Competitive Business
Intelligence is a process for gathering and analyzing information about the competitors'
activities and general business trends to further your own company's goals. In
short, when you are proactive, you are in control. When you are forced to become
reactive, you have lost control.
Over 95% of Fortune 500
companies openly admit they have an active and aggressive Competitive Business
Intelligence department within their organization, yet less than 6% of American companies
utilize any type of competitive intelligence processes.
Can you imagine any
military leader going into battle without crucial knowledge of the enemy -- including how
many troops there are, where they are coming from, the size and strength of their arsenal,
and what their possible strategy (or strategies) might be? It sounds crazy to
go into battle without assessing the enemy, but people in business do it all the time.
Instead
of sizing up their competitors, most business leaders take their competitors at face
value.
Instead
of predicting the competition's future activities, executives read about them in business
publications.
Instead
of asking why their competitor's sales are on the increase, many managers are content to
look only at their own company's numbers.
Some company leaders
erroneously believe that Competitive Business Intelligence is usually an inferred
marketing process, and expect marketing to single-handedly conduct all intelligence
gathering and analysis. The sales force then complains that they don't get what they
need from marketing, while marketing has no idea what competitors or market issues the
sales force is running up against. (see The Sales & Marketing Paradox)
"The
next best thing to knowing all about your own business is to know all about the other
fellow's business" -- John D. Rockefeller
You must
continually work to gain critical information on your competition, and this means training
your SALES and MARKETING groups to work as a TEAM -- to gather and feed competitive
intelligence into a central location on an on-going basis - to develop an aggressive
competitive business strategy. Setting up a Competitive Business Intelligence
process is much easier than trying to explain why you let your competitors gain an
advantage and win the war !!
"Until now, I didn't even know
that I could keep track of what my competitors were doing and planning, much less how to
exploit my competitor's weaknesses. Thank you for your insight, and for such
an entertaining speech. I can't remember laughing so hard while learning such
invaluable new ideas. After your examples, it seemed so obvious, and I kept
wondering why I had never come across these ideas while I was completing my MBA?"
-- Dolores Noble
Why should you
care about Competitive Business Intelligence? It offers you a unique and powerful set of
tools in which to better understand your market, your customers, and your
competition. And, if you still have competitors, despite how
great you think your business is doing, you had better begin to find out why!
"If you are not paranoid about
your competition ... YOU SHOULD BE" -- Peter Drucker
[The MATTRIXX Strategy]
[The Sales & Marketing Paradox]
