A competitive intelligence professional spends 30-60 minutes daily scanning competitors, then packages findings in a three-step format: what happened, why it matters, what to do about it. The team produces 3-5 weekly alerts and a competition report. Sophistication matters less than clarity and usefulness to sales, marketing, and product teams.
about, you know, a day in the life of, right? So a specific question about the processes, or how do you go about doing your business, right? So once the CI program is, you know, up and running, you know, then what? So what does it look like on a daily basis? Or do you have a specific recipe that you teach people how to gather intelligence, how to analyze it? And you said a lot about value, you know, how it adds value. How do you go about that? On a daily basis?
Yeah, well, first thing in the day of CI professional is drink coffee, and then after that, well, you start looking at what—
what kind?
Yeah, it depends on your taste, but some people like it like, say, latