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Authenticity

Smart competitive intelligence anticipates, identifies and assesses competitive threats and opportunities, then deliver authoritative analysis for聽strategic and operation decision-making, inbound content creation, onboarding, sales enablement and customer retention.

There are two basic sources of competitive intelligence: external and internal. External intel demands the time and resources required to聽search and dig, filter and sift, scrape, copy, paste and clip. It鈥檚 out there, among the billions of bits and bytes, hiding in plain sight or buried on LinkedIn and corporate archives.聽Most use some franken-stack of APIs, Pocket, Evernote, Google docs and/or wikis鈥攕ad, stuffed, out-of-date wikis. All relayed across multiple chat channels and email, in various states of edit and update.

The term proprietary CI refers to the good stuff that already resides in the minds, chats and notes of your accounts and service teams. It鈥檚 the exclusive insight gathered via debriefs and event gossip sessions, internal comms, win loss analysis聽and all that fancy CRM reporting you built.

Put it all together and you鈥檝e got a complete and complex picture of your competitive landscape.

Actionability

Make it detailed and make it useable. Assets like product sheets, sales battlecards, competitor matrices and demos are all the result of curated, competitive intelligence. As above, you are the authority. It鈥檚 your job to deliver directional (not prescriptive) intel to your audience.

Sales battlecards, for example, should explicitly be built and used to sell against a specific competitor in a specific use case. 鈥淭his is what you say to __________ about ___________.鈥�

Accessibility

Competitive intel tools are used in different ways by different audiences. It鈥檚 important to deliver your analysis in a way that resonates with whomever it鈥檚 intended for. So, sales content like battlecards and competitor sheets should use the unique language used by your accounts teams and reps. Likewise, assets for CSRs, product managers and executive leaders should be tailored for those specific use cases.

If it can鈥檛 be found, it won鈥檛 be used. Smart competitive intelligence content, such as sales battlecards, competitor matrices or pitch sheets have to be easy to access, any time. That means one live聽version available on commonly used channels via any mobile device. If your assets are useable and effective, your frontline teams need to be able to use it any where, any way. Imagine the power of a sales battlecard immediately available via text or voice query.

Accountability

Smart competitive intelligence will have an organizational impact, from top-level business decisions to product development, positioning, inbound and outbound activities, hiring, training, selling and servicing. Measure every single touch-point in away that is relevant to your business. Here鈥檚 a little article about ways to聽measure sales enablement that might give you some ideas.

Do this to fine tune your process and outputs, as well as to highlight the impact of the work. So often we talk to Product Marketing Managers who are tasked with CI accountability, yet not the tools nor the time to really deliver. We hear you.

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