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.

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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.


Enrico Vonghia

Director, Markets &. Competitive Intelligence, SUEZ Water Technologies & Solutions

Find different sources to validate your assumptions. Develop process rigour driven by several external data sources.

Julia Zukowski


Corporate Strategy and Competitive Intelligence, CDW

Develop an internal network of field/sales staff to capture and leverage the Intelligence they pick up and summarise the input in an internal document for management/staff.

Tatiana Khayrullina


Consulting Partner, Standards & Technical Solutions
Outsell Inc.

Triangulate your sources! Use three sources, preferably mixing external and internal intel.

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.

Tatiana Khayrullina

Consulting Partner, Standards & Technical Solutions
Outsell, Inc
.

“For secondary research, don’t forget to search in other languages in addition to English. Google translate works”.


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“. 

Steven Medley


Competitive Intelligence Specialist, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Understand the limitations of the data sources you are using. Very few data sources are perfect, and this needs to be factored into your analysis“.

Alex Knapik


Competitive Intelligence Lead, Milestone Systems

Most industry news isn’t actually relevant. But deliver it because your people probably like to read that stuff. Use that credibility to bring the real insights to them.

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.

Dr Michael Neugarten

It’s important to look less hard”.

CI is about insight – and more insight doesn’t necessarily come from more information – sometimes quite the opposite. So stop looking for more and more information, close your eyes, lean back in your chair, and think. Coffee can help.

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.

Pete Robinson

Cyber Intelligence Manager, Capital One

Always believe in your gut instinct”.

Competitive Intelligence Director

“Make sure that your CI program is embedded in already existing processes. Ensure that your insight generation processes are tightly connected to the strategy process”.

Chirag Bansal

Head Competitive and Market Intelligence, GreyRadius

“There’s no use in gathering intelligence unless you find actionable insights to make an impact across your companies. The information must be sourced equally from primary and secondary sources”.

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”. 

Graeme Dixon

Founder, Octopus

“Well, I know that, but no one asked me”.

Senior Market Intelligence Lead
US based health insurer

Look at multiple sources and resources, both quantitative and qualitative (especially discussions with experts in the field) and layout a story that is simple and direct.

Ben Tutt

Head of Market Insights,
BAE Systems

“If you aren’t sure what you are going to do with the Intelligence, then the Intelligence will not be useful”.

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.

David Tass


Global Market Intelligence and Strategy Partner
Advanced Analytics

Make sure all your output is practical and bottoms up so it can be deconstructed and explained to any person on any level of the organisation. This is about knowledge transfer, not ego.

Samir Shah


Head of Intelligence & Data Analytics
IDP Connect

“Be fully aware of your own and your competitors’ value propositions. That way you can continue to differentiate, innovate and meet your own customers’ needs”.

Zaul Ridley

Intelligencia Training

“Use the power of 5WH at every stage of the intelligence cycle. I would love to claim it, but Kipling said it much better: “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who”.

Stewart K. Bertram

Head of Cyber Threat Intelligence
Elemendar

“Intelligence is a team sport the more opinion from the more diverse groups of people you can get in the room the better. Within this context, an Intelligence leader is the person who facilitates rather than dominates the conversation”.

Dolly Guinto

Market & Competitive Intelligence team lead, AMS

“Never stop being curious. Curiosity might kill the cat but only if the cat doesn’t know how to counter-CI. But never stop asking the right questions”.

Andrew Beurschgens


Senior Insight Manager | Market and Competitive Intelligence
Avast

“We have two ears and one mouth so use them in that ratio”.

Andrew Beurschgens

Senior Insight Manager | Market and Competitive Intelligence
Avast

“For every external market assessment based question ask how it links to the strategic priorities, what drove it, what would happen if we did not do it and what hypotheses do we have?”

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.

Stéphane FOUQUAY


Scientific Consultant
Former Corporate Scientific Director
Bostock S.A.

“Have technical (sciences, patent, academic, …) and economic expertise in the field studied in order to detect the weak signals and competitor strategy + software expertise in order to generate reliable data”.

Athanasia Kokkinogeni

Senior Competitive Intelligence Analyst, Elekta

“Communicating (and not only collecting) actionable insights often and effectively leads to company & customer loyalty and better business decisions”.

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.

Zaul Ridley

Intelligencia Training

I think this is increasingly important as our customers look to analysts to ask the right questions as much as provide the right answers.

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.

Nash Jaikharan

Market Intelligence Manager TV & Sport, SABC, South Africa

“The definition of your competition can make or break your business in the future strategic intent”.

Sunita Iyer


Former CI manager for companies like Dell

“Working in CI in large corporates and it was harder to convince the internal departments about what you are doing than dealing and figuring out what your competitors are doing. Often the challenges are within than outside”.

Yaron Eshdat

Associate Partner – Research at LINX Market Intelligence, Israel

The essence of Competitive Intelligence is not to gather information effectively, it is all about converting the information you have into actionable business insights”.

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

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