Measure competitive intelligence programs in three steps: volume of output like briefs and alerts, impact by tracking how many reports get used in product roadmaps and campaigns, and influence by assessing whether CI insights actually shape decisions. Most of this is qualitative, requiring stakeholder conversations to link CI work to outcomes.
Chapters
you know, what you're doing, using, you know, processes, gather the intelligence, communicate clearly, right? But I guess you always go back to the idea of the value, right? The value you deliver. And you said that quite clearly. So do you have some guidance on how should we measure the CI program's performance as a whole? So how do you measure performance for a CI team or a CIF or the people who are looking into, well, should I really have a CI team or not? So how do you measure the performance, or how can you tell this is going really well or not, or I need to improve?
Yeah, you mentioned value, and it's really important. I think it's a first metric, is value we provide. But it's tricky, it's not easy to, to, to assess what value we provide to the organization. But we can know If let's say, for example, for any project, the first step was presentation of competitive intelligence to the team for the project. Let's say we're working on a product roadmap and we want to present some competitive intelligence on that, or let's say a marketing campaign, and we present some competitive market intelligence at the beginning. And after the fact, we see if the program or the campaign took into account that information and we can link it to the success or failure of that campaign. But at least we know that competitive intelligence, what was included at the beginning and was included in that project. But it's not easier said than done because it's a lot qualitative than quantitative. But when you're starting with the program and we, you want to assess the performance of the team, well, you have first How to say, you start with volume. And volume, I mean, we can start easily and it has its value no matter what. How many key intelligence topics do we deliver? How many voice of the competition or competitive briefs? How many alerts and things like that? So the how many comes first because you have to build volumes and it's not for the volume, it's for the habit. Of building and doing things week in, week out. Okay, second is, uh, let's say, uh, impact. Uh, how many of those, uh, reports or presentations have been, uh, included into such and such pro— program, project, or something like that? And from what we provided as insights or recommendations, etc., when we see the results of those programs or projects, we say, uh, how many of our outputs influenced those, uh, those, uh, those organizational outputs. Let's say if we have, as I mentioned before, a campaign, a deal, a product feature we want to build, etc. So it's hard to explain it in details like in, in, in the conversation, but link the value, uh, of, uh, of how to link what we are doing with what is providing, uh, as value for the organization. Start with the volume, but the volume is to create the habit of producing. It's for the team. As for management of the team, you know that we are working on that. And after that, it's, it's how what we are producing, the volume, is linked more and more to what other teams are doing— operations, sales, etc. That's the second step. And the third step, okay, you created the volume, you know you're producing day in, day out, you know that they are, uh, aware and exposed to that competitive intelligence recommendations, insight, etc. The third step is to say how that intelligence shaped or influenced— that's why we were talking about influence— how it was, uh, an influence element or influential to the decision-making. And this about, it's a lot about discussion with stakeholders and being involved in the decision process to understand what has been done and how we influence that, if it can help.
