Create your own competitive intelligence team

Create a competitive intelligence team

We can set up and advance the effectiveness of your new or existing competitive intelligence or market intelligence departments with rigorous benchmarking and mentoring processes. And by knowing what it takes to produce quality intelligence teams and end products to ensure you make better evidence-based decisions. 

In-house setup and effectiveness

Octopus works with you to set up and manage your in-house competitive intelligence function. We can build your processes, review current understanding, create competitive awareness, help you understand your intelligence needs, isolate sources and mentor your team before, during and after in-house setup. 

We help ensure effective processes, determine where your information sources originate, importantly, how you communicate your intelligence and the level of competitive intelligence integration within your organisation. We determine the best place to place the function, agree on who is championing its importance and effectiveness and educate the top decision-makers on getting the most out of intelligence

Our approach to benchmarking, assessing and improving the effectiveness of your intelligence function is broken into five areas:

1. Evaluation: Assessing your needs and overall effectiveness of any existing function while benchmarking capabilities with external examples of best practice.
2. Envisioning: Isolate the strategic purpose and governance of your intelligence function and the required capability of the tech, processes and people
3. Design: Create an intelligence function that will add the greatest possible value to your business
4. Implementation: Develop an action-based plan to demonstrate how the function will deliver against your highest priorities, growth goals and initiatives.
5. Execution: Once approved, we execute a plan within agreed timelines to enable decisions based on insight relating to your competitive environment. Customer trends, key supply issues and many, many more aspects to enable you to enhance your competitive advantage. 

Auditing and review

Once established, we can offer an independent view by auditing your systems and intelligence capabilities and suggesting potential improvements. Asking questions like, is your Competitive Intelligence function delivering real value? What are the gaps in intelligence, and clarify what is currently known, who knows it and what intelligence is needed? Also, are you wasting time collecting information for people who don’t need it?

We can help

Our Competitive Intelligence audit process includes but is not limited to benchmarking current capabilities and future needs, including:

• Appraisal and statement of current capabilities versus future needs
• A development plan associated with:
  • Problem assessment capabilities
  • Identification and determination of Intelligence users’ needs
  • Analyst capabilities/training
  • Modelling and scenario analysis
  • Battlecard analysis and review
• A data collection review – face-to-face, phone, email, survey/questionnaire and focus groups. Industry analysts, company sales and marketing personnel
• Presentation skills
• CI Strategy and objectives
• Report generation
• Final report peer review and end customer review to ensure relevance
• Dissemination of the end product intelligence
• Test systems with war gaming, red team analysis, counterintelligence and other risk readiness tools. 

Team skills and capabilities

 We are also able to look at your team’s skills and capabilities in terms of the following:

•  Structured collection plans
•  The creation of accurate reports
•  Intelligence workflow management
•  Formulation of intelligence questions and topics
•  Knowledge mapping
•  Source management