Competitive Intelligence.

When making a purchase, in order for your stakeholders to benefit from insight, the information collected about competitors must be relevant to them. According to the 2021 Competitiveness Support Report, the biggest challenge stakeholders face is that they are not getting the understanding of competition that matters to their role.

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