• What changes in the market could provide opportunities for future growth?
• Which technology breakthroughs could significantly alter our current plans?
• Who are the key players in our industry, and what are they likely to do next?

Brief your employees.

Once senior management has identified the information needs and potential sources, they should inform the company’s employees, particularly the sales, marketing and technical staffs. Depending on size, some companies brief a few key personnel on the intelligence requirements. Others hold an “all-hands” meeting to discuss information needs. Employees should understand the importance of the information to your company’s long-term competitiveness, and the necessity that the information must always be held in the strictest confidence.

It is also very important to ensure that your employees’ desires to collect valuable information does not put your company in any legal jeopardy or tarnish its well-earned reputation. There are many ways to collect information that are both legal and ethical. Unfortunately, there are also many examples of companies “dumpster diving” to acquire information on their competitors.

Discuss your company’s policies with respect to collecting competitive information, addressing issues such as antitrust issues and unfair trade practices. Employees should also understand how to handle sensitive information discreetly. SCIP publishes a set of guidelines that can help guide your employees’ actions.

In addition to soliciting your employees’ knowledge of the market and your competitors, you should encourage them to talk to other experts and contacts outside of your company. You should also urge them to attend special industry events, like trade shows, plant tours or government-sponsored conferences. These programs offer a rich source of market and competitor information that often goes well beyond what is routinely published in industry journals.

Develop an effective communication network to share the information.

Once your employees begin their collection activities, you will need a process and tools to gather all of the information they obtain. These do not have to be very elaborate – a simple voicemail box and dedicated e-mail address might suffice in the short-term. Ultimately, it would be beneficial to establish a more sophisticated database to combine field reports and marketing materials from the sales force, technical papers from your engineering staff, and published material from your research staff or librarian.

However, it is unwise to undertake these information management enhancements until you have established an effective and workable process to collect the information. Some firms have wasted literally hundreds of thousands of dollars by prematurely purchasing off-the-shelf solutions. Rather, companies should go through a few collection events before deciding what IT solution best matches their emerging competitive intelligence needs.

Provide feedback.

In the rush to incorporate the valuable information they have collected into their operational plans, many companies overlook feedback. Providing feedback to the collectors of this information is a critical step in the process of data gathering. In addition to demonstrating your appreciation for their efforts, feedback provides the employees with the necessary direction for future collection efforts. It helps them understand what information was or was not important.

Feedback can be a as simple as a short e-mail message to the employee after they have forwarded some information from the field. Or it could be a detailed debriefing following a major industry trade show. Some companies have their employees compete for prizes based on who collected the best piece of competitive data during an industry conference. What is important is that the collectors know what information is deemed valuable by senior managers and which information is not needed in the future.

Using these proven techniques, companies can become more aware of their market environment and avoid damaging surprises. Gathered correctly, this knowledge can be used to quickly forecast potential threats and identify emerging opportunities. In the end, the objective of the competitive intelligence process is to provide senior managers with useful market information and early warning of future competitor actions.

[Article originally appeared in the Hartford Business Journal, June 3, 2003.]


Background

Fred Wergeles is the President of Fred Wergeles & Associates LLC, a Connecticut-based consulting firm specializing in Competitive Intelligence and Strategic Planning. He teaches a class in Competitive Intelligence at the University of Hartford Barney School of Business, and serves as the Coordinator of the Connecticut Chapter of SCIP. He can be reached at (860) 408-9093 or via e-mail at FWergeles@att.net

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