Competitor Intelligence Trends In 2022 And How To Use Them To Your Advantage

Most industries have this never-ending war among players to win over the competition and get the most customers. Many businesses gain a competitive advantage by deploying  “competitor intelligence (CI)” or “corporate intelligence” tactics.

The term competitor intelligence is not new for business professionals, and it involves collecting information about competitors and markets. Customers and businesses indulged in these activities before the term was coined.

Competitor intelligence can include anything from monitoring website changes to various analyses. This article will examine a few ways a company can enhance its competitive intelligence.

Ways A Company Can Improve Its Competitive Intelligence

According to research, 94% of businesses have invested in competitive intelligence to find the gaps in their strategies and understand their competitive environment.

There is no particular way a business should proceed with its competitive intelligence strategy. They can use several methods and tactics depending on their resources and skills.

Below are a few efficient ways your company can conduct competitive analysis:

Focus On Market Intelligence Rather Than The Competition

Gone are the times when we built strategies around spying on our competitors. What matters these days is what your audience is up to, and where the market is heading.

Studying competitors is an excellent way to improve your performance, but it is not the best way. You also need to monitor website changes and identify your audience’s interests and current market trends. Using this method you can stay a step ahead of your competitors.

The ideal approach is to take the matter into M&CI (market and competitive intelligence) war rooms. The war room in business is where the top leadership sits and discusses the project strategy. It helps organizations to study and predict customer behavior.

Moreover, leaders can answer questions that are crucial for an effective strategy. For example:

• What are the risks
• Rising trends that can significantly change consumer behavior 
• How can they adjust the business to market trends 
• How can business operations adopt the changes

Test New Tactics

Competitor analysis data might not increase your sales or growth. What if they are also experimenting with new strategies? Not knowing the tribal knowledge of the market trend and audience can waste your time and resources. 

Have your sales teams directly update competitive content. It would be best if you equipped your sales team with the latest intel on customer interest and market trends so that they do not look uninformed compared to your competitors. It is crucial for your sales team’s credibility and success rate.

Moreover, B2B and B2C customers are more informed. Your sales team will require knowledge that can exceed their expectations. Research from Hubspot shows that 60% of people want to connect with sales after their consideration stage. You can create quite a lot of sales from this 60%, depending on how you use the intel.

Make Better Strategic Decisions

With the changing trends and customer behavior, the organization has to adjust its goals and strategies. In addition, they have to make strategic decisions to implement across the organization to align it with recent changes.

News and changing trends are highly valued in the business world and competitive market. You must continuously monitor the news to make necessary changes to the strategy. Send information to your audience about the frequent market changes and business updates. Moreover, it would be best to use a competitive intelligence newsletter to stand out from your rivals.

Organizational leaders should create a Competitor Intelligence committee that overviews the operations, efforts, and data obtained from CI analysis. The committee should also be responsible for monitoring organizational performance to achieve the desired competitor intelligence goals.

The CI committee should have executive presentations discussing new tactics’ progress and results. The presentations should include the following elements to get in-depth competitor intelligence analytics:

• Direct and indirect competitor analysis
• Determine your desired data and what is the purpose of acquiring that data
• Identify sources
• Identify the strength and weaknesses by analyzing the collected data
• Create an execution plan

Provide Sales Teams With Intel And Support For Messaging

The sales team needs the data to close more deals. If they do not have the necessary data, they have a higher chance of giving an advantage to the competitor’s sales campaign.

Moreover, they will be completely ignorant of how their competitors are behaving. Update your battle cards frequently so that your sales team remains updated on the latest trends and knowledge.

Let’s take an example from the Covid-19 situation. At that time, businesses were in a panic because of the sudden change in the world order and global commerce. During the pandemic, customer buying intent and behavior changed dramatically.

However, businesses found a way to continue. Many created Covid-19 messaging support for customers so that they can continue to conduct business despite the pandemic. This put pressure on the sales team to deliver relevant information with the market trends and guide the customers. However, competitor intelligence greatly benefited sales teams in providing efficient Covid-19 messaging support.

Aim To Retain Customers

Customer retention is one of the main challenges companies face today. They fail to understand what and why their customer support teams are lacking in acquiring new customers and retaining old ones.

Instead of putting pressure on the sales team to acquire new leads, they should focus on creating tailored battle cards for customer service. This means providing your CS team with battle cards with the latest information on trends and customer behavior.

Moreover, CS teams should precisely target the customers. A sales battle card might be effective for acquiring new customers but may not be effective for retaining clients or customers.

Conclusion

Research and analytics build the path to a company’s successful future. Several companies now invest much of their technology budgets in research and data analytics. This helps them speed up their decision-making process five times. Companies need to focus more on research and analytics to capitalize on their shares in the market to their highest potential.