How competitive intelligence helps strategy of your business
You and your competitors need to be increasingly agile when introducing a product or service to market—or releasing new features and launching new marketing campaigns. However, it doesn’t need to be such a difficult task to undertake. And knowing what your competitors are up to will give you a step up. That’s why we have seen interest in competitive intelligence grow significantly in 2021. And we expect 2022 it be jam-packed. We called this article how competitive intelligence helps strategy of your business.
Competitive intelligence increases certainty and competitive advantage in an ever-changing world. So when thinking about your situation, it’s essential to consider competitive intelligence.
So, what can competitive intelligence ever do for you?
- Competitive intelligence will improve your certainty and help you make better decisions.
- Help you understand your known and unknown competitors and their offerings.
- Enhance your knowledge of your market positioning and result in more sales.
- Put you in a position where you are more certain about what customers in your market need. Not what you think they want.
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the finding, sorting and critical analysis of information. To make sense of what’s happening and why. Predict what’s going to happen and give the options to help you control the outcome. Competitive intelligence offers certainty, competitive advantage, insight, growth & security.
There are many reasons why a competitive intelligence program will succeed, and here are our thoughts on using competitive intelligence to create a great strategy.
Strategy
While your team are focused on getting the sales in. Or providing the product or service to the best of their ability; as a leader, it’s essential that you work on the business and not in it. Working on defining, refining and achieving the overall business strategy. And a focus on strategic questions like:
- Long term, how are we going to grow sales and increase our market share?
- What similar markets we can move into?
- How are these markets structured?
- How to remove some of the uncertainty of the future?
- What risks is the business facing? How can we reduce the impact of any of these risks?
- What could happen in terms of these questions above?
You will struggle to gain market share without an understanding of your competitors. Without knowing how they position themselves in their market and what you can do to disrupt, exploit and beat them.
You are more likely to fail than be a roaring success if you enter a new market without knowing anything about it and the competitors it contains. With the resources they have to hand, even Apple and Amazon wouldn’t do this. But so many enterprise-level companies do. And it’s not likely that a competitor is not going to take your market entry lying down. It’s also crazy to plan to reduce risk without knowing your biggest threats. And their capabilities and weaknesses.
How competitive intelligence helps strategy of your business
This article was called how competitive intelligence helps strategy of your business. So the message is unequivocal. Make 2022 the year you use competitive intelligence for your strategic direction and decision making. You’ll not regret it, and your bottom line will love it.
