Outsourcing Competitive Intelligence is a good idea
This article asks: Should we outsource competitive intelligence? Should you look inside your own company for the answer or take a look outside?
There needs to be a benefit to outsourcing Competitive Intelligence. Within your company, there will already be plenty of information, experience, and contacts. For instance, your sales teams should be full of real-time Competitive Intelligence. Some of this information may be lost if you outsource CI entirely or offer a project to an agency like ours. However, a professional CI consultancy should also work with you to collate all relevant internal information.
Outsourcing your needs means that you will receive objective, impartial insight without being side-blinded by experience, “this has always happened like this,” office politics, self-interest, and subjective analysis. Outsourcing allows a company like Octopus to use the skills we are trained for and provide a reality check to show you exactly where you are and how you are doing, and then understand where you are going. Read more: Why Outsource Competitive Intelligence And The Advantages And Disadvantages of Doing so?
For companies that want the benefits of external expertise without the challenges of long-distance coordination, nearshore outsourcing services offer an ideal middle ground. These services operate in nearby time zones and often have stronger cultural and linguistic alignment, making collaboration smoother and faster.
When to outsource?
Not outsourcing or setting up an in-house team to focus on CI will inevitably mean the Intelligence does not get done, and you will be in a situation where you are making decisions without Intelligence. Consider outsourcing your Competitive Intelligence if:
- You have a project with a tight deadline and no one to do it
- Skills are not available internally
- Asking questions of people outside your company will expose or embarrass you.
- When looking for the information, it’s obvious who is searching for it.
- You have never gotten anything out of an intelligence exercise before
- You realise the last internal project was just basic research.
- And you want to know what’s going on and make decisions based on something concrete, not guesswork and assumption.
Don’t make the mistake
Then there is the mistake of buying an expensive research report—you know, the one with the perfect brand name on the front. The trouble is, your counterparts in Korea and Bristol have purchased the same report. Each one is sitting on a shelf. What about Competitive Intelligence monitoring software? You sign up, and it does not do it for you. So you give it to someone to use, and nothing happens. There is no magic Intelligence button. Read more: 5 Market Intelligence Providers Mistakes You Don’t Need to Make
Outsourcing Competitive Intelligence
Great, as with some CI software, it still needs a lot of work to get the most out of your investment. However, a good competitive intelligence consultancy should collate the information and create intelligence for you.
Let’s talk…
