Through my 15-year marketing career, spanning three Fortune 500 companies and a stint in Silicon Valley...


...I've discerned that the competitive intelligence function in most companies can be categorized into three buckets...

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Useless or Near Useless
*
Marginally Helpful
*
Deep and meaningful insight

The first category of useless or near useless competitive intelligence is quite frankly the stuff that most companies produce. They'll track competitor gross and operating margins, revenues, organic/inorganic growth rate, cash flows and stock price. For senior management, this information is interesting to the degree that it's been neatly packaged in a nice Word doc or PDF, but it's nothing that can't be found in Hoovers, Capital IQ or the Wall Street Journal.

The second type of competitive intelligence is marginally helpful. This is the type of information is typically assembled by those in the competitive intelligence function. It contains a compilation of different data sources such as Gartner, Forrester, competitor annual reports and 10-K's, and anything else that can be found on the internet with a well-defined Google search. It's packaged up, and sent to senior management with a pretty bow, and for the most part it's of marginal value in understanding competitive intent.

The deep and meaningful insight is where competitive intelligence really needs to evolve to. As a colleague of mine is fond of saying, "Deep competitive intelligence is getting to the heart of the matter." It's synthesizing all the learnings found in the annual reports, 10-Ks and other information sources and coming to solid and verifiable conclusions about where your competition is strong and where/if they have a weak underbelly.

Going a step further, deep competitive intelligence is also about using the assembled information to get such a compelling picture of the competition that one can "predict" competitive intent with a high degree of confidence.

Where does deep insight come from?

A well-trained marketing analyst, who is focused on an industry and group of companies will, over time, gain a depth of knowledge on the competition to understand strategic intent. Of course, that requires a real commitment to competitive intelligence and the associated resources to fund it.

Another source for deeper competitive intelligence is the analyst communities who have vendors practically tripping over them with PowerPoint's detailing customer wins, strengths and 3-5 year plans. A quick briefing with the right analyst can provide what your competition is good at, where they falter and where they're headed.

A final source for deeper competitive insight could be former employees of a key competitor who might have some appropriate nuggets to divulge. Of course, it's important to be respectful of any non-disclosure agreements in place.

Deeper competitive intelligence can not only improve the strategic understanding of competitor intent, but also helps in the all important day to day, "hand-to-hand" sales combat, where deals are won or lost based on a comprehensive understanding of what a competitor is going to propose or price.

It's a war out there. Get to the heart of the matter, and win more often, with deeper competitive intelligence.