Understand Your Company
The organizational profile of your company is the most appropriate starting point for looking into competitive intelligence. It is critically important for the following reasons:
- It helps you identify gaps in key information and focus on key requirements and results.
- You can use it as an initial self-assessment.
Your company’s success is important to you. So, you’d like to start using the competitive intelligence technique. Remember, the basis behind this method is to gather the relevant information about your market and to analyze it.
It is helpful to think of the competitive intelligence technique as a system with the owner of the company being at the top. The owner is the chief motivator and is responsible for implementing a system that will allow the employees to contribute what they find.
Since competitive intelligence is both an ongoing process and a time consuming one, you need to assess your options in order to get the most out of this method.
In order for the Competitive Intelligence system to work, employees need to stay motivated so they can share any information about the competition and the market that they gather.
Once the competitive intelligence system is underway, there are some things to keep in mind that will make the process much easier.
In order to engage in the competitive process accurately, you need to understand the nature of your industry.
Since competitive intelligence is a group effort where everyone in the company is responsible for gathering information, it makes sense to form a special group that is in charge of the information.
Just as you wish to know information about your competitors, they want to know things about you. That is the nature of competitive intelligence. To prevent your competition from learning too much, you need to find a way to protect your secrets.
Even if your company has a committee in place to gather and organize the necessary information you will need to stay informed about what the committee has found.
Competitive Intelligence