Competitive Intelligence in the company: key decisions where it is essential

The intelligence function is characterised by being a cross-cutting function across the organisation, serving many other business functions, from innovation to talent management, and enabling organisational competitive intelligence.

Three of the areas of the company that make the most intensive use of competitive intelligence are marketing and sales, innovation, and strategic management.

The list of tactical and strategic decisions taken within a company is so broad and varied that it would be impossible to cover them all in a single article. So we will focus on the most common ones that the competitive intelligence function supports within the company.

Decisions in marketing and sales

The decisions to be taken in the marketing and sales area are sometimes clearly separated into tactical and strategic decisions, with some differences in each.

Tactical decisions are those fuelled by operational intelligence about what is happening right now. This is information that is consumed quickly and to which the directly involved team reacts.

Examples include:

• Making use of new business opportunities: Depending on the sector, the intelligence hypotheses we use to identify them will be very different. Even within each sector, each business line in our company will develop its own hypotheses. Once a new customer or opportunity has been identified, we will take an immediate reactive decision.
• Prioritising customers: Especially the early identification of customers’ financial problems and the risk of non-payment.
• Scheduling events, such as conferences or trade fairs, at which our company should be present. We will do this based on the intelligence generated about what interests our customers and our competitors’ moves.

Strategic decisions in marketing and sales are based on the continuous collection of information and the development of conclusions supported by that ongoing monitoring.

Some examples of strategic decisions are:

• Market size and market share targets: Other areas of the company may find it strange, but sometimes it is not at all easy to reach a consensus figure on the size of the market and its subsectors.
• Evolution of the marketing messaging: In a business-to-business, or B2B, environment we will identify our buyer personas and follow both their publications and our customers’ corporate publications. Depending on our positioning strategy and the information acquired, the marketing team can evolve, almost in real time, the guiding principles of corporate communication, as well as continually improve product communication.
• Classification of competitors, to carry out competitive analysis from different perspectives and thus obtain a complete information view.
• Design of sales force training plans: Although it is a point that does not receive much attention, our sales team needs to be up to date in order to maintain an enriching conversation with our customers. The design of the calendar of events, courses, conferences, etc., can be greatly enriched through proper monitoring of opportunities that are not only aimed at training our team, but also provide the chance to establish personal relationships with other industry players, including customers.

Decision-making in the Innovation Department

The innovation management area is one of those that makes more intensive use of competitive intelligence and technology watch. Here, some of our customers point to several decision-making processes that are supported by the intelligence function:

• Prioritising innovation lines: For this we can develop intelligence from two different perspectives:
  • On the one hand, from a reactive point of view: identifying the gaps between what the market is increasingly interested in, and our product and services portfolio.
  • On the other hand, with a forward-looking view: identifying the key factors in the evolution of the sector “as a system”, and leveraging them to facilitate exponential growth in the medium term.
• Investment decisions in a new technology that will allow the product or processes to be improved, for example by reducing production costs. Monitoring new market proposals from suppliers, and the early decision to incorporate them, often translates into a competitive advantage.
• Go/no-go decisions on ongoing innovation projects. The continuation of a new product project may be determined by information appearing in our technology watch channels—for example, a new substitute technology, a patent, or the publication of a competitor’s project or product. The absence of such information will also be a factor to consider when deciding whether or not to continue with the project.

In addition, one example we must not forget in innovation decision-making is updating the technical team’s training plans: monitoring courses, conferences and other types of events, sector-related or technology-focused, that we can incorporate into the team’s knowledge-updating plans.

Strategic management supported by Competitive Intelligence

The concept of strategic management refers to certain decisions in areas that companies may cover across different functions, such as Internationalisation or Expansion, Corporate Venturing, etc. Let’s look at some of those key decisions supported by competitive intelligence:

Internationalisation decisions

Internationalisation confronts a company with many key decisions that must be taken with as much information and as high a quality as possible, such as:

• Choosing the countries to focus on
• How to approach landing in a particular country, bearing in mind that good practices are not the same in every country
• Choosing the preferred local partners to collaborate with
• Choosing the catalogue products we should prioritise

Monitoring draft legislation in the destination countries is essential to obtain early warnings about changes that may affect our products or operations.

Inorganic growth, M&A

Mergers and acquisitions in the sector are always a focus of monitoring for the company’s strategic area. Choosing the right country and company to acquire must be supported by Intelligence work. Of course, these decisions will be influenced by the “merger & acquisitions” in which other sector agents are involved, such as competitors, suppliers and customers. Those M&A operations must be monitored continuously.

We must pay special attention to the confidentiality of this intelligence task, also within the organisation, because any leak could hinder or even cause this type of acquisition project to fail. Even if we have developed a distributed and collaborative intelligence function in the company, there are aspects of intelligence that must be especially confidential and not accessible to the whole analyst team.

Corporate Venturing, or Corporate Venture Capital

Corporate venture capital initiatives have proliferated greatly in recent years. From banks to insurers, from food companies to automotive manufacturers or private universities, any company of a certain size has created—or is considering creating—a Corporate Venturing division. Some companies have done so convinced that it is the method to drive their innovation and long-term survival, while others have done so by imitation and to take part in the trend, as just another part of their corporate communication.

The Corporate Venturing area is one of those that most needs competitive and technological intelligence to make good decisions:

• Prioritising the sectors and technologies to invest in
• Choosing the candidate start-ups to monitor closely
• Identifying possible partners among the Venture Capitals active in the priority sectors

Let’s not forget that the Corporate Venture team must closely monitor competitors’ operations in this field, as well as monitor even more closely, if possible, the start-ups that compete with those with which the company collaborates or in which it invests.

Competitive Intelligence in strategic planning

Foresight feeds information into Strategic Planning.

When we review the strategic plan, we make the largest set of high-impact decisions in the company. These decisions must be the best informed of all those supported by Competitive Intelligence. But that collection and provision of information cannot be carried out in isolation at a specific moment of need. The information required to review a strategic plan must be gathered continuously, and to be useful from a strategic point of view it must follow a method, such as strategic scenario planning.