Competitive Intelligence

Are you looking to gain a competitive advantage in your industry but you're not sure where to begin? Whether you collect the data in-house or through an external partner, understanding your competitive landscape can mean the difference between significant sales growth and missed revenue opportunities. 

What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence refers to the process of gathering, analyzing, and utilizing information about competitors in the marketplace to gain strategic insights and make informed decisions. It involves monitoring competitors' activities, capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning to understand how their activities may impact your own business.

Competitive intelligence is crucial to the business for several reasons:

1. Strategic Planning: It helps businesses anticipate and respond to market changes, emerging trends, and competitive threats, enabling them to adjust their strategies accordingly.

2. Market Positioning: By understanding competitors' strengths and weaknesses, companies can identify opportunities to differentiate themselves and position their products or services more effectively in the market.

3. Innovation: Studying competitors' products, services, and R&D efforts can inspire innovation and help businesses stay ahead of the curve by developing new features or technologies.

4. Risk Management: It allows businesses to identify potential risks and challenges posed by competitors, such as pricing pressures, new market entrants, or disruptive technologies, and devise mitigation strategies.

5. Resource Allocation: Competitive intelligence helps to optimize resource allocation by identifying areas where investment is needed to maintain or enhance competitiveness.

6. Marketing and Sales: Insight into competitors' marketing strategies, customer acquisition tactics, and sales approaches can inform the development of more effective marketing and sales plans.

Overall, competitive intelligence provides businesses with a deeper understanding of their competitive landscape, empowering them to make better-informed decisions, mitigate risks, and seize opportunities for business growth and overall success.

What Insights Might Be Gathered?

From the standpoint of an HVAC original equipment manufacturer (OEM), for example, the sales team may wish to gather and analyze insights about equipment dealers and service contractors across specific geographic regions. In this scenario, the team may wish to understand what geographic locations represent the highest (or lowest) sales volume within a given time frame. Having access to this data can provide valuable insights into things such as:

• How many manufacturers are represented across dealers in a specific location
• Which manufacturer has the highest concentration of dealers within a location
• The identification of "dealer deserts" or areas where there is a shortage or absence of authorized dealers or distributors for their products, meaning that there are fewer or no dealerships or service providers available to sell or support a given manufacturer's HVAC equipment in that particular region
• Whether a given dealer shows loyalty to one or more brands through website content such as brand logos or product images

From Data to Insights: Making Data Actionable

In the example below, Company B aspires to increase its market share within a specific geography. By analyzing the raw data on that region's market share across its top three competitors, the team can determine that Company D has the most robust market share for online sales. Using the data from the example above, we can see that Company C makes the majority of their sales offline.

Access to raw competitive intelligence data and the proper analytical approach will allow Company B to make informed decisions about how to increase their market share both online and in-store by conducting further research into:

• How their competitors are approaching this market geography
• How competitors market, price, and position their products and services  

The Right Resources for the job

In addition to harvesting the data, specialized resources will be needed to leverage the raw data collected from both published and unpublished data sources to:

• Identify competitive trends and areas of opportunity
• Help decision-makers stay informed to enhance organizational performance by discovering risks and opportunities before they become readily apparent
• Prevent the business from being caught off guard by the competition
• Make informed resource allocation decisions

Ultimately, the research required to gather and analyze this data typically requires a dedicated data analyst or team to run complex queries and produce data that is easily understood and actionable. The team should have direct knowledge of your industry and understand competitive and go-to-market nuances within your segment.

Using this data, a company can make decisions such as:

• Whether or not to open or expand brand presence in a geographic area
• Which competitors present the biggest competition in varying circumstances
• Preparing to sell products online and leveraging a Product Information Management (PIM) to expand digital market share

Where to begin?

One of the first steps to collecting competitive intelligence is to identify your competitors and how they're performing compared to your brand. A best practice would be targeting the top two or three companies that share the same target audience and are at similar price points and reputations within your industry.

Competitive intelligence research should include extensive qualitative research from publicly accessible sources (news, press releases, conferences, interviews, etc.) and investigations using quantitative approaches to analyzing stakeholders, suppliers, customers, and other unpublished data sources.

By using this information to streamline the decision-making process, companies can expect better results by reacting to trends more effectively. It is important to ensure that competitive intelligence is sourced ethically and legally.

Looking to learn more?

Our team of 200+ Technical Data and Analytics Experts at Convergence Data can handle competitive intelligence requests across various industries.

📝 Contact us today to get started!