Competitive intelligence expert quotes
We’re all about your competitive advantage.
Some of the best Competitive Intelligence expert quotes are direct from the frontline. The Competitive Intelligence quotes are in no order and will be updated on a regular basis.

From people who use Competitive Intelligence in their day jobs.
Some of the best Competitive Intelligence expert quotes are direct from the frontline. The Competitive Intelligence quotes are in no order and will be updated on a regular basis. Please let us know if you have a quote for us to put on this page. Thank you.
Mary Allen
IP Enforcement & Competitive Intelligence Manager, Hypertherm
You need to understand your market, your market potential, and who your competitors are. Keeping in mind that none of these factors are always obvious. Competitive intelligence isn’t just collecting information on known competitors. It is also understanding industrial or market changes and technologies that could make your product or business obsolete.
Alex Knapik
Competitive Intelligence Lead,
Milestone Systems
Organisational adoption is more important than anything. More important than the depth of content, the quantity of competitors or markets tracked, or even the quality of the insights you bring. If your business doesn’t change the decisions and actions they make based on your work, it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t do the work for yourself or to look good; keep the customer in mind – your sales team, your executives, marketing, down the line.
Adam Paine
Head of market and Competitive Intelligence, Alexander Mann
“Make sure you get the right Competitive Intelligence before you make a strategic decision, rather than after implementing it. Simple obvious tip but amazing how many companies don’t actually do this. They make a big decision, it doesn’t work, then pay for the intelligence to show them what they should have done“.
You need to understand your market, your market potential, and who your competitors are keeping in mind that none of these factors are always obvious. Competitive intelligence isn’t just collecting information on known competitors. It is also understanding industrial or market changes and technologies that could make your product or business obsolete.
Alex Knapik
Competitive Intelligence Lead,
Milestone Systems
Organisational adoption is more important than anything. More important than the depth of content, the quantity of competitors or markets tracked, or even the quality of the insights you bring. If your business doesn’t change the decisions and actions they make based on your work, it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t do the work for yourself or to look good; keep the customer in mind – your sales team, your executives, marketing, down the line.
Manasak Bantalapichai
Head of Product Intelligence, Entain
“A simple way to get more people involved and talking CI – is to create a channel about it, where news can be shared by all.- For instance articles from media or reports. This could be on Slack, Teams community or wherever people hang out. You start by sharing. While trying to encourage people to share too. Eventually, it will build momentum and you will see people flock in and participate. Many upsides, including more awareness, alignment, crowdsourcing intelligence, a variety of expert views. Eventually when it becomes fully active, if you happen to scout for SMEs for a project, look no further than in your channel. You will foster a CI mentality in people, potential ambassadors, at a very low cost.s, lean back in your chair, and think. Coffee can help.
Tatiana Khayrullina
Bank Intelligence Unit & former member of Military Intelligence
I find the most important aspect is ‘truly. understanding my customer’s requirements – it can be very easy as an analyst to be carried away in an investigation and end up in a place that’s interesting but does not help influence a customer’s decision.
Paul Holliday
Market Intelligence Manager, Reed Exhibitions
“Before you make a prediction, remember the base rate. The base rate is the normal rate at which something happens. Once you know that, you can increase or decrease your prediction based on other evidence. As an example, recessions in the UK occur about once every ten years on average. If your planning doesn’t include mitigation of a possible recession, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. Read about Bayes theorem, or Kahneman’s Thinking”.
Enrico Vonghia
Director, Markets and Competitive Intelligence at SUEZ
“It’s critical for CI practitioners to stay objective and to keep an open mind for their insights and outcomes to remain actionable and relevant. If you don’t, you won’t get to the right answers for your company even if you’ve gathered the right data”.
John McDonald-Dick
Head of Commercial Competitive Intelligence,
UCB
Get teams / stakeholders to ask the right questions. i.e. Questions where the answers can be actioned upon. This drives value, gains the right insight, at the right time, is generally focused and reduces waste of efforts and resources.
Enrico Vonghia
Director, Markets and Competitive Intelligence, SUEZ – Water Technologies & Solutions
“Stay objective and open-minded. Established companies develop a corporate culture and typically tend to view the world in a specific way and with a specific lens. Long term influence of this culture can make them complacent, myopic, and inwardly focused. They develop strong biases based on “the way we’ve always done it”.
Babette Bensoussan
The MindShifts Group Pty
Always work with the Intelligence customer to understand up front what decision they will be making with the information collected. The more you understand the thinking around the problem and then the decision that they are looking to make, the better you will be in addressing that issue in the information you collect and analyse”.
Gareth Westwood
Global Intelligence Manager,
AstraZeneca
“The art of the question: Whether collecting, collating, processing or disseminating intelligence, the ‘question’ (PIR etc) has to be front and centre of one’s mind. For managers, their role is to make sure they have the best possible idea of what the customer wants so as to best enable their analysts to be requirement focused. For the collector and analyst, it ensures that resources can be focused to what is relevant. For reporters, it enables the drafting of a product that is as relevant as possible and cuts down the noise.”.
Raxita Salam
Market and Competitor Intelligence Director, Elsevier
“Patience and perseverance in finding the insights you need”.
Milosz Skrzypczak
Director Market & Competitive Intelligence, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
It’s also best practice to perform a sanity check throughout the project to ensure that the initial goal is still valid or needs to be adjusted in light of findings to date.
Enrico Vonghia
Director, Markets and Competitive Intelligence, SUEZ – Water Technologies & Solutions
“Consistently maintain an external focus to counterbalance the inward-looking company culture. In this way, you’re more likely to get to the relevant actionable outcomes and true “so what” for your company“
and….
Listen to everyone before you draw your conclusions.
Ben Tutt
Head of Market Insights,
BAE Systems
“There is no such thing as a static, perfect database of Competitive Intelligence, it doesn’t work like that“.
Milosz Skrzypczak
Director Market & Competitive Intelligence, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
Starting right is critical. Spend more time in the scoping phase of the project. Never take a request at its face value but instead ask probing questions to get as much background and context as needed so that the original aim of the request can be either confirmed or adjusted. In my experience 80%+ are adjusted at this stage.
Do you have a personal favourite? Or do you disagree with any of the quotes? Please let us know your thoughts and quotes on hello@octopusintelligence.com