Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence, with its potential to significantly enhance mid-size to large company strategies, is crucial for an enterprise's business approach. The benefits it offers, such as gaining a competitive edge and mitigating risks, make it too valuable to overlook.
Competitor intelligence can be divided into three levels: Strategic direction, best practices, and sales and marketing.
Strategic direction: This is not just important; it's crucial. Analyzing competitors at the strategic level is significant; it can help a company move in the right direction, thus contributing to market leadership in a particular industry. It helps companies understand the strategic direction of the competition and its impact on them. One can analyze the acquisitions, strategy, product strategy, and other strategic moves the competition makes and explore how these moves will affect the company.
I can give you two clear examples of the same company that was quite ahead of the competition and lost to the competition simultaneously.
AWS was way ahead of the competition when it launched the cloud in 2006, while Microsoft and Google took two years to launch their cloud offerings. Microsoft and Google are still trying to catch up with AWS.
AWS and Google were also caught off guard when ChatGPT was launched and its popularity among B2B and B2C users. Microsoft invested heavily in OpenAI, which allowed the company to integrate GenAI tech from OpenAI into its products, creating a strategic advantage for itself.
Best practices: The competition provides a wealth of learning opportunities. Understanding how they run their company, why they are successful, and what they do differently can inspire and motivate companies to implement similar strategies in their businesses.
A deep analysis of one or two leading companies in a particular industry is required to understand their operations and what are the best practices that can be adopted.
During one of the consulting projects for a telecom company, I researched the leading telecom companies globally, trying to understand what they are doing differently and how to develop a list of best practices to follow. Our client adopted many of these best practices.
Sales & Marketing: Developing battle cards is vital to ensuring salespeople can effectively increase the rate at which they win the deals. This involves collecting information about their products, pricing, marketing strategies, sales tactics, strengths, and weaknesses. Based on the collected information, various kinds of battle cards can created for competition, including company overview battle cards, product overview battle cards, pricing battle cards, etc. These battle cards can improve the win rates, help find the gaps in the product portfolio and help marketing develop effective messaging and positioning.
In my consulting career, I have helped numerous companies develop detailed battle cards that helped them understand the competition's product portfolio, gaps, strengths, and weaknesses. Often, I have seen these companies not capitalize on shared information.
At Strategy Spark Advisory, we specialize in providing customized competitive intelligence solutions designed specifically for the unique needs of medium and large-sized businesses. Let us help you stay ahead of the competition.
