A military commander will find himself hobbled without information about the battlefield. Where are the important terrain features? Choke points? By what route and conveyance does the enemy transport their supplies?
There are reasons why our armed forces deploys topographers, geologists, and meteorologist alongside their tanks and troop transports. Through centuries of armed conflict, we’ve learned that information of all kinds can be used to tip the odds in our favor.
This same mentality can be applied to the running of a business, and the discipline of doing so is known as competitive intelligence. It’s intelligence because it involves the gathering of useful information. It’s competitive because it focuses on the external business environment, or factors that exist outside of internal operations. The manner of information that relevant to competitive intelligence can vary, but it generally includes intel about the business’ competitors, customers, regions of operation, and the industry in general.
Note that it’s important to understand the difference between competitive intelligence and competition analysis. While both are important when discussing marketing, the former is more of a broad-spectrum concept. Competition analysis deals strictly with understanding market rivals, while competitive intelligence covers everything from customer behavior to local zoning laws.
The purpose of this intel gathering is simple. By learning and understanding what’s happening beyond the four walls off the business itself, leadership is able to make more informed strategic decisions. In fact, many consider it the realm of competitive intelligence to locate, identify, and understand external risks and opportunities before they are readily noticed. It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to think of competitive intelligence (CI) offices to be the business equivalent of the CIA. (If you’re doubting the analogy, consider that the Academy of Competitive Intelligence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has employed former Israeli intelligence officers as instructors.)
Gathering Competitive Intelligence
In the same way that a nation without an intelligence agency will be at a major disadvantage on the global stage, a business without competitive intelligence will be at the mercy of unexpected surprises and missed opportunities. In other words, what you don’t know can be very harmful to your business.
So, with up-to-date and accurate information being so crucial, how do you go about gathering it for your own business? One of the downsides to such a broadly-defined intelligence gathering discipline is that the possibilities are virtually limitless – and thus, so is the amount of time, effort, and funding that you can spend on it.
To maximize the effectiveness of your intel gathering, first determine what information you need to know. For example, if you’re preparing to launch a new product and you know that a competitor is working on a similar product, then you’ll probably want to focus your efforts on determining their launch date.
Of course, timeliness is a critical factor in such situations, as it is in most intelligence operations. If you’re trying to determine a competitor’s launch date, there’s a very good chance you’re doing so because you want to launch your own product first to garner more attention. That decision would likely involve launching a product that’s not completely finished – a risky move in itself – which means that bad intel could easily lead to bevy of headaches.
Perhaps your problem doesn’t involve a competitor’s product launch, but there’s likely something out there that’s keeping you awake a night. Are you concerned about a supplier raising their prices? Or maybe worried that new legislation will change the landscape of your industry? These issues can be addressed with careful application of competitive intelligence, and while the intel you gather probably won’t eliminate the problem, it will certainly place you in a better decision-making position.
What’s your business’ pain point? Focus your intelligence operations on that issue to maximize your results.
Deploying Your Operatives
The CIA wouldn’t be very effective without agents in the field. One common misconception about their operations is that CIA field agents are Americans, when they are actually foreigners who have been swayed to our cause and provide information from within their own borders.
The same strategy can be applied to your own intel gathering – although you’ll want to maintain a good distance between snooping and outright espionage. You won’t want to try to recruit spies within your competitor’s ranks, but it’s not a bad idea to make contacts within relevant circles, such as local zoning boards, retail collectives, municipal government, or anywhere else that decisions are made that could affect your operation. Realtors can be an excellent resource, as they often spend a large amount of time studying consumer behavior in specific areas, including factors such as median income and family size. Journalists that work stories within your industry are also a valuable asset, and can usually be kept close by offering them exclusive stories.
It’s also wise to put your existing staff to work on intel gathering. Various people within your business are already well-connected with the outside world – purchasers talk to vendors, and HR talks to people who were previously employed by your competitors – so help them leverage those connections to gather useful information. The smallest bit of intel can become part of a much larger collage.
Monitor Their Traffic
You don’t need a listening post in Siberia to keep tabs on your industry. The internet makes it very easy to keep yourself informed, as long as you know how to leverage it.
Many examples of successful CI operations were carried out using nothing more than social media. By monitoring the Twitter and Facebook feeds of competitors’ staff, it’s often possible to track down patterns that lead to an important piece of information. CEOs are often their own worst enemies when it comes to operational security, and simply following their social media can reveal loads of useful information.
It’s also a good idea to make use of Google Alerts, the service that notifies you when certain keywords appear on the internet. If you’re trying to closely follow a rival company, simply setting up a Google Alert with their business’ name as the keyword can keep you apprised of any noteworthy internet chatter.
Going All Out
Keeping tabs on internet activity is one thing, but there are plenty of cases where CI was taken to the next level. Private investigators are certainly on the table, and they’ve been hired to perform all manner of CI operations for large companies. Sometimes, private eyes are hired to pose as customers to ferret out information from a rival company. In more extreme cases, they’ve been known to pay garbage collectors to hand over bags of trash collected at a competitor’s office.
Even though such operations are carried out legally, they sometimes create unfavorable backlash. One has to question if the information gathered was worth being discovered – and being forever known as the “guy who dug through the trash.”
Putting the Intel to Work
You can take all sorts of extreme measures to gather intel, but if you don’t know what to do with the information, it’s a moot point. Be prepared to study and scrutinize the information as you go, and be sure to keep your eye open for patterns and tells.
Of course, there are methods you can employ to streamline your analysis. One of the simplest, yet most effective, means of sorting and understanding gathered intel is through a comparative analysis.
This involves careful consideration of the issue that you’re trying to shed light on. Begin by creating several hypotheses about what you think could happen. For example, in our theoretical product launch concern, you might create three columns:
• Product will launch on announced date.
• Product will launch early.
• Product will be delayed.
As you gather intelligence, file each bit under the column that it supports. For instance, if you discover a tweet from your rival’s CEO that says “My thanks to our star developers …followers can expect a surprise very soon!” then you would likely file that under the “Product will launch early” column.
As time goes by, you should start to see one column filling up faster than the others. You can then interpret this as solid evidence of that hypothesis being the very likely outcome, although you’ll want to be very careful about drawing that conclusion prematurely.
One recommended way of avoiding making a “bad call” is to present the sorted intel to someone who hasn’t been involved in the intelligence operation. (Within a large company, that might be a panel of C-level executives.) Present the information without foreshadowing or bias, and let them draw their own conclusions. Usually, if the intel is sufficient enough to draw a conclusion from, the data will speak for itself.
