Your CI Starting Block

CI, Competitive Intelligence, not Continuous Improvement, is where all the fun in your organization starts.

You see, CI starts with your own company.

Before trying to figure out who you are, you must know who the competition is.

How Can We Be Our Competition?

Let’s look at you for a minute.

When we start working with clients, we do an audit as an outsider sees you and points out questions that someone might never realize internally.

You can bet your competition is looking at everything you do. Shouldn’t you at least know yourself?

Does your content scream startup or small shop, or have the comfortable feeling of a solid and experienced entity?

Pricing, as an example, is an excellent place to start when seeing if you are your competition.

Are you giving away too much for the free or lower subscription tiers?

Have you let larger customers know you are ready for them and can help them in a way that speaks to their mindset?

You would be correct if you think this sounds a bit like CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). CI and CRO often cover similar ground and have the same goal: to produce more sales and revenue.

Does Your Website Fail the Basics?

Do you make it easy for customers to find what they need from you, like support, contact details, or price guides?

·????????Is support easy to find? People looking for a new solution know they need help. It should be easy to find. Otherwise, what are you hiding?

·????????Is your phone number on the front page, or are you making people dig it out from some “contact us” page? Substitute an Email for a phone number if you want, but Enterprise customers expect to take to people or at least have a direct email.

·????????Is your website all about what you want to tell the customer or what the customer wants to hear from you?

·????????Have you been upfront about pricing? Or do you obscure it in shadowy wording?

·????????Is your website even legible? As funny as this sounds, have various age groups look at your designer’s pages. You want to specifically look at contrasting colors, font sizes, and kerning.

The list of what to look out for is very long, but starting with the basics always helps.

As you can see, it is not very hard to be your own competition.

But wait, I may have gone a bit extreme for you for the moment.

It all depends on how you view CI and whether you are in the role part-time or full-time.

Can You Do CI Part-Time?

Part-time people get that glazed look in their eyes once they realize the investment time required to do the job correctly.

On the other hand, full-time people have so many ideas and people to meet, talk with and interview that it is just a thrill-a-minute role for them.

The CI role needs dedication; if you can’t find someone internally, you need someone from the outside and quickly.

Judith Lamont, Ph.D. ([email protected]), in this article in KM World, said it succinctly, https://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Features/Building-a-CI-team-9228.aspx.

“Another question is whether experience in the specific industry is essential. “About 80% of my clients insist on industry-specific experience,” says Paul Houston. “But most CI individuals are quick studies and can pick up the dynamics and vocabulary of an industry relatively rapidly.” Those firms that are flexible on that point can get a fresh perspective, some synergy from other industries and often an out-of-the-box approach.”

What matters is that your organization gets started and heads out on its way to beginning its CI journey.

You probably have started looking into the software running your CI efforts in parallel with your internal review. The usual ones make the list, and for a good reason, but I am mentioning this more as a task for you than a “choose this one” discussion.

Have you thought about how staff will find you or your CI data?

You want everyone to know where to go for the information.

It would be best if you had a unique name or short phrase that would be the new name of CI in your organization.

You want it to be easy to remember the name.

You want to ensure the email and any internal applications have that name available so that when your newsletter arrives, they know what it is.

You want this name to own everything CI. Not yourself.

Why? A few reasons:

You may not stay in the role or get promoted, and it is best left to an anonymous person/group to maintain the CI secrecy feeling.

Do you want everyone sending you countless emails and messages, “where is this” and “what about them” missives? No, you want some logic, order, and time to finish your work.

When everyone knows where to go for <insert your CI name>, they don’t have to waste time looking up who they last talked to or your details because they know if they let the <insert your CI name> moniker know, they will receive a reply, or find what they need at the depository.

Also, it is fun and intriguing for staff to get emails or slack messages from the moniker selected.

Now that you have a name planned, it may be time to start researching.

Time to Meet Your Stakeholders

Have you yet met with all your stakeholders to understand their needs and goals?

