Establishing an efficient and successful competitive intelligence (CI) program is no small feat. There are many elements a successful CI program must include to achieve the goals of the organization it’s serving.
The average enterprise CI team is 3 to 5 people, and they serve over 500 stakeholders. A successful CI must provide results and insights relevant to those stakeholders.
One way to determine the success of your CI program is to establish the goals and outcomes stakeholders want to see from the program.
This blog will outline three outcomes stakeholders in your organization want to see from the CI program.
Identifying How Competitors are Solving Problems
Internal stakeholders like your executive team, sales team, and product teams want information about how your competitors are identifying and solving problems like the ones your organization may be facing.
This can help executive teams create new strategies and take different approaches to the problems at hand.
Product teams may see benefits like adding new features, discovering bugs to patch, and providing a better user experience overall.
Sales teams may use these insights to craft better objection handling, influence their outbound strategies, and target new prospects.
Marketing teams want to know how to position the product based on market interests and competitive strengths.
Procurement & supply chain teams want to know how to price and predict supply needs and negotiate contracts fairly.
Increased Speed in Knowledge Gathering
Stakeholders, especially teams that deal with day-to-day data, need fast, comprehensive, and reliable intel. Without comprehensive insights, teams will not be able to monitor thousands of sources, get a quick trend analysis, and have the most relevant information highlighted for their organization to respond efficiently. Without AI and technology, it’s near impossible to do that.
Knowledge gathering is a hefty task itself and ensuring the insights gathered are relevant to stakeholders across the organization is difficult for one team to handle on its own.
CI programs are built to gather knowledge, filter for relevancy based on parameters your team sets, and provide and distribute those insights to the proper stakeholders.
All stakeholders want faster and more reliable insights that can be stored in a central knowledge system for easy access across the organization.
This means teams will spend less time doing their own research and instead will have a comprehensive collection of the best resources to make decisions from.
Deeper Analysis of Knowledge Gathered for Data-Driven Decisions
A CI platform can enable your stakeholders the ability to dive deeper into the data gathered for a multitude of reasons: more time, faster data collection, more relevant insights, AI filtering, efficient technology, etc.
The data and knowledge gathered by a CI program are more reliable and can enable your teams to improve their strategy and decision-making.
Stakeholders want more data-driven decisions, so users and clients have greater experiences with the product or service being sold.
AI will filter and expose trends so teams can spend time digging into the trends rather than searching for the trends on their own.
With the level of efficiency technology can bring for gathering and distributing information, you can focus on more strategic work and hone in on things like primary research to dive deeper into the details that may not be obvious with an initial google search.
Conclusion
To have a successful and efficient competitive intelligence program, you’ll need to outline the goals you want it to achieve and determine the outcomes you want to see.
A CI program should be multifaceted and serve several different teams in your organization and serve as a central knowledge repository for all members to access.
Show all your stakeholders, internal and external, that you know what they want out of your CI program by establishing goals, parameters, and outcomes you want to see.
A successful CI program will address all those areas and help your stakeholders improve the organization’s revenue, retention, and data-driven decisions.
