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Building a Competitive Intelligence Team

by Scot Kim  |  January 28, 2020  |  Submit a Comment

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:

  1. Establish key performance indicators to be held accountable
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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Tags: build-a-strong-leadership-team  competitive-intelligence  

Scot Kim
Senior Research Director
1 years at Gartner
25 years IT Industry

Scot Kim is a member of the Technology and Service Provider research organization. Mr. Kim provides research and advisory services to clients that are in need of performing competitive analysis for all departments like product management, engineering, product marketing, solutions marketing, and sales. Read Full Bio




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