A competitive intelligence team is a lot like entrepreneurship or an entrepreneur experience in a company. Think of the competitive intelligence team as a small business serving the company. There are a lot of “customers” with diverse needs, and a competitive intelligence team has to efficiently satisfy their customers to help the company make sales.

A lot of companies that start competitive intelligence divisions begin by trying to offer high level deliverables without building a foundation. This can limit overall success and hold teams back from providing a diverse range of benefits. There are a range of levels and deliverables, and going step-by-step through the levels will help establish consistency and quality. It will also allow a team to reliably enhance existing deliverables while developing new products.

Level one goals are to increase company knowledge and culture surrounding competitive intelligence. Most of the systems might already exist, such as using Microsoft products, and investments might be in the shape of assigning an additional task to a team member from an existing company division.

What services and products are you offering as part of your program? There is a huge range of deliverables that your competitive intelligence team might be able to offer. Low-investment and low-detail deliverables might include creating a newsletters or solution positioning statements, while higher-investment and higher-detail deliverables would include competitor assessments or roadmaps.

A great first deliverable for a Level One organization is a newsletter with regular updates. Just as with battle cards, newsletters can and should be customized for the recipient. Of course, it cannot simply be a list of events. An effective newsletter includes original analysis and content created by the internal competitive intelligence team. One of the most important aspects that should be considered when creating a newsletter is the question: What does this mean to me? What does it mean to the recipients?

After creating the newsletter, the team has to decide how it is distributing the materials. Will it be emailed to recipients? Will it be posted publicly on social media? In any case, it should be branded with your logo or mark, and it should have an executive summary at the top. This can go a long way to building an informed competitive organization.

CompeteIQ was built by experienced practitioners. The team helps improve intelligence practices that in turn can help improve the company practices. This in turn helps make the company as a whole more competitive, and able to win more competitive deals.