Why do companies need B2B competitive intelligence? The answer is simple: without data, how do you make informed, intelligent decisions as a business?
While there’s undoubtedly a lot of value in experience when it comes to decision-making, it’s too easily clouded by assumptions. And if those assumptions are wrong, then the decisions you make risk wasting your time, money and energy.
According to research by BARC, 69% of companies claim they make better strategic decisions from using big data as well as recording an 8% increase in profits. Meanwhile, Deloitte reports that companies with CEOs that spearhead data-driven decisions are 77% more likely to achieve business goals.
While data comes in many forms, one of the growth areas comes in the form of B2B competitive intelligence.
What Is B2B Competitive Intelligence?
B2B competitive intelligence refers to the process of gathering insights about your market and competitors by monitoring their global digital footprint. This importantly provides companies’ various departments, from marketing to sales and product, actionable insights that’ll enable them to grasp their competitive landscape and grow revenue.
The importance of competitive intelligence is being increasingly recognised. It’s estimated that 94% of companies are investing in some form of competitive intelligence. One of the more effective methods of collecting competitive intelligence is by using a competitor intelligence platform.
How Do Competitor Intelligence Platforms Work?
In years gone by, monitoring your competitors online would’ve been a slow, manual process carried out by a single member of the team visiting various websites to identify changes. Over time, software was embraced including RSS feeds, Google Alerts and Social Media Monitoring.
However, today’s competitor intelligence platforms offer something more. They use AI to perform real-time automated tracking of your competitors’ global digital footprints. Data is gathered in real-time and presented in a variety of ways through an online dashboard, shared via alerts or collated in periodic reports.
How Does B2B Competitive Intelligence Support Decision Making?
Your account is set up to track the data sources that will produce the most relevant intelligence for the goals of the activity.
For example, if you’re competing for job applicants with a specific set of skills, your competitor intelligence platform will be set up to track the aspects of your competitors’ business that relate to their employer proposition – including their messaging, content, social media engagement, benefits package, personnel news and more.
Another example might be if you operate in a price-sensitive market. Tracking changes to competitor pricing, promotions and marketing activity and comparing data across your market will give you insights that can inform your approach.
You can use B2B competitive intelligence to validate your decision-making, optimise strategies and identify and respond to threats and opportunities.
Are There Challenges To Using B2B Competitive Intelligence?
92.2% of executives say they’re experiencing significant challenges in becoming data-driven.
One of the reasons is that most of the data collected by organisations is unstructured and difficult to analyse. Competitor intelligence platforms help with this challenge by housing all of the data in one place and allowing for you to analyse what you’ve gathered.
However, the more data you’ll have access to, the bigger the challenge to. For B2B competitive intelligence to aid decision-making, you’ll need the resource to organise, analyse, curate and share the most relevant and actionable intelligence.
For some organisations, that resource is in-house in the form of an insights department. For others, it may be part of the competitor intelligence platform offering.
Once you and your team are in possession of relevant, actionable intelligence, you also need to be mobilised to use it.
How To Mobilise Your Organisation To Use Competitive Intelligence
There are three key challenges to mobilising your organisation so that competitor intelligence becomes a valuable decision-making tool.
1) Make it easy to access
Your data will have little impact on your decision-making or results if it exists in silos or under the control of just one person. The first step to mobilisation is getting it in the hands of the people who need it in your organisation. That could be sales, marketing, product or customer service.
You can do that by managing access to your dashboard or by sharing alerts of the most relevant insights directly into their workflows. Many competitor intelligence platforms integrate with third-party tools such as Slack and MS Teams.
By sharing insights in a format that’s easy to access, you remove one of the biggest barriers of becoming a data-driven organisation.
2) Make it easy to understand
The transition to becoming data-driven can be bumpy, especially if people and departments aren’t used to receiving or using intelligence to make key decisions. Most competitor intelligence platforms will present insights in bite-sized form with the option to delve deeper where necessary.
Some will also offer products such as sales battle cards that make it easier and faster to compare competitors across set criteria. Such steps make intelligence easier for everyone to understand and therefore use in their decision-making.
3. Demonstrate its worth
Becoming data-driven is about changing an organisation’s culture and mindset. It’s about a different way of thinking about problems and challenges. As a result, there can often be a resistance to change that needs to be overcome.
The best way to do that is to demonstrate the value of your competitive intelligence. Before it’s been used, the best way to do this is to highlight the cost of losing to the competition – whether that’s over a sale, a candidate or market share. Highlighting what’s at stake may be enough to greenlight your initial use of a competitor intelligence platform.
Once in use, you’ll be able to track the impact of every data-driven decision you make via the platform by monitoring your progress and making comparisons with competitors. Sharing this intelligence can be as valuable as any in building the case for embracing intelligence.
Getting started And Using B2B Competitive Intelligence For Decision Making
Set your goals and objectives
You can capture data on almost anything that occurs online. For some organisations with the resources to handle large amounts of data, this may involve tracking all competitor activity online. But most organisations start their competitive intelligence journey by focusing on a specific challenge they need to address.
For example, you may want to become the authoritative voice on a key industry topic, or win the race for the best talent in your sector, or improve your new business success rate. Whatever it is, being clear on the outcomes you want will keep your approach focused and effective. This is the important first step when it comes to B2B competitive intelligence and decision making for your business.
Identify sources, metrics and competitors
Your goals will inform who, what and why you track. If your focus is on price strategy, you may want to monitor competitors’ websites and marketing activities for insights into how they’re pricing their products. If you want to create intelligent content on a regulatory change in your market, you may want to track governing body websites, social media profiles, industry publications and more to become the most informed organisation on the topic.
The point is to use your goals to narrow in on the types of competitor intelligence you need so that you know what’s on your dashboard and the alerts you receive are relevant and timely.
B2B Competitive Intelligence Examples That Will Aid Decision Making
a) Price strategy
How are your competitors pricing their products? Are they constant or do they change at different times of the year? Do they offer incentives or promotions? How do they present their pricing and what content sits alongside it?
b) Product roadmaps
What products are your competitors offering? What are they developing and planning to launch? Have they discontinued or made changes to older products in their range? What new features have they introduced?
c) Marketing strategy
How do your competitors promote and advertise their products? Who are they targeting? What channels and tactics are they using to reach them? What messaging do they lead with? How do they communicate the benefits and value of the proposition?
d) Brand and website changes
When did your competitors last update their brand and visual identity? What have they added or removed from their website? How do they tell their story? How are they applying it across other brand materials?
e) Social media activity
Which of your competitors have the biggest following online? Who gets the most engagement? Whose profile is growing and whose is falling away? What content are they sharing and when? What is the sentiment towards their brand across social media?
f) Recruitment strategy
Who’s winning and losing in the job market? How are your competitors presenting their employer proposition? What job boards and social media channels are they using to attract candidates? Do they use agencies or internal resources?
g) Review sites
Which competitors have the best scores on which review sites? Which have seen a sharp rise or drop in their scores? What are the common comments that feature in customer views?
h) Personnel changes
Have any of your competitors made a significant hire? Has anyone significant left the organisation? Are any recruiting more than usual? Have any made cuts and restructured? What market factors have influenced these changes?
i) Regulatory changes
What regulatory changes are rumoured to be on their way? What changes are being rolled out? How is the market reacting to the news? Which competitors are producing content on the topic? What recommendations are being made?
Concluding Thoughts
Companies that use data and analytics to inform their decision-making outperform their peers by up to 6%. They’re also twice as likely to exceed their competitors in terms of profitability.
By embracing B2B competitive intelligence, you’ll be able validate your decision-making, optimise your strategies and become smarter as an organisation.