Know The Competitor With The Help Of Competitive Intelligence Report

By Author: Vijay K Shetty
Total Articles: 2542
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Do you know what your competitors are doing now? Do you have an idea about the things that will be happening in the market tomorrow? Predicting and analyzing the movement of the industry you belong to, especially your direct competition can helping you in keeping up with what is happening in the market right now. Most effectively in the online sector, what you competitor is doing can help in improving your own business and marketing processes. Here are some practices that you might want to go for when it comes to analyzing the competitive intelligence.

Acquiring the intelligence
There are 2 kinds of CI sources that you can use for the competitive intelligence report. First is passive and it mainly comes from sources like the internet. Check the company sites, portals and search engines to find out more about the competition. You can also read press releases or check out reports from industry market analysts. You can also use government data such as UCC, environment or zoning data and the SEC. Check out their employment ads and read reports from financial analysts. The next one is from active sources. You can go ...
... to various trade shows, panels and meetings, tech conferences and employee interviews.

If you go further, you can also use indirect sources for the competitive intelligence report. Talk to former employees, partners and suppliers as well as distributors and representatives. You can also check customer interviews, surveys as well as sales force.

So you got the data, how is the competitive intelligence relevant?
The thing with this report is that it is critical for making useful strategies that actually work. For those vying for emerging markets, it is necessary to understand what the competitor is doing more so than what the customers need as well as their buying models.

Limitations
The data from the competitive intelligence report do not necessarily work. With the data that you can get, no matter how much data that would be, are unverified and incomplete. If something is negative, it is very difficult to prove it. Another thing to consider is the acquisition of information. Some will require cooperation from other people and it is a difficult and time consuming process. Of course, it is not only you trying to get competitive intelligence report; your competitors are also commissioning counterintelligence procedures to know what you are up to.

The best tip
It is necessary to know what you actually need to know. Remember that getting a competitive intelligence report and if you do not have proper knowledge about what you want, you will end up wasting precious time and resources just to get information that could be useless and trivial at the end of the day.

Vijay K Shetty,
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