Competitive intelligence is a slow burn

I was recently talking with a product marketer from a company that I have a lot of respect for and he asked me what my general philosophy for competitive intelligence was. As I’ve written about before, I was thrown head first into CI, and much of my early efforts were fairly tactical steps to get an initial program built. Consequently, I hadn’t given much thought to that question. But it dawned on me pretty quickly that my approach at Sprout has been a methodical slow burn that prioritizes the big picture at all times.

Unfortunately for most, running a CI program can feel like you’re sprinting at all times. Competitors announce a new product, funding, partnership or anything else and people look to you to break down the news. Internal stakeholders often assume that because the competitor issued it in a press release or executive blog post that it must be all hands on deck. Or maybe you lost a key deal or customer to that competitor and sales wants to have an immediate post mortem and make changes.

There’s a temptation to respond to any and all moves that competitors make. But your job as a CI expert is to get everyone to just take a deep breath and look at the big picture. Examining each one of these events in a vacuum will cause you to be overly defensive and ultimately respond to competitive noise instead of signals.

If you’ve done the work to collect win-loss data, analyze your competitors’ overall strategies, scenario plan for potential moves and create a clear set of competitive differentiators, each individual competitor move will be easier to understand as part of the larger picture.

But this takes time and consistent effort. Too many organizations view CI as a collective effort from a group of individuals usually in product marketing instead of having a dedicated individual (or team) exclusively working on it. That’s too bad considering how necessary is has become in nearly every organization. This type of approach leads to a reactionary, short-sighted view of competitive intelligence because there isn’t enough time to truly understand what your competitors are doing in the market.

I always tell people at Sprout that no piece of intel is too small. Every little bit is another piece of the puzzle. It can be a slow burn to piece it all together. But if you take the time to collect, analyze, synthesize and maintain it, individual competitive moves will no longer leave you feeling winded. CI should be a marathon, not a sprint.