What decisions can Competitive Intelligence help you with?

The Intelligence Function is characterized by being a cross-organisational function, which serves a multitude of other departments in the company, from Innovation to Talent Management, and which makes it possible to generate organizational intelligence.

Three of the areas of the company that exploit Competitive Intelligence most intensively are Marketing and Sales, Innovation, and Strategic Management.

The list of tactical and strategic decisions taken in a company is so wide and diverse that it would be impossible to cover them all in one article. So in the following post, we are going to focus on those that, at Antara Mussol, we consider to be the most common ones supported by the Competitive Intelligence Function in the company. The set of decisions to be taken will shape our CI strategy, whose ultimate goal is to support the multitude of decisions to be taken by the different departments.

 Let's look at some of the decisions based on Competitive Intelligence information in the different departments of the company.

Decisions in Marketing and Sales

Decisions to be taken in the Marketing and Sales area are sometimes clearly separated into tactical and strategic decisions, with some differences between the two.

Tactical decisions are those fed with very specific intelligence about what is happening right now. It is information that is quickly consumed and reacted to at the level of the team directly involved. Examples include:

• Exploiting new business opportunities. Depending on the sector, the intelligence hypotheses that we will handle to identify them will be very different. Even within each sector, each business line of our company will develop its own hypotheses. Once the new customer or opportunity has been identified, we will make an immediate decision to react.
• Prioritisation of customers. Especially early identification of customer financial problems, and risk of non-payment.
• Scheduling events, such as conferences or trade fairs, where our company should be present. We will do this on the basis of the intelligence generated about what our customers are interested in and the movements of our competitors.

Strategic decisions in Marketing and Sales are based on the continuous gathering of information and drawing conclusions based on this continuous monitoring. Examples of strategic decisions are:

• Market size and market share targets. It may seem strange to other areas of the company, but sometimes it is not easy to reach a consensus figure on the size of the market and its sub-sectors.
• Evolution of the marketing narrative. In a business-to-business 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 main lines of corporate communication, as well as continuously improve product communication.
• Classification of competitors, in order to carry out an analysis of the competition from different perspectives and thus obtain a complete view of information.
• Design of training plans for the sales force. Although it is a point that is not given much attention, our sales team must be up to date in order to be able to maintain an enriching conversation with our customers. The design of the calendar of events, courses, conferences... can be greatly enriched by proper monitoring of those opportunities that are not only oriented to train our team, but also allow the opportunity to establish personal relationships with other actors in the sector, including customers.

 Decision-making in the Innovation Department

Innovation Management is one of the most intensive users of Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch. Here, some of our clients point to several decision-making processes that are supported by the Intelligence Function:

• Prioritise innovation pipelines. For this we can develop intelligence from two different perspectives:
  • On the one hand, from a reactive point of view; identifying gaps between what the market is increasingly interested in, and our product and service portfolio.
  • On the other hand, from a forward-looking perspective; identifying the key factors in the evolution of the sector "as a system", and taking advantage of them to facilitate exponential growth in the medium term.
• Decisions to invest in new technology that will improve the product or processes, for example, by reducing production costs. The monitoring of new proposals in the market by suppliers, and the early decision to incorporate them, often results in a competitive advantage.
• Go/no-go decisions on ongoing innovation projects. The continuation of a new product project may be determined by information appearing on 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 in whether or not to proceed with the project.

In addition, an example that should not be forgotten in innovation decision-making is the updating of the training plans of the technical team. Keep an eye on courses, conferences and other types of events, sectorial or focused on technology, that we can incorporate into the team's knowledge updating plans.

Strategic Management supported by Competitive Intelligence

The concept of Strategic Management refers to some decisions which companies may be contemplating in different areas, such as Internationalisation or Expansion, Corporate Venturing, etc. Let's look at some of these key decisions supported by Competitive Intelligence:

Decisions on Internationalisation 

The internationalisation of a company faces many key decisions that must be taken with as much information and of the highest possible quality, such as for example:

• Choosing which countries to focus on
• How to approach landing in a given country, bearing in mind that best practices are not all the same from country to country
• Choosing preferred local partners to collaborate with
• Choosing which catalogue products to prioritise

Monitoring draft legislation in target countries is essential to get early warning of changes that may affect our products or operations.

Inorganic growth, M&A

Mergers and acquisitions in the sector are always a focus of the strategic area of the company. Choosing the right country and company to acquire must be supported by intelligence work. Of course, these decisions will be influenced by mergers & acquisitions involving other players in the sector, such as competitors, suppliers and customers. Such M&A transactions must be continuously monitored.

We must pay special attention to the confidentiality of this intelligence work, also within the organisation, as any leak could hinder or even derail such acquisition projects. Even if we have developed a distributed and collaborative Intelligence Function in the company, there are aspects of Intelligence that must be particularly confidential, and not accessible to the analyst team as a whole. 

Corporate Venturing

Corporate Venture initiatives have proliferated in recent years. From banks to insurance companies, from food & beverages to automotive manufacturers or private universities, every company of a certain size has created or is considering a Corporate Venture division. Some of the companies have done so convinced that it is the way to boost their innovation and long-term survival, while others have done it by imitation and by participating in the trend as a part of their corporate communication.

Corporate Venturing is one of the areas that most need Competitive and Technological Intelligence to make good decisions:

• Prioritising the sectors and technologies in which to invest
• Choosing candidate startups to watch closely
• Identify potential partners from among Venture Capitals active in priority sectors

The Corporate Venture team must also keep a close eye on the operations of competitors in this field, as well as keeping an even closer eye on the startups that are competitors of those with which it is collaborating or in which it is investing.

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 information gathering and input cannot be done in isolation at a particular time of need. The information needed to review a strategic plan must be collected on an ongoing basis, and to be useful from a strategic point of view it must follow a method, such as Scenario Planning.