Comments on: Tapping Competitive Intelligence To Drive Product Success

By: Competitive Intelligence Software

Competitive Intelligence Software — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:44:40 +0000

Chris: Excellent summary. As you pointed out, there is no shortage of competitor and market intelligence readily available – and the amount of information that can be found grows every day. In fact, for people who recognize the strategic decision making value of all of this information, the biggest challenges are sometimes how to:

- regularly monitor all of these available sources
- organize this dynamic information in a way that provides actionable intelligence related to classes of companies and lines of business
- share the information real-time among decision makers in your organization who need it
- collaborate with colleagues who may come across important intelligence in the field
- track changes in the competitive and market environment over time

Fortunately, there are a number of excellent tools available to assist with this process. My firm offers a very affordable web-based competitive intelligence software product called AttaainCI that extracts intelligence from all of the sources that you mentioned and more (e.g., news, search, blogs, videos, twitter, hiring, patents, SEC filings, articles, on-line documents/presentations, etc.) plus intelligence in areas such as competitive website advertising activities, keyword focus, traffic trends, search rankings, on-line collateral, and more. It also provides real-time profiles of any companies, people or markets of interest. In addition, it provides a complete framework for organizing and tracking this information according to related classes of companies, people or markets relevant to individual lines of business in which a company competes. This real-time information can be quickly viewed on-demand using web portal Dashboards, and also delivered via user-specified e-mail intelligence alerts. You can see more about AttaainCI at: http://www.attaain.com.

Tools such as this can be invaluable in regularly and cost-effectively extracting, summarizing, tracking and reporting on the kinds of crucial information that you discussed.

Thanks again for the excellent post.

Best Regards,
Daryl Scott
Attaain, Inc.
http://www.attaain.com

By: Christopher Cummings

Christopher Cummings — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:46:37 +0000

Thanks, Stephanie! Targeting the competition’s strengths, not just their weaknesses, is a great tip. Leave real value differentiators behind on your sales calls: Clients will investigate the gaps and put the other side on the defensive.

- Chris

By: Stephanie Tilton

Stephanie Tilton — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:33:02 +0000

Thanks for the great summary Christopher. As a former product marketing manager and competitive analyst, these points resonated with me. A couple of other suggestions/considerations:
1) When positioning against the competition – remember to target their strengths, not just their weaknesses.
2) Don’t overlook other points that the sales force might find valuable, such as a competitor’s financial health, customer attrition rate, and customer support policies.
3) Companies should run competitive positioning statements past their legal department before publishing to avoid the risk of potential lawsuits for any claims that can’t be backed up.
4) For critical competitive news/positioning, companies could send out an email blast.

I look forward to future posts!

Best,
Stephanie Tilton