Trends in Competitive Intelligence Driving Change
A look back at some past and present drivers of competitive intelligence practices.
Salesforce’s third edition of their State of Sales report tells us that ‘66% of high performing sales teams believe that AI will transform or substantially impact opportunity insights including competitor involvement within five years’. But even though CI today is included in many sales teams’ tech stacks, it suffers from a low level of adoption at only 47%.
Reasons for this could be a lack of education, on-boarding and incentives to consistently use the tech and take actions based on the intelligence. This makes the overall benefit and contribution of such platforms hard to prove to stakeholders, which represents an opportunity in itself missed.
The idea of gathering competitive intelligence isn’t new, but until recently there hasn’t been a very reliable method of doing so consistently and buy-in at an organizational level—so that the practice becomes ingrained in the company culture—has been famously difficult to keep, which is critical for CI success. According to Forrester, historically, credibility was an issue, and it could be one of the reasons still affecting adoption among new CI platforms today.
Traditional intelligence gathering methods were seen as untrustworthy among many sales teams because they would ‘hire analysts from non-sales backgrounds who might measure CMI performance using volume, rather than value metrics and construct content differently than sales teams need to use it.’
Going back even further, we can see that CI and CM practices have always had importance attached to them. Authors of a 1996 case study which conducted a deep-dive analysis into the competitive maturity of the South African banking industry noted six reasons for companies to pay attention to CI:
- The rapid increase in the pace of business
- Information overload
- Increased global competition from new customers
- Increasing aggressiveness of existing competition
- Quick and forceful effect of political changes
- Rapid technological change
To show how serious many organizations are about company-wide adoption of these sale-saving tools, many are overcoming any barriers to adoption by offering incentives. Machine Learning, AI and forward-looking KPIs such as customer experience mean that gathering CI is necessary. A recent MIT Sloan report backs up this trend in numbers: ‘At a time when business leaders generally want a more data-driven, holistic view of their customers, more than 80 per cent of respondents with incentives to use machine learning report that their functional KPIs help them develop such a view.’
You might believe that paying attention to competitors or having too many competitors at all is a bad thing. But as Hubspot notes, it comes as more of a support than an inhibition: ‘By their mere presence, a competitor is already helping you carve out your category, make noise, and educate your users. They are legitimizing your idea, and proving there’s a market for it.’ The real way to capitalize on the fact that you have 10, 20+ competitors is to gather intelligence on their practices, products lines, promotional techniques, market moves, entries and exits, everything and anything out there and putting this data to work for your organization. With this intelligence, you’ll be able to position your offering correctly, direct attention in the right areas and respond to threats quickly.
Establishing a process of competitive intelligence within an organization in today’s business landscape is a no-brainer and crucial in times when a typical company can face over 10 competitors.
Talk to us today about getting a CI system up and running in your company.