Competitive intelligence, also known as corporative intelligence, is crucial for any business. It helps in understanding the competitive aspects, and challenges revolving around them and throws light on the finest opportunities available. Competitive intelligence deals with the collection, interpretation, and use of information about critical market factors such as competitors and customers that accord to the competitive advantage of a business.
Importance of competitive intelligence
When put in simple words, competitive intelligence constantly oversees the forces that could disrupt your company’s competitive edge. Businesses examine this data and take well-planned business measures. As per the current status, business competition has increased in recent years and is increasing faster.
Competitive intelligence gathers all the helpful information from both published and unpublished sources. The nature of competitive intelligence could vary with the company, type of industry, departments, etc., but the ultimate goal is to aid in making better decisions, discovering potential risks, and improving the corporate performance of the business before it becomes rapidly apparent.
What are the important components of competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is developed to create a competitive edge by tracking the competitors. To get a piece of more precise and comprehensive information regarding the competitors and how to move forward with your business, you will have to consider the following components of competitive intelligence:
- Sector intelligence
Sector intelligence plays a major role in understanding the events occurring among large companies. Sectors are developed by different grouping companies based on their predominant business activity. This intel tracks large-scale economic shifts and provides access to these trends. Each sector has its unique characteristic and risk profile. Sector intelligence also plays an important part in providing the business with a competitive edge.
- Market intelligence
Market intelligence identifies the strengths and weaknesses of competitors and provides the partners’ insights on the competitive strategy of the company’s products and services and the future problem your company is likely to face.
Situations, where businesses use Market intelligence, are listed below:
- Decreased understanding of the customer’s need
- Scaling up to new existing markets
- Evaluating existing products and comparing them with the competitor products
- Competitor intelligence
Competitive intelligence focuses on the competitor’s decisions and the movements happening in the industry. This intelligence is useful in observing the competitor’s marketing strategy and winning deals in your landscape, their impact on the market, business, customers, etc. competitive intelligence keeps you active in the competitive industry, advance faster and remain ahead of the curve.
- Innovation intelligence
Innovation intelligence assists you in solving problems by incorporating new ideas. This intelligence is crucial for any business’s success as it helps in understanding the changing customer behavior, identifying new offerings, and identifying holes in the market.
- Sales intelligence
Sales intelligence utilizes the data and software to help the vendors concentrate on purchasing prepared accounts, creating profiles, efficient data management, and more. As the business is constantly changing, it is important to monitor them and improve the sales tools.
- Procurement and supply chain intelligence
Procurement and supply chain intelligence is important to understand the potential risk by analyzing and interpreting the existing reports and implementing effective measures to mitigate them. This largely helps minimize the risk proactively, identify potential suppliers, understand their strengths and weaknesses, analyze cost drivers and assist you in taking better decisions in sourcing and category oversight.
The procurement and supply chain intelligence provides information on:
- Storage expenses
- Seller or partners malfunctioning
- Administrative risks
- Taxation costs and risk factors
- Material supply intel
- Cost of production
- Competitive sale price.
- ESG intelligence
ESG, short for the environment, social, and government intelligence, helps identify your business’s influence on the environment, social issues, and government relations. It also helps track the changes and easily adapt to the new environmental, social, and governmental relations.
ESG intelligence is of supreme importance for any business since it enables your business to remain on top of any new changes happening.
It can also help trace the environmental impact of a business, help in turning more sustainable by adjusting the landscape, provide accurate data on your industry and competitors and propagate faster adaptation to business models. It can also offer a close observation of competitors’ movements and efforts and their relationship with foreign and national governments.
