Competitive Intelligence prime elements I

Competitive Intelligence elements to create your key competitive advantage

For any business owner, gaining a competitive advantage is crucial but harder to maintain. In two parts we define the Competitive Intelligence elements to create your key competitive advantage.

Across several industries, the rate of business competition has been increasing. And advanced technologies and innovations are entering at an unprecedented rate. Thus, gaining knowledge about market players in the industry gained new importance.

Competitive Intelligence is the quickest way for market leaders to stay ahead of the curve and formulate their strategies based on sound, data-backed industry predictions. Moreover, competitive intelligence offers an opportunity to analyse, study, and act on intelligence related to the market.

Competitive Intelligence covers everything from market research and supply chain to products and service analysis. In short, it constantly monitors driving forces in the industry and helps you maintain a leading position.

What are the elements of Competitive Intelligence?

The objective of Competitive Intelligence is to offer business owners a competitive advantage in the market. Thus, every team in the company needs complete access to intelligence that will help them improve themselves and adjust according to the latest market trend.

While competitive intelligence is initially limited to tracking competitors, it is a lot more than that and is vital in moving a business forward. Here we will look into key steps of competitive intelligence:

Sector intelligence

Large corporations demand sector intelligence. Companies with similar business activities help create health care, information technology, finance, and communication sectors. Each sector has unique characteristics and risk profiles, and sector intelligence offers access to these trends.

Consultants and investors use sector intelligence to make recommendations to investors. As investors need to make significant business decisions rapidly, sector intelligence plays a prime role in helping them. Moreover, advisory firms work with businesses that are going through bankruptcy. As well as partners at such firms need the latest sector intelligence to sell their expertise that can define the future of the company.

Market intelligence

As the name suggests, market intelligence offers in-depth information about the entire market. It helps shed light on a company’s market position, customers, competitors, growth opportunities, and current or future problems that the company might face. Such information helps in designing the competitive strategy for launching products and services.

Companies often struggle to navigate the landscape of the B2C market or B2B market. Thus, market intelligence is an essential practice that needs regular updates to maintain a foothold in the market. Market intelligence offers insights on the market and customer needs to help strengthen the position of the company across multiple channels. Moreover, it assists where the company should focus its resources to meet its goals, tap into a new market, and identify trends among consumers.

Competitor intelligence

Competitor intelligence focuses on gaining insights into competitors’ decisions and strategic movements in the target industry. It includes tracking how your competitors are investing, developing new products, their marketing strategy, sales deals, and the overall competitiveness of other companies in the industry.

Competitor intelligence is vital for each team to understand the competition and how it can affect your business, consumers, and market position. Sales and marketing teams need to know how competitors use marketing tools to launch their products and services. The need for competitor intelligence has increased significantly over the last few years. Understanding a competitor’s overall business strategy helps win deals and improve sales and marketing strategies to bring revenue to the business.