Building a Competitive Intelligence Team

Establishing a competitive intelligence team is an opportunity to provide real actionable insights to product management, product marketing, executive members and sales.  To justify the budget to hire headcount to build a robust competitive intelligence team, competitive intelligence leaders should do the following:

1. Establish key performance indicators to be held accountable
2. Articulate in financial terms, how CI will help grow the company’s overall revenue.  For example, every CI analyst will displace $500k worth of deals away from competitor x.  So, if you manage 8 CI analysts, that is a $4M worth of wallet share away from the competition.
3. Calculate how CI will help in the product development phase.  In a recent Gartner product development survey, 58% of companies say that competitive intelligence is the most important activity before committing to product development.  Why would you not invest in a CI team?

By building a business case to executive management to invest in building a competitive intelligence team will allow CI leaders to be accountable.  Accountability is not a bad word.  In this case, it is a great word to have next to competitive intelligence because at the end of the year, CI can justify either adding new headcount, invest in new CI tools and/or expand travel expenses to train-the-trainers on how to displace the competition.  Competitive should never be a bootstrapped organization.  Or better yet, a bunch of rogue CI analysts.  Start now in building your CI team by creating a business case.

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