A competitive edge is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain.
Competitive intelligence is the collection and analysis of data and information of customers, competitors, and other market factors that provide a competitive advantage to the business.
According to research, 63% of companies face disruption, while 44% are highly susceptible.
Competitive intelligence services help create business strategies on data-backed predictions on the market.
Businesses can understand their competitive landscape and capture, analyze, and act on the insights gained from competitive intelligence services.
Competitive intelligence tells a business about the opportunities and threats in the business environment that lead to the formation of effective and efficient business practices.
7 Key Elements of Competitive Intelligence
A business can genuinely gain a competitive advantage when all the departments and teams in the company get access to the intelligence that impacts them. It would help the teams to improve on the factors and respond to the competitive intelligence. The seven key elements of competitive intelligence are:
- Sector Intelligence: A sector means a large group of companies having similar businesses, like automobiles, healthcare, communications, etc. Sector intelligence gathers information on what is happening in the sector in which the business operates.
Every sector has distinctive characteristics and risk profiles, and sector intelligence tracks the large-scale economic shifts in the various companies within the sector.
- Market Intelligence: A market is the meeting place of buyers and sellers and is a little more specific than an industry. Market intelligence gives information about the entire market and informs the business about its current position in the market, its competitors, and its customers.
Companies need to perform market intelligence regularly to close profitable deals and remain competitive in the industry. Market intelligence gives an insight into customers’ needs, opportunities, and problems in new markets, evaluation of the company’s products against the competitor’s products, and the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors to provide more value than others in the industry.
- Competitor Intelligence: A company gets to know about business decisions and movements of its competing companies through competitor analysis. Businesses can benefit from knowing how their competitors design and develop products, market them, win sales, and strategize in the industry.
Competitor intelligence does not focus only on sales, it tells every department how its coinciding departments at other companies operate. It can help each team to develop winning strategies and add to the company’s revenue.
- Innovation Intelligence: Innovation intelligence lets a company solve its operational problems by utilizing ideas and methods through a new approach. Innovation intelligence helps a business, irrespective of its size, grow and evolve in the changing market dynamics by gaining early market advantage.
Innovative intelligence not only helps a business in innovating its processes and products, but it also shows the business the way to keep pace with the ever-changing consumer preferences. Businesses can identify the pain points of their customers and provide better solutions than competitors to the customers.
- Sales Intelligence: Businesses are constantly changing, and the sales teams need advanced tools and techniques to monitor these changes. Sales intelligence offers information to the sales teams by using data and tools. This information helps the sales teams make better decisions while buying ready accounts, following leads, creating customer profiles, and managing relevant data.
Sales intelligence helps sales teams focus on accounts that need immediate attention and identify triggers that indicate buyer readiness.
- Procurement and Supply Chain Intelligence: A business needs relevant information regarding its supply and vendor contracts to make profitable sourcing and category management decisions. Procurement and supply chain intelligence gives the company an insight into the demand and supply, the sale price of competitors, costs of production and storage, regulatory risks and taxation costs, vendor analysis, and market supply intelligence. It helps the business make crucial decisions on how much to produce, where to produce, and at what price to sell what has been produced.
- ESG Intelligence: ESG intelligence shows the impact of the business’s activities on environmental and social issues and the impact it would have on stakeholders and the government. ESG intelligence lets the business adapt to the changing business landscape through sustainability. It can help decrease costs and increase revenues for the business in the long run.
Businesses can outsource competitive intelligence services to expert partners to cope with the current dynamic landscape and get an insight into potential markets.
