Competitive intelligence is a business’s systematic research process of collecting and analyzing information about industry, business environment, competitors and its products or services in order to gain an advantage over its competitors as well as be more proactive when it comes to changes in market trends.
What can your business identify with competitive intelligence?
A lot of individuals confuse competitive intelligence as just determining a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses like a SWOT analysis, but it is far from that. CI gives businesses a clear picture of what is happening in a competitor’s business as well as the activities they carry out in-depth in order to perform a gap analysis, in order to understand what they’re doing successfully and what keeps them lagging behind from their rivals. Competitive intelligence can be considered in simple terms,”your very own secret investigation agent”.
Factors of competitors that can be examined through competitive intelligence:
- Policies, Procedures & Practices
- Sales & Marketing Strategies
- Plans for any new research and development
- Unethical & Illegal Activities & Behavior.
Benefits of competitive intelligence
Businesses can experience a myriad of amazing advantages when they undertake competitive intelligence:
Determine Industry Trends & Forecast Future Moves:
Competitive intelligence helps businesses determine the changes it can make today for a better tomorrow.
By analyzing competitors, businesses can improve the way they deals with customers, bring about technological advancements as well as determine any upcoming threats and opportunities in the market, resulting in them staying ahead of the curve.
Greater Return-on-Investment
Decluttering business endeavors, determining current gaps and strengths, helps businesses re-prioritise their operations and investment efforts. The lesser the indecision and therefore, probability of failures, the greater the return on investment (ROI)
Speed Up Time-to-Market
Creating, testing and launching a product depends on many variables depending on industry, the product itself, and the processes that happen in between. Speed to market refers to how much time it takes for a business to transition from the ideation process to the initial launch.
The more competitive a product or service, the faster it’s launch should be without compromising on quality. Competitive intelligence helps a business enhance this speed to market time by enabling the business to have a thorough market focus, entry into the market and defense capabilities.
Make Better Business Decisions
Insights that competitive intelligence provides are critical and clarify the exact opportunities businesses need to take from a strategic point of view.
How to use competitive intelligence for your business in the UK?
It can be used vastly in different areas of business such as:
Sales & Marketing Strategies:
Competitive intelligence is very lucrative for Sales and Marketing, be it in getting a clear idea of the competitors activities or constant monitoring and analysis of the output to be achieved. It give businesses a direction, allowing them to take a proactive approach rather than a reactive one.
Boardroom Strategies
It helps bring to light market trends and insights as well as helps businesses in focusing on strategic long-term goals. Any risks can also be identified as these are most important to make decisions regarding obtaining any short-term or long-term gains.
Relation between business intelligence & competitive intelligence
Business intelligence is an inward process and involves collecting data about your business from multiple sources and ultimately making decisions that will benefit your business while competitive intelligence is an outward process and focuses more on what’s happening externally as discussed above.
While both of them are different in theory and practices, they are extremely crucial for the success of a business.
Why employ SG Analytics business intelligence solutions?
89% of business leaders believe that data will revolutionize business operations, just like the Internet did, making investments in business intelligence critical to process this vast volume of data.
With SG Analytics your business can take valuable decisions from large & complex data sets. We have advanced analytical technologies to create customised business intelligence solutions & strategies that fuel performance and profits, increase operational efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction by quick and accurate reporting, analysis, and planning.
