If you’re looking for a phrase to simultaneously sink the spirit of a CI practitioner and cause their blood pressure to rise, try making a request that sounds something like “Can you just tell me about our competitors…”

Requests that begin like this risk turning out to be too vague, too broad or too late to be genuinely useful. Whilst it’s part of the CI practitioner’s role to help clients refine their key intelligence question, having put some thought in to what you really want to know beforehand will impress your CI provider and help improve the insights that are delivered.

So how do you get your CI engagement off to a better start? Here’s three simple suggestions to get you started.

1. Be clear on what decision the intelligence will influence.
Producing CI has a cost – either the opportunity cost of the time dedicated by in-house CI or real cash leaving your organisation. If you want the best bang for your CI buck, take the time to think through what decision(s) you are trying to improve by gathering competitive insights.

To get the most value out of CI, the decision you’re engaging CI to help answer should be one that is still to be made, and not something that’s already been decided.

For example, if the CEO has decided to launch a new promotional offer, collecting CI to justify that decision ex-post arguably adds little real value, even if it does allow one to tick the ‘market intelligence’ section of the business case and proceed to the next stage of development. In this situation, there’s potentially more value to be gained from using CI to improves decisions yet to be made, such as:

• What marketing message should we run? (CI could help determine what messaging competitors are using and hence what will be differentiated.)
• What media should we use? (CI may be able to advise on competitor advertising behaviour so you know if you are going to be going head-to-head or have clear space.)
• How should our sales force respond to comparisons with our competitors? (CI can gather information on the strengths and weakness of competitor products to help manage customer comparisons.)
• When should we launch the offer? (CI might be able to determine if there are particular periods where competitors will be more vulnerable.)

You can also help improve the CI process by providing some context about the decision process itself – such as who the decisions makers are (if not yourself), where the decision will be made (at a meeting? by email?) and when the decision will be made. The latter point is particularly important, and is discussed in more detail later.

2. Explain how different information and insights will help make a better decision
Once you’re clear on the decision CI needs to help make, list the information about the competition that is actually needed to make that decision. Then, next to each item, write down how this information helps to make a better decision. If you can’t be clear on how something improves the decision – strike it off the list!

The items on this list provide guidance on the essential information and topics for the CI practitioner to focus on. At the same time, understanding how different pieces of information contributes to the decision making process can help the more enterprising researcher or analyst to identify other relevant and useful information.

For a small investment of time, a list like this can help improve the likelihood the insights produced are well targeted and relevant to the decision that needs to be made. Your CI analyst or consultant will also appreciate not spending time collecting superfluous information that never gets used.

3. Get CI involved early
If you’re engaging someone to produce CI, get them involved sooner rather than later. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and things will work out. Maybe the information you’re requesting will be on hand or will be simple to produce. Maybe you can find a consultant with enough hours and resources to hit that looming deadline.

But you might not be lucky and instead find yourself having to make do with whatever superficial information can be hurriedly scraped together – or maybe nothing at all. The best way to reduce the risk of this happening is to get CI involved early on the decision making process.

CI has the potential to improve your organisations performance. Following these three simple suggestions can help improve the return from CI by ensuring that relevant information is collected in time to help solve real business problems.

Understanding the character of a company and it’s leaders is a useful way of distinguishing between what a competitor could do, versus what it is likely to do. For the CI practitioner, this is an extremely valuable distinction. A shopping list of possibilities isn’t really actionable as there are too many ‘possibilities’ for any manager to plan for. What’s needed is a way to screen the ‘possible’ actions and create a short list of what’s actually likely to happen. This is where understanding the culture of a company and the character of it’s leaders provides a useful sorting mechanism. And this is why the Mindshift’s course on competitor profiling is probably one of my favourite courses.

So how does it work?

Create the Basic Profiles
To start with, you need a pretty good base of information about your competitor and it’s leaders. As was pointed out repeatedly during the workshop, you need to build profiles that include both ‘hard information’ (data, facts, statistics, news, time-lines) and ‘soft information’ (opinion, anecdotes, commentary, personal observation).

In my experience this is a straightforward but very time consuming process. If you don’t have an army of graduates/interns to do this work then you might want to consider subscribing to a service like Factiva to speed up your information search, or even contract a librarian/researcher to assist.

Once you have a mix of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information, this is used to create profiles which summarise the key information about the competitor and it’s leaders.

Analyse the personality and corporate culture
A major focus of the Mindshifts course was using the information in the profiles to estimate the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) of your competitor’s leader(s). This then provides a frame of reference for predicting how they are likely to behave when faced with certain situations or decisions.

Where things took an interesting turn during the workshop was when we were introduced to the idea of using MBTI to describe the corporate culture of a company. This process involves the CI practitioner analysing the culture of the company within an MBTI style framework to determine the temperament of the competitor. (e.g. Guardian, Artisan, Rational, Idealist).

From Possibilities to Probabilities
The third step starts with analysing the competitor using Porter’s ‘Competitor Analysis’. By examining the competitors stated goals, current strategies, capabilities and management assumptions – a response profile is generated which identifies the competitors possible offensive and defensive actions. This is where a lot of ‘competitor analysis’ (including my own until now!) would have stopped – with a list of possible actions.

What makes the Mindshift’s profiling course so useful is that it teaches how to use the culture and personality profiles to narrow down the list of ‘possible’ actions into a shorter list of what the competitor is ‘probably’ going to do. This is extremely valuable to the CI practitioner as it then becomes more realistic to offer options for responding to the competitors likely actions.

Overall, I’d rate this as my favourite Mindshift’s course so far. For those interested in attending the course, keep an eye out on the “Upcoming Events” page at Mindshifts or join their mailing list.

Note: This is an edited version of an article previously published at ‘Catallaxy Files’ but lost during the great crash of ‘09.