What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence (CI for short) aims to help businesses improve their decision making and strategic planning through the acquisition, analysis and dissemination of information related to products, customers, competitors and any other industry specific data.
The terms competitive intelligence and business intelligence (BI) are often used interchangeably, however business intelligence officially refers to the use of data analysis software and systems to examine internal data sets held by a company.
Why gather competitive intelligence?
Analysis of internal and external data has many advantages for companies as they complete their sales and marketing plans…
- Reveal customer purchasing plans — Achieving greater sales from exiting customers should be a key part of business growth plans. The more you know about your customer’s buying patterns over the next 12 months, the better targets you can set for account management teams.
- Complete competitor analysis — What are you main competitors planning? Their activity affects your plans, and being forewarned allows your business to develop both defensive strategies (to retain existing customers) and proactive propositions (to attract new clients from your competitors).
- Better sales pipeline planning — Customer growth targets need to be realistic and require building a sales pipeline that supports your aims. Competitive intelligence allows you to build a pipeline that feeds the right sales lead to your sales teams, at the right moment.
- Test your internal data sets — Poor data means poor sales results. Whether it’s information on existing customers or a prospect database, you need to make sure each record is accurate, if it is to support your business growth plans.
How to gather competitive intelligence
B2B CM provide several services to support your competitive intelligence gathering strategy. Through telemarketing, and data analysis, it is possible to build up a picture of the competitive landscape quickly, and at a lower cost, than other data-gathering methods.
- Analyse existing data — Errors and omissions in existing data reduce your competitive advantage and lead to ‘false’ planning assumptions about future activity and target audiences. B2B CM take your data and run it through a full audit, giving you a firm foundation on which to build.
- Cleanse and enhance databases — Prospect targeting and building a workable sales pipeline are essential if your business is to have a competitive advantage. We have the skills to work your data, checking its accuracy and adding in new information to boost your competitive intelligence.
- Customer contact programme — The simplest way of finding out your current customers’ future activity is to ask them. We can take your customer database and contact each record in turn, finding out how market conditions are affecting them, and what their buying plans are, leaving your current account management team free to concentrate on their core activities.
- Best practice & competitor benchmarking — Building competitive intelligence isn’t just an insular activity, it involves looking outside your organisation at the wider market you operate in. B2B CM can benchmark your customer touch-points against your competitors and analyse their current activity, helping you plan your response.
Competitive intelligence should be an important part of business planning, if your organisation is to reach its full potential. Telemarketing allows you to quickly build competitive intelligence on existing customers, future prospects and competitors. Combined, this gives you strong foundations on which to build.
To improve your business planning, and develop a strong growth plan, contact B2B CM on +44 (0) 1244 521 557.