As a business owner, you’ve probably wondered what you could do to gain insights into your competitor’s success. Knowing this will help you develop an approach to help steer your business in the right direction. If your competitor is achieving through a certain means, then borrowing the idea can also help you achieve the same success. You can also learn all the challenges encountered by the competitors on their way up the success ladder.
On the other hand, if your competitor fails to achieve the desired success, you can learn what to do and avoid so you may avoid the same fate. For this reason, you need to carefully follow all the steps involved in the competitive-intelligence process.
Here is how you can design a process that can help you succeed in your business.
Set Your Goals
For you to succeed in the process, you need to define the business goals carefully. Doing this will help you come up with the best team responsible for the competitive intelligence process. An example of competitive intelligence goals that you need to consider for your business includes identifying all your competitors and writing all the existing differences. Once you have defined the goals, please choose the best people to help your business achieve them.
Come Up with a Plan
Once you set up your business goals, you need to come up with the right ways of achieving them. A plan also involves competitive intelligence resources and other tools to help achieve business goals.
Learn Everything About Your Competitors.
Research and learn about your competitors. Once you find them, write them down on a piece of paper and research every detail about them, including their strengths and weaknesses for both your direct and indirect competitors. You can borrow the tips from Moz about how you can identify your competitors.
Get into Work
After defining goals and identifying your competitors, the next step is doing the necessary work. There is really no need to set goals and identify your industry’s competitors if you are not willing to put in the work. The best way for you to work smoothly is by outlining the process and working on achieving each step one at a time. This also means working together with everyone involved for the greater good.
Results
You need to share your results with the rest of the team. This step involves putting together a well-defined presentation that will explain each step for every teammate to understand. While in the presentation, ensure you also present the necessary solutions. You can also offer successful recommendations to the business. You also need to provide a progression report concerning all the recommendations that you have offered.
Adoption and Result
Once you have put the competitive intelligence process in place, ensure you share it with every business member. Every involved person should also adopt it for it to be successful. As people adopt the process, they will provide feedback, which you can use to improve it.
Implement the Process
Now that you have looked at all the processes involved in competitive intelligence, you need to adopt the tools to help you achieve them. One example of the competitive intelligence tools that you should adopt in your business is NetBase Quid. NetBase Quid will provide insights into all the business trends from both structured and unstructured data. The platform will also provide faster solutions that will smoothen the process. This information will be based on billions of resources, including consumer reviews, news articles, media posts, forums, and publications.
Ensure you have implemented the process to void surprises and half-baked answers when an important question is raised.
