I'm pretty new to the world of competitive intelligence and recognize that I have a lot to learn. I've seen a lot of great insight from many of you on this forum already and thought it would be helpful for everyone (especially those just starting out in CI) if we had a place to share some general advice, guidance, or tips and tricks on how to be successful in competitive intelligence. So, what is the best piece of advice you could offer to someone in our field? What is something you've discovered that has helped you excel at your role?
Discussion
I'm excited to announce our first Ask Me Anything (AMA) in the community with Kimberly Bauer on Feb 13th at 1pm EST. How this works : Simply post any questions you have for Kimberly in this thread, then on February 13th she'll be responding to them all. Have a question you want to ask anonymously? Send me an email at hello@competitiveintelligencecollective.com and I'll post to the thread for you. Can't join us on February 13th? Don't sweat it. The conversation will remain posted in the community. About Kimberly Bauer: Kimberly Bauer was most recently the Manager of Customer & Competitor Insights at one of the top Higher Education publishers/content providers. Over the last decade in the industry, Kimberly has held a variety of roles including market development, strategic marketing, and sales management.
Her competitive intelligence career began three years ago when she was asked to create the competitive intelligence function to help guide the transition from print to digital content. Through strategic collaboration with siloed internal teams, she was able to create a constant flow of insights and deliverables that allowed teams to make quicker, more educated product & offer decisions.
Kimberly has worked with key leadership to research and foster innovation ideas within an industry that is seemingly declining. She introduced research programs that investigated potential market opportunities for innovation and provided recommendations on growth areas based on win/loss data.
Kimberly continuously seeks out developmental opportunities to hone her research and CI skills. She has been a member of SCIP (Strategic Competitive Intelligence Professionals) and has completed her CAP-1 CI certification. She has also received her certificate in Quantitative Analysis and serves on the Advisory Group for Crayon. Interested in being our next AMA guest? Send me an email at hello@competitiveintelligencecollective.com .
Get creative! I can only gain X amount of information from a competitor's website, so finding other resources is critical. Talking with industry experts, gathering intel from sales reps, reading G2/Capterra reviews, news articles and podcast interviews have been really informative for us.
Thanks Melanie! Building relationships with the sales reps has been one of the most helpful resources for me as I build out our CI program. Good call out.
Aside from the importance of working cross functionally whenever possible (sales, marketing, account managers, partners), I recommend getting a clear understand with your company's legal team on what they feel comfortable with. CI has a lot of gray areas and it helps to have a clear set of guidelines of what your company feels comfortable with.
From what I've seen secret shopping is one of the biggest gray areas that can be extremely valuable. Especially if your competitors don't have a lot of public information and have a lot of content like a help center gated behind a login. Personally, I've done secret shopping and I've made sure that I'm not crossing a line like signing an NDA in order to get information. I know some companies per to hire an agency to do this type of work while others don't mind it being done in house.
Secret shopping can be really valuable but if you think you can just call up a competitor without doing your research and having a plan fist, it can easily backfire. I'm really curious if anyone else has done secret shopping and what guidelines they have set in place.
I've done CI work at two different companies and currently doing some freelance work. One of the companies I worked at wanted to be more careful about the terms you accept when you join a webinar while another company left everything to my best judgement.