Tweet

Increasing Your Company's Competitive Intelligence

Guest post by: Roger Bauer

Article Overview: The resources are likely within your reach to gather and distribute competitive intelligence throughout your organization if you desire to make this important for your organization. Smaller companies simply don’t devote enough attention to expanding their competitive intellectual capital, and this is a creative way to get more people involved in your strategic efforts and team build while maintaining some cost control. This article outlines a few ways to help get you started down the path to greater competitive intelligence across your entire firm.

Increasing Your Company's Competitive Intelligence

Perhaps you run a small business and have a belief that you simply don’t have the time to consistently monitor your competitors and your market as you should. Keeping the business afloat is paramount to you, and hiring additional staff to address this area isn’t an option at this juncture. Consultants aren’t an option either because they’re costly, or your company can’t sacrifice the time necessary to properly educate an outsider about your inner business workings. For any of these situations, there is an alternative if you truly want to keep tabs on your competitive landscape: have your current employees take responsibility.

Tasking your existing employees with developing competitive intelligence for small portions of the overall endeavor isn’t that time consuming, and it will allow them to feel like they are part of the strategic planning process. If your company has a sales or marketing department, these employees serve as the ideal candidates for undertaking competitive analyses. They should be familiar with the market to begin with and have contacts throughout the territory which may provide some inside information. To think your sales or marketing staff doesn’t communicate with a competitor or two is rather naïve—it happens, and it’s a reality you can use to your company’s advantage if it’s encouraged instead of frowned upon.

What kind of information do you need from each employee as it pertains to the competitive landscape? Capturing the following competitor data is a good start:
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• How your company can take advantage of their weaknesses
• How your company can minimize potential threats from the competitor
• Product and service offerings & changes
• Pricing structure & fluctuations
• Plans to expand or consolidate operations
• Management & staffing changes

Most top sales and marketing reps will know this kind of stuff inside and out (on your strongest competitors) without having to do a ton of “homework,” but that doesn’t mean the information is being shared throughout the ranks. Often times it’s not, and that’s a contributing factor as to why there is typically a great divide between the top and bottom performers. This presents an opportunity to improve overall sales performance in addition to other benefits mentioned in this article.

Once you’ve gotten your employees to gather and analyze competitive data, how are you going to efficiently distribute it amongst the ranks? Why not host mandatory weekly strategic meetings to feed this information into your organization’s collective mindset? As co-workers demonstrate a solid understanding of a specific competitor or issue, they become the so-called defacto in-house “expert” on that competitor or issue which their co-workers will value. It will raise mutual respect levels and give employees the opportunity to develop better presentation and teaming skills. Other workers will follow suit, thus increasing your entire company’s competitive intelligence. Choose to focus on one competitor or issue per week, and the meetings won’t infringe too much upon the normal work day. The weekly strategic meetings could be conducted over lunch, as an internal lunch and learn, where you order food for all in attendance in exchange for their undivided attention. Yes, you’ll have to pay some money for food, but it’s cheaper than hiring additional staff, and it raises the bar across the board for your organization to become a more competitively focused entity.

The resources are likely within your reach to gather and distribute competitive intelligence throughout your organization if you desire to make this important for your organization. Smaller companies simply don’t devote enough attention to expanding their competitive intellectual capital, and this is a creative way to get more people involved in your strategic efforts and team build while maintaining some cost control.

Related Articles
  Betterment is a way to lead…
  How Does Working With Emotional Intelligence Help Us In Daily Life?
  General Intelligence Is Not Enough
  Competitive Advantage
  What is Your Intelligent Self-interest

Article Tags:



