How do you balance competitive intelligence and data privacy in your industry?

There's a pretty clear line between ethical and legal, and crossing that line is unacceptable. We worked closely with our general council when developing standards for insight channels to make sure we can stand behind everything that we do. Sharing a competitor's pitch deck is not the same thing as sharing trade secrets. We're not conducting coprorate espionage, we're learning from each other to better serve our customers.

I think it's simpler than all this. If the content is publicly available, without having to apply any nefarious scraping methodologies to source it, then it's fair game. Any information that you have to work *that* hard to collect via questionable tactics should not be part of your data set. Finally, you should have internal policies prohibiting such acts.

You should never do something that is unethical or illegal. The good part is, that all the data and information are already available. For secondary research, you can use trackers, scrapers, and monitoring software to for pricing, product, and documentation pages. You can set up social media monitoring, hiring practices on LinkedIn, funding information on Crunchbase,... And even for interviews - you could spend money by going to a market research company to interview a competitor customer or ask them yourself. Be transparent on why/what/how you're doing with stakeholders and legal teams. Once you come up with internal conses of what you can, the process will be much smoother.

You're never going to have 100% reliable data - it doesn't exist. But good CI is going to get you close to truth and information you're confident in. I like to source data based on: ? Timeliness - is this data up-to-date and relevant ? Contextuality - how close is it to the product and marketing strategy ? Reliability - a tweet from a random person on Twitter is going to carry less weight than an interview with a customer, or an unbiased review on an aggregate website ? Verifiable - can I double-check the information? For example, you stumble on competitor weakness while social monitoring. Check with CS and Sales, and ask a customer to see if it's true. With team comms it's easy to do this fast.

As a CI professional, you might be required to work with sensitive customer data, including personally identifiable information (PII), that is captured for surveys/interviews as part of win/loss analysis. It is imperative that you remain transparent and accountable about the collection and use of this data. If you run a win/loss analysis program with an external vendor, ensure that the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that you sign with them stipulates how customer data will be used and for how long will it be retained. Typically, you should not store any PII for more than six months. You must also share this NDA with your customers and always give them the choice to opt out of win/loss surveys and interviews to build trust and credibility.