How to calculate the ROI of competitive intelligence in your company

How can you justify the budget for the competitive intelligence function in your company? The answer lies in calculating its ROI: a complex but essential challenge.

There are three main approaches to calculating the return on investment of the intelligence function:

ROI based on efficiency: how competitive intelligence multiplies productivity

This measures how much time and cost is saved thanks to the automation of tasks such as searching, filtering, and distributing information.

In practice, without specialised tools, only about 25% of analysts’ time creates value, whereas with competitive intelligence software that figure can rise to 90%.

This translates into:

• Savings in staff hours (e.g. a 95% reduction in time spent reviewing irrelevant information).
• Reduced costs for external consultancy or redundant sources.

It is the easiest approach to quantify and the one that best resonates with the idea of productivity.

A software solution should turn the limited dedication of each person monitoring their area of expertise (customers, technology, etc.) into a source of strategic value, multiplying the productivity of time invested by 3 or 4, and generating both tangible economic impacts (savings of millions in investments, opportunities detected before the competition) and strategic ones (cross-departmental alignment, regulatory anticipation, risk reduction).

The current problem: low productivity in monitoring

In most companies that have not digitalised the intelligence function, there is no formal monitoring process due to the high cost in hours it would entail: the business simply runs on information arriving organically (personal contacts, conferences, a newsletter here and there). Moreover, this information remains fragmented and is not actionable in decision-making.

Even in companies that do monitor the environment, analysts dedicate only a small part of their working day (between 30 minutes and an hour), usually limited to manual searches, Google Alerts and scattered newsletters – methods that are inefficient and of low impact:

• Less than 25% of this time becomes useful knowledge for the company.
• The rest is lost in manually reviewing scattered results, irrelevant information, or material disconnected from the company’s objectives, and without the ability to personalise by analyst or department.

How the scenario changes with a specialised software solution

It radically transforms this limited dedication:

• With advanced support, an analyst can dedicate about 40 minutes a day effectively, because they are working directly with filtered signals relevant to their topics of interest.
• The jump in productivity goes from 25% to 90% of useful time, multiplying the value generated in that same period by 3.6.
• The software automates 95% of repetitive effort, freeing the analyst to focus on analysis and the creation of knowledge.

ROI calculation (with 40 minutes daily dedication)

Using a reference cost of €60,000 per year per analyst (direct and indirect costs) and a daily dedication of 40 minutes (≈150 hours/year):

Practical ROI: 40 minutes daily dedication

Impact on a team of 5 analysts: over €16,000 annually in high-value time available, simply by optimising daily dedication (40 minutes).

ROI based on effectiveness (impact on strategic decisions and business outcomes)

This approach seeks to quantify how intelligence enables:

• Avoiding losses: for example, a packaging company reoriented a strategic investment in production capacity, estimating a positive impact of over £1 million, while simultaneously creating a successful new product line aligned with customer needs.
• Capturing opportunities before competitors: for instance, a technology company detects early signals of potential client projects months before those clients even formalise their needs.

Here, the metric is not just time saved, but the value of decisions taken thanks to better information.

Extended ROI (intellectual capital and collaboration)

This includes more intangible but highly powerful benefits:

• Improved cross-departmental collaboration.
• Reduction of “blind spots” in the organisation: minimising unpleasant surprises that could have been monitored from the outset.
• Empowering the executive team with a comprehensive view of the market, thanks to incorporating the interpretative capacity of signals that the organisation’s experts collectively hold.

This approach highlights how the intelligence function contributes to organisational resilience and capacity for innovation, which can also be linked to metrics such as:

• Speed of reaction to regulatory changes.
• Number of business areas involved.
• Number of opportunities detected through internal sources.

Final thought

The ROI of competitive intelligence is not measured only in euros saved, but also in your company’s ability to anticipate, collaborate and make better decisions. The real return combines efficiency, effectiveness and organisational resilience.

Ultimately, measuring the ROI of competitive intelligence is not a bookkeeping exercise, but a way of demonstrating how this function transforms a company’s capacity to survive and grow in an uncertain environment.