Establishing a competitive intelligence team is an opportunity to provide real actionable insights to product management, product marketing, executive members and sales. To justify the budget to hire headcount to build a robust competitive intelligence team, competitive intelligence leaders should do the following:
- Establish key performance indicators to be held accountable
- Articulate in financial terms, how CI will help grow the company’s overall revenue. For example, every CI analyst will displace $500k worth of deals away from competitor x. So, if you manage 8 CI analysts, that is a $4M worth of wallet share away from the competition.
- Calculate how CI will help in the product development phase. In a recent Gartner product development survey, 58% of companies say that competitive intelligence is the most important activity before committing to product development. Why would you not invest in a CI team?
By building a business case to executive management to invest in building a competitive intelligence team will allow CI leaders to be accountable. Accountability is not a bad word. In this case, it is a great word to have next to competitive intelligence because at the end of the year, CI can justify either adding new headcount, invest in new CI tools and/or expand travel expenses to train-the-trainers on how to displace the competition. Competitive should never be a bootstrapped organization. Or better yet, a bunch of rogue CI analysts. Start now in building your CI team by creating a business case.
1 Comment
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