This includes the following people:

Your manager is the first stop, so you are both on the same page, and they have your back when your data causes friction, and it will cause conflict if you do your job well.

There is the head of sales who can tell you who is the competition you should focus on. You should also ensure they let you access their staff for follow-ups and debriefs.

Talk to all salespeople, business partners, and anyone involved in customer discussions because what seems obvious to them is not to you yet. You may find a common issue that has yet to be unearthed.

If they are different from your manager, you want to meet with the head of marketing to know what is coming down the road from them and how you can enhance their efforts.

My favorite is meeting with the head of support and some customer success team members.

Learn why people need help. Your competition may be leveraging their knowledge where your product fails customers. Shouldn’t you know as well?

Are you getting tired yet? All this running around, you need to organize yourself a bit.

Make Time by Owning Your Calendar, and Your Competitions

Next up, you need to plan your calendar for the future.

Reminders need to be in days or weeks sometimes, and repeating, not just 10 minutes or 2 hours beforehand like your usual for meetings.

You should include important dates in your calendar of competitor events, financial press conferences for public entities, or anything else industry-related.

How often will you be updating everyone? Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? You must mark out planning and write time to keep to your schedule.

Will you be doing audio or video updates or an internal podcast?

You need to book time for yourself to record and edit everything.

Look at management calendars to know when a good day is and when to push the information out.

Be prepared to A/B test everything from timing to format to links vs. longer content in the newsletter.

Newsletter? Yes. While you are busy updating everything online someplace, NO ONE KNOWS if you don’t tell them about the updates. Never rely on staff to be proactive. Always presume you need to do the hard work for them, and at least no one will accuse you of not working hard.

You will get helpful feedback usually, but if you get no feedback, you know you missed your mark and should try a different way.

Your time will go by fast, and you need to keep up because even getting slightly behind turns into an avalanche.

How Much Data Do You Need?

As much data as you can compile is lovely but impractical unless you leverage various tools to sift through it all and give you the key points.

Non-CI people think we want more data, and we do, but not always the type of data they think we need. We need information at the high and low levels and sometimes just the passing bit of information.

We sit in on competitor’s webinars and AMA chats as often as we can because what people say when performing their sessions live is always better data than what can be found online.

If the competition puts out a white paper, blog posts, social media posts, or podcasts, you need those too. Analyst reviews, yes, please. You need it all!

Oh, and you also want it in other languages too, when you have a worldwide mandate.

When customers mention the competition, we take notice and get our salespeople involved because they may not even know the customer had purchased the other solution.

In short, we want an overload of data because more data provides more insights.

However, there is a downside to all this data. We are also responsible for putting all this data into some logic so our teams can understand it and leverage it.

Ready to Get Started?

If all the above has not put you off yet, then think about this last piece of the puzzle for today. You must start producing content yesterday so people can hit their target this month or quarter.

How are you supposed to get your head around all of this, provide the logic, meet everyone, and start getting things done when you are so far behind the ball?

This is where that conversation with your manager comes into play, as does your 30-60-90 day plan. Because while you are building the CI practice, you are also producing content, and people need to give you the time to get yourself together.

Be strong and be open about what you can do today and what you will do in XX days.

Set expectations and then plan to exceed them eventually.

You will reach the day when you are “caught up” and can breathe, but the first 90 days are complicated, and you need to be strong enough to stand up to the pressure of it all.

CI is all about you and your team, if you have one, helping everyone and knowing that you may miss some things but also hit the right spots more often.

Your findings may be contrarian to management initiatives, and you may clash with the head of sales or question the rest of the marketing team about their upcoming plans. Listen to them and see how you can change their views to see what your data validates.

All of this is okay and expected, which is why you need to be made of Teflon and get out there again and again to fight the fight that makes it all worthwhile. Be open, honest, and upfront about who you are and what you are doing, and you will go far.

So, who’s ready to get started on CI for their company?