Competitive Intelligence Influence on Your Business
This article introduces the Competitive Intelligence influence on your business. Competitive Intelligence transforms your thinking. And how you do things. It enables you to deliver a better strategic direction to your organisation.
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive Intelligence is the ethical collection and analysis of information. To enable you to avoid surprises. To think more moves ahead and minimise uncertainty. Be able to make more informed strategic decisions. It offers the ability to differentiate yourself and stay ahead of the competition. And in many cases, can be the unspoken, hidden key to success.
Suppose you can gather sufficient information about what your rivals are doing. Why are they doing it? Understand their business model and take advantage of their strengths and weaknesses. In that case, you will stay ahead of the game. Competitive Intelligence improves your productivity by allowing you to focus on winnable activities. And reducing the influence of rumour and industry experience.
Awareness of the competition will improve cross-functional relationships. Bringing teams together by getting everyone involved in the information collection. And then strategic analysis. It can give you early warning of competitive threats. Allowing you to make strategic decisions and actions. Based on valuable Intelligence, not the latest article in the local business press.
Interesting questions
- Can you describe the attributes that set you apart from your competition?
- Do you have any competitors that you believe are doing a better job than you?
- Which competitors concern you the most?
- Why is that?
- What do you think they do better than you?
- Is what you know about them true?
Nothing should be a surprise
Using Competitive Intelligence so you can copy your competitors is not the answer. Most companies don’t want to be the same as their competition; they want to be better. Do you know your competitor’s real strategy? Which customer segment they are focused on? And how they differentiate themselves from you? Competitive Intelligence will also help you answer these questions too:
- What does your competitor do? – Not as simple and straight forward question as it seems.
- Do their actions match their words?
- Where do they compete, which customers and niches?
- How are they going to fight in the future?
- Are their strategic objectives achievable and will they clash with yours?
- What options do we have to compete in this changing world?
- How will you differentiate against them?
- Can you isolate vulnerabilities to exploit?
Competitive Intelligence Influence on Your Business
In short, CI offers unbiased news and the truth. The analysis for your strategic and operational decision-making. This article introduced us to the Competitive Intelligence influence on your business.
