Competitive Intelligence actions to create positive outcomes

Competitive Intelligence actions to create positive outcomes

Competitive Intelligence is something that can fit into the strategy of any business. It doesn’t matter what your product or service is. There will be competitors out there who are striving to get ahead of you. In your the same market, finding ways to stand out from the crowd. This article defines the Competitive Intelligence actions to create positive outcomes. Competitive Intelligence could benefit your entire company. It could help many of your teams, including:

• Marketing teams
• Sales teams
• Customer success teams
• Executive team
• Product marketing
• And more

Let’s look at some actions to create outcomes for you using Competitive Intelligence.

Sales enablement strategy actions

Not surprisingly, Competitive Intelligence research involves looking for information about your competitors. Assess their products, pricing, and services and many other things. Whatever you find would help your entire company, your sales team especially. After gathering this information, your sales team could use it to their advantage.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive Intelligence is the finding & critical analysis of information to make sense of what’s happening & why. Predict what’s going to happen & give the options to control the outcome. The insight to create more certainty & competitive advantage.

By using Competitive Intelligence, sales teams are provided with supporting collateral and materials. Collateral training materials should be useable, timely and impactful to support their dealmaking. And this is especially the case when it comes to handling objections. Sales team using competitive sales enablement materials will increase your competitive win rate. And, of course, so will your revenue.

• Competitive battlecards can be provided to your sales team. These can be used as a reference for when they’re on a phone call with a potential customer. Strategic and tactical information go into any effective battlecard. You should begin with a company’s basics and then progress to more content. This could include; current events, pricing, landmines, and win/loss stories.
• You could create ready made sound bites to tackle any common competitive objections. When something crops up, again and again, it’s helpful to think of common sales answers. To allow your sales teams offer strong responses and data to back up their claim. Sound bites should be included on your one-pagers and battlecards for easy access.
• Competitive one-pagers of easy-to-understand highlights on how your competitor’s product or service. And how they compare to yours. Include quick statements on what your product is and is not. And the same for your competitor’s product. Customer quotes showing how your product stands against competitor’s product are also useful. As helpful as battlecards are to your salespeople, one-pagers are even better.
• In order to have a stronger competitive outreach use draft email templates. When your sales team emails need to meet to the exact needs they’re looking for. Rather than emails that are sent to bring down your competitor directly. You should provide sales with email formats that show off your product. So they grab your potential customer’s attention.

Marketing strategy actions

We will leave the definition of strategy and it’s use to make everything it touches sound clever here. But there are many ways to succeed and be enhanced by Competitive Intelligence with your

• Marketing strategy
• Content strategy
• Growth strategy
• Social media strategy
• Product marketing strategy
• Their social media posts can be looked through to improve your social media reach. This depends on what platforms they use. Doing this would give you insight into how social media works in their overall strategy. If they’re only on one channel but not another, you’ve been allowed to use that channel to expand your reach.
• Use your competitor’s campaigns to inspire your own. Their paid social media, landing pages, ad copy and A/B tests are the things that you should focus on. You could use your competitor’s campaigns to come up with your own. And also keep an eye on their their marketing investments. We are sure there will be some over expensive platform to help you with that, should you so wish.
• You can analyse the content strategies of your competitors. You should do the same for their content’s quality and SEO strategies. Your own content can fill up gaps in the market to convey the needs of your target audience. And you can target new keywords depending on Google rankings.
• Differentiated messaging should be used to make sure that you stand out in the market. Identify common themes based on your market and competitive research. Incorporate them into your messaging to better relate to your target audience.

Product Strategy Actions

Listening to your audience is a great way to improve your product or service further. You could be able to find lots of information on your customer’s ‘pain points’. Watch them through market research, customer interviews and third-party websites. You could look for any reviews on your competitors on third-party websites also. When people review things online, they are brutally honest and don’t hold back. This would help you to see both the good and bad aspects of your competitors’ products.

• Third-party review websites help shape your product roadmap based on what you find. These findings include information about your competitors. Precisely what they have, don’t have, and what your customers wish your product would have. Analyse how to exceed your competitors’ products performance. Apply your findings to your product roadmap.
• Your pricing and packaging could be redesigned based on your competitions performance. Some of your pricing and packaging may allow your competitors to get ahead of you. So adjust your pricing and packaging structure to be more competitive. But only after looking closely as to why a competitor is doing what they are. And what the consequences are for them.

Overall business strategy actions

Some more’ actionable outcomes’ of Competitive Intelligence could benefit your entire company.

• You could prevent customers from churning by monitoring your competitors. Customers often decide to leave when what they believe to be a “better” solution rears its head. But by tracking competitors messaging. Understand what their products really offer. So you are able to keep customers by addressing concerns early on.
• Your competitive landscape must be kept in check. The way to understand your competitive landscape is to conduct Competitive Intelligence research. This would include; aspirational, direct, indirect and emerging competitors. After all, you want to know whom you might compete against in your market.

Competitive Intelligence actions to create positive outcomes

In conclusion, analysing the Competitive Intelligence data that you have gathered is essential. But your research is only made worthwhile by actually using it to your advantage. Otherwise, your Competitive Intelligence strategy won’t benefit your company. We have gone through are only some of the successful Competitive Intelligence strategy.

Art by Edu Lauton

Words by Billy Devereux-Dixon