竞争情报培训与策略

竞争情报为何对您的业务如此重要？

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a method used to gather and analyze information about competitors, which may not always be easily obtained or publicly available.

Understanding how competitors will act in the marketplace can build profits and new competitive advantages for your company.  You can adapt your products faster, achieve cost advantages, and differentiate your market position.  CI can help you deter competitive movements and build market share.

搜集 智力

There are several forms of intelligence gathering such as Market Research or Market Intelligence that can be used to:

• understand the landscape of your market (e.g. size, regions, demographics).
• gain feedback from prospects and customers about different products or services, e.g. you might learn about alternatives or substitutes being considered by buyers.
• create a list of companies that compete with yours.

Competitive Intelligence is often used as a strategic tool to complement other findings. Having knowledge of the likely plans and efforts of your competition allows your company to have both offensive and defensive strategies in place to achieve greater success in the marketplace.

The process of gaining certain information about competitors requires a planned approach, good organizational skills, and analytic experience.  It is not simply finding data or statistics, but understanding the implications it has to your business.

Good intelligence that is converted to insights can be used to help top executives and marketing managers to make better informed strategic business decisions – both short-term as well as long term.

根据竞争情报结果制定战略

一旦通过各种其他情报、研究和讨论确定了“目标公司”名单， 一个计划 需要制定并招募适当的人员来实施。

Such a plan must set objectives and anticipate how results will be used.

• 需要回答什么问题？
  • 竞争对手是否计划推出新产品？或进入新市场？或扩大销售队伍？或调整定价？
  • 是否存在合并或者合作机会？
  • （注意：获得这些问题的答案需要技巧，因为这些问题不能直接提出来。就像在某些运动或打斗中一样，你需要让对手“失去平衡”或分散他们的注意力。）
• 谁将接受采访？
  • What people are likely to have the answers — or part of the answers — to your questions? It could be the competitor’s sales force, engineers, their ad agency, public relations firm, present customers, or members of their supply chain.
• 将会观察到什么？
  • 结合网站、新闻通讯、贸易出版物、专利申请甚至招聘信息的内容可以提供信息见解。
  • 越来越多地，对社交网络、博客或讨论板的选择性监控可能会发现有关竞争性企业内部发展情况的有用信息。
  • 贸易展览和会议提供了许多收集信息的机会，这些信息可以结合起来形成见解，例如展位大小、宣传品数量和在场员工数量可以表明此类活动的大致营销预算。此外，您还可以听取演示或销售宣传，从而了解新功能或新服务。
• 这些信息将如何整合并呈现？
  • 一个数据点通常不足以得出结论，因此建议采用多种来源、访谈或观察。
  • 结论应该现实可信，因此任何假设都需要清晰地呈现。
  • 表明对向利益相关者提供的建议的信任程度是一种很好的做法。
  • CI 提供了一个早期预警系统 (EWS)，它可以检测信号并提醒您竞争对手可能正在计划做一些会影响您业务的事情。

竞争情报培训

A good CI professional may have experience with journalism, interviewing, reporting, and writing skills. Alternatively, a market researcher or statistician with strong analytic abilities can often be trained for this role. There are many other backgrounds that at times can lead to successful performance in the CI function.

It is important to understand that CI is focused on gaining insights into what your competition is doing or planning to do while 市场研究 is customer-focused.  As such, even if customers are surveyed and tell you about their attitudes about your competitors and their usage of their products, they are not a source of knowledge about future strategies of those companies.

SIS trains companies to build internal CI functions.  Founded over 40+ years ago as “Strategic Intelligence Systems”, we helped build CI departments that can rapidly receive and analyze information from around the world.  We continue this legacy in training companies to be agile CI organizations.