Smart business owners ensure that they have a clear picture of everything that goes on in their companies. These include understanding your customers, suppliers, competitors, market, emerging trends, among many more. Many tools and technologies are available to help you gather the information you require and perform essential analytics to achieve your business goals. Competitive intelligence is part of emerging trends that are changing the business world. The State of Competitive Intelligence Report for 2020 shows that 94-percent of businesses are using competitive intelligence. Due to digital intelligence, companies of all sizes can invest in CI, and as more small companies venture into E-commerce, the importance of competitive intelligence increases.
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1. Scaling Competitive Support To Partner And Internal Teams
A competitive intelligence program is meant to drive value to your company. It would be best if you scaled competitive support to all the necessary departments and teams to make the most of it. With many people working remotely today, there is an increased tribal knowledge loss and collaboration gaps. Fortunately, the remote environment has raised an appetite for competitive intelligence, and people want to be involved and connected.
Competitive intelligence and product marketers are now generating more newsletters or intel digests to facilitate continuous communication. Like other CI emerging trends, this engages competitive intelligence with the whole organization. The development of cross-functional committees is also on the rise to bring together all departmental leaders and encourage CI content usage and engagement.
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2. A Continuous Shift Between Tactical And Strategic Intelligence
There is an increasing shift between tactical and strategic intelligence among competitive intelligence teams. Teams that focused on tactical approaches are now moving to strategic solutions, including capturing market landscape changes and gathering information on prospects, the market, and customers.
Although knowing your competitors is vital, you must also learn about every system that affects your business. A 360-degree market landscape view adds value to an organization. It entails gathering all the information, including the emerging trends in the market, and attaining field intel.
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3. Enablement of Data-Informed Sales
Data plays a fundamental role in how companies run their business and make decisions. Gathering, analyzing, and using data about customers, competitors, and many more market factors help a company’s sales team to make informed decisions that will lead to more sales. Data informs you of your biggest competitors, the content you should be generating, and how your sales teams can enable sales proactively.
Since your sales team need to outperform your competitors to achieve your bottom line, you must give them the right tools to do their job. NetBase Quid offers tools and services to help you generate innovative business pitches, find cultural patterns, measure brand perception, collect creative inspiration, map and make sense of customer reviews, and perform competitive analysis.
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4. Competitive Enablement For Customer Success (CS) Teams
Retaining customers is critical for businesses, especially subscription-based companies. CS teams’ responsibilities may vary from one business to another, but the importance of providing competitive enablement cuts across. Specific CS teams own the renewal or upsell commercial responsibility while others possess the customer relationship.
Despite the differences, they all serve as the primary contact point for customers, meaning they are a company’s first defense line against its competitors. The way they interact with your customers contributes to your brand reputation, and they are in a strategic position to learn your competition’s actions. This group requires competitive support because they help you retain customers and gain a competitive edge.
You can gather factual information about your competitors online. However, if you invest in competitive intelligence, you will get more than easily accessible information. It provides data and analysis from different sources, including industry experts, new media, government records, and competitor and customer interviews.