How to do competitive intelligence research
Want to do your own competitive research?
The good news is that there’s no secret formula, and anyone can gather competitive intelligence.
The bad news is that you’ll need a lot of time to gather information, and the determination and persistence to uncover hard-to-find stories and data.
At Aqute, we’ve spent more than two decades refining our approach to competitive intelligence, and this experience gives us an advantage when it comes to uncovering the most valuable and insightful information.
But that’s not to say you can’t use a DIY approach to competitive intelligence – just that it will take you time to learn where to look, and how to access crucial details.
Assuming you’re prepared to do the groundwork, let’s explore what goes into competitive intelligence.
First, we need to know what we’re looking for, and why we’re looking.
Competitive intelligence strategy
Without a clear plan, you could easily spend months gathering information that has little value to your organisation.
Questions to ask:
What do you want to achieve?
What problems do we encounter because we don’t know the competitive landscape?
How could we support our sales team?
What do our salespeople need to know?
Why do we lose deals?
What are the blind spots in our current market knowledge?
Your answers to these questions should give you some idea of the scope of your research. You need to define:
Which competitors to include in your research
Which data points to focus on
The level of detail that is useful
Once you’ve defined the limits of your project, you can begin gathering data. For most companies, this means creating a spreadsheet and starting your secondary research.
Secondary and primary research
At Aqute Intelligence, we use a two-stage approach to data gathering. The first step, rather confusingly, is the secondary research. We call it secondary because of the types of sources we use, not the order it’s conducted.
Secondary research uses publicly-available resources to build a foundation of knowledge. Ideally, this enables us to gather a lot of the basic data required by your strategy. The additional benefit of secondary research is that it gives researchers a chance to develop their market knowledge – and be well prepared for the primary research phase.
Secondary research sources include:
Websites
Databases
Company reports
LinkedIn posts, profiles and status updates
Industry news
Primary research involves more direct contact with stakeholders and company representatives. This may include attending trade shows, visiting stores or calling current and former employees. The primary research phase is the time to clarify issues raised during the secondary phase, to confirm findings and bring data to life with first-person accounts.
Presenting competitive intelligence
The world’s largest companies gather competitive intelligence because it helps them take advantage of opportunities, dodge risks and get ahead of their competitors. But this information is only valuable when it is usable.
The key to making competitive intelligence usable – and used – is to present the information in a format that makes sense for the audience.
As with any design project, the key is understanding your audience.
If you are preparing competitive intelligence for a sales team, which metrics or insights are they most interested in? Would they prefer battlecards, or a spreadsheet?
Does your product development team need different information?
And if you are preparing reports for senior leaders or directors, what information are they most interested in seeing?
Rather than assuming what an audience wants, it’s worth asking the question so you can achieve more with your competitive intelligence.
A professional competitive intelligence partner
If your organisation would like professional support with your competitive intelligence project, Aqute can help. With more than a decade of experience working for global firms, we understand how to navigate complex industrial landscapes and gather hard-to-find information.
Want to do your own competitive research?
The good news is that there’s no secret formula, and anyone can gather competitive intelligence.
The bad news is that you’ll need a lot of time to gather information, and the determination and persistence to uncover hard-to-find stories and data.
At Aqute, we’ve spent more than two decades refining our approach to competitive intelligence, and this experience gives us an advantage when it comes to uncovering the most valuable and insightful information.
But that’s not to say you can’t use a DIY approach to competitive intelligence – just that it will take you time to learn where to look, and how to access crucial details.
Assuming you’re prepared to do the groundwork, let’s explore what goes into competitive intelligence.
First, we need to know what we’re looking for, and why we’re looking.