Related Forum Posts
Global Ad Agency Seeks Senior Sales Account Executive - Global Ad Agency -- We are seeking experienced advertising Senior Sales Account Executives to join our growing sales force in New York office. ICMediaDirect.com, Inc is a Full Service Online Advertising Agency driven by a united goal to provide both online as well as offline advertisers with easy and affordable ways to plan and buy media online. We are proud to present an impressive roster of over 300 satisfied clients and a wide reach of billions of visitors each month. With two great locations - N.Y. and D.C. - we know how to PLAN your media, how to BUY your media, how to TRACK your media and how to CAPITALIZE your media. Qualifications • Minimum 2 years of active ONLINE advertising sales experience • Responsible and aggressive attitude • Successful track record with ONLINE sales • Understanding Internet advertising vehicles such as pops, banners, search and lead generation is required • Excellent communication and presentation skills • Strong computer skills are required • Detail oriented and well-organized • Ability to work independently • Enthusiastic team player The Best office location in the city! Competitive salary (plus commission), bonuses and benefits. Please send your resume with salary expectations today at jobs@icmediadirect.com!
Re: Global Ad Agency Seeks Senior Sales Account Executive - [quote="RobertGresch":1lt645d1]Global Ad Agency -- We are seeking experienced advertising Senior Sales Account Executives to join our growing sales force in New York office. ICMediaDirect.com, Inc is a Full Service Online Advertising Agency driven by a united goal to provide both online as well as offline advertisers with easy and affordable ways to plan and buy media online. We are proud to present an impressive roster of over 300 satisfied clients and a wide reach of billions of visitors each month. With two great locations - N.Y. and D.C. - we know how to PLAN your media, how to BUY your media, how to TRACK your media and how to CAPITALIZE your media. Qualifications • Minimum 2 years of active ONLINE advertising sales experience • Responsible and aggressive attitude • Successful track record with ONLINE sales • Understanding Internet advertising vehicles such as pops, banners, search and lead generation is required • Excellent communication and presentation skills • Strong computer skills are required • Detail oriented and well-organized • Ability to work independently • Enthusiastic team player The Best office location in the city! Competitive salary (plus commission), bonuses and benefits. Please send your resume with salary expectations today at jobs@icmediadirect.com![/quote:1lt645d1] Hi Robert, Welcome to our forums! Have you had any luck in your search for this job candidate and can I ask what other sites you've used to advertise this position?
SES Toronto Day 2 - Well I’m off to Day 2 of Search Engine Strategies 2008. Here is what I have planned to attend today: 10:30am-11:45am - Search User Behavior How do searchers interact with search engines? New research is constantly revealing how searchers act. This session explores the latest studies and findings to provide tips and tactics for search marketers to consider. 12:45pm-2:00pm - SEM Toolkit: Marketers Share Competitive intelligence, keyword research, customer profiling, exotic analytics, and visual mouse tracking are just some of the tricks of the trade of search marketers. Guerrilla marketers on the panel show you the favorite tools in their kits. Many are low cost or free. 2:30pm-3:45pm - Web 2.0 & Search Engines An overused and amorphous term, “Web 2.0? nonetheless encompasses an evolutionary shift from the typical web user experience of a decade ago. Some aspects of the “new” web environment are great for improving your search traffic. Other developments may lead you to make serious SEO errors. Among other things, Web 2.0 is about new user interface designs that speed up user actions with techniques such as AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), which allow users to perform operations nimbly without loading a new HTML page. This session will cover AJAX, CSS, user-generated content, and other new trends in web design and user experiences that may require a re-think of your SEO strategy. 4:00pm-5:15pm - Site Clinic This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their websites live to provide general feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines. As usual I’ll report my findings after the day is through!
Re: Search Engine Optimization - There are a great number of reasons a person can have difficulty with Google indexing there site. One of the most important aspects is doing initial keyword research properly. I'm amazed at how many times people will just pick a keyword phrase "they think makes the most sense" without doing the research to explore all of the windows of data. This does not take weeks and hours if you follow the guidelines in the book on this site I offer for free to Evan's members. It's called Wordtracker Magic 2.0 - Keyword Forensics for SEO. Once you have 4 or 5 keyword phrases with fair search volume and the right window of opportunity, you will find it extremely easy to grab top visibility even with only mild optimization. This is one of the most stress free ways to grab organic top visibility and traffic, without the stress. It's been working for me since 1997. Other easy tips. If you write sloppy copy you will will not get nearly as effective results as if you write very focused, useful and engaging content that readers will find helpful. Some people find writing harder than others. If you find it difficult personally, then chunk the process down into 2 steps. Step 1. Write the content first. There should be a beginning a middle and an end. Write your content with the knowledge of which keyword phrase you are going to target - but do not worry about optimization or where the keywords go or character counts or anything technical (in this first step.) Write something and work on it for whatever time it needs for you to feel proud of the finished work. Don't forget to include a call to action near the end. Step 2. Once the article is written and looking good, read it out loud to see how it flows. Next in the second step, just do a mild rewrite of the article for the SEO specs. One of the single most important things is not keyword density, but it's keyword proximity (meaning to use your phrase as a whole group of words together.) By writing in this 2 step method, you will with practice, find that you are writing far higher quality because so many have trouble writing and optimizing at the same time. Why is high quality important? Google uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the background. For a number of years now, Google has been able to gather the context of a message. You see it is no longer just the primary keyword phrase that is important (because it is all the entire body of supporting words other than the keyword phrase that matters including synonyms etc.) In our workshops we teach significant in-depth studies in each of these areas plus more. Remember that if you are new to SEO focus on optimizing for just 1 keyword phrase per page and it will be much easier. As to why your site may not be showing up in Google, it is difficult for me to say without seeing your site. But you might check to ensure you are using a Doctype tag at the top of the page and also the ISO character set tag must be there as they are required by Google for compliance. Google actually follows very closely to any guidelines set by the W3C org and you may want to brush up on Google Webmaster guidelines too, because things do change in there and they are a helpful resource. These are just very basic tips, but if you follow them you can grab your traffic fairly easy without all the stress. If you visit my site, I have hundreds of free tips I can send you (just a tip a day but they are short, easy to understand and free.)


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Building a Business From 30,000 Feet

Remind Me...

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.