Although competitive intelligence has been in existence for more than four decades, it is only since the past decade that it has made its way into the corporate culture as an essential business practice. It is now used by countless organizations around the world to understand their competitive environment, its opportunities as well as its challenges, acting as a bridge between information and action. According to Forbes, the goal of competitive intelligence is to identify challenges, advantages and white spaces to build a strategy that creates competitive differentiation.
However, with the advent of the age of technology, methods to conduct competitive intelligence have changed dramatically. Earlier forms of competitive intelligence required organizations to manually scour news, industry publications and libraries to gather information on the market and competitors. Today, all these sources of information have been moved online. Not only that, there’s much competitor intel to be found now, and in much more places than ever before. Having said that, the internet is a vast sea of information, and manually gathering information off the internet is still a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, like before, although a bit easier. So, what’s changed?
As the saying goes, need is the mother of innovation. Organizations needed something which could help them collect, analyze and distribute competitive intelligence, and they got it, in the form of competitive intelligence software and platforms. These platforms gather and analyze information from multiple online sources about products, customers, competitors, and other market factors, pretty much automating a long and arduous process. In this article, we’ll look at 7 reasons why your business needs such competitive intelligence software, and the benefits it can provide.
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence can be defined as the systematic process of observing, collecting, analyzing relevant information about the external business environment (mainly competitors and the market), and distributing it within an organization in order to make informed decisions and gain a competitive advantage. A number of organizations these days have Competitive Intelligence or CI as a function of their organization, much like marketing, sales and product development. The goal of CI is to understand one’s external environment – specifically the industry and the relevant competitors – as much as possible, as soon as possible. Competitive intelligence has to be timely and actionable, or else it isn’t intelligence. This is what separates it from information. To ensure that you get actionable intelligence in real-time while saving time and effort, a competitive intelligence software is ideally needed. Now that we have a general understanding of what competitive intelligence is, let us help you understand the reasons why your organization needs a competitive intelligence software/platform.
7 reasons to use a competitive intelligence software
- Tracking competitors
If you’re not paying attention to what your competitors are doing, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to sustain your business for a long time, regardless of how good your product or service might be. You’ll need to watch out for both direct and indirect competitors, and track their moves so that you can react accordingly to maintain a competitive advantage. A competitive intelligence software will provide you with a regular stream of intel on your competitors, so that you can implement a strategic response to their moves in advance.
- Finding opportunities
A competitive intelligence software will not only inform you about your competitors, but also what’s happening in the market. This will allow you to find new opportunities for expansion and growth. For example, you might unearth information about an organization that is looking for a service or product that only you provide, or you find out that you can sell more of your product by partnering up with another organization belonging to a different industry altogether. Regular competitive intelligence is guaranteed to bring opportunities your way.
- Differentiating yourself
Differentiation is something that most companies look for to make themselves a class apart from their competitors. Companies that use a competitive intelligence software will get regular insights about their market and competitors, and can easily create a unique brand identity by changing their positioning, adjusting their pricing, introducing new products, targeting specific accounts, uncovering an untapped market segment, etc.
- Identifying gaps
A competitive intelligence software is also a great tool for self-analysis. Using insights gathered from such a software, you can easily perform competitive analyses with your top competitors. List down their strengths and weaknesses alongside yours, and you’ll quickly find out what’s working in your favor and what’s not, as well as what’s something you should be doing but aren’t. Competitor analysis can sometimes identify gaps in the market as well, which can help you find a new angle, product or service that fills a need within the market no one knew was there.
- Avoiding pitfalls
It’s easy to make mistakes in business when you’re uninformed about the external circumstances. New challenges arise in business all the time, and regular insights from a competitive intelligence software can help you navigate around these challenges, avoiding mistakes that might be detrimental for your business. You also learn from the mistakes of your competitors, as you’re constantly tracking them. A steady flow of actionable intelligence will give you early indicators about something going wrong, and save you from committing blunders.
- Reducing Competitor’s Sales and Profits
The world of business is fiercely competitive. Your profit is your competitor’s loss and vice-versa. Competitive intelligence allows clamping down on your competitor’s market share, sales and profits, as you’re always one step (or several steps) ahead of them. A competitive intelligence software can help you track and identify your competitors’ client lists, service/product differentiators, marketing campaign components, sales strategies, service delivery processes, and customer service methods, which you can use to your advantage to beat them.
- Innovating successfully
The number one reason for the failure of long-standing business is a lack of innovation. Markets are highly-dynamic, and if you don’t keep up with their changing trends, one of your competitors is likely to leave you behind. A competitive intelligence software keeps you up-to-date with current trends, technology, and industry-related developments, allowing new ideas to flow into your organization, which in turn sparks ideation and innovation in the form of new offerings.
Conclusion
Forces such as globalization and digital technologies have already made the business world supersonic, and this is expected to only progressively increase with time. If organizations aren’t quick to adapt to these changes, they get left behind in oblivion. Competitive intelligence software and platforms are the need of the hour for businesses who don’t only wish to survive, but succeed sustainably. Timely and actionable insights are your only advantage against your competition, one that is unlikely to ever be obsolete. Thus, if your organization doesn’t have competitive intelligence software yet, it’s time to think long and hard about it, and have a discussion with your leadership. The future of your business is at stake here!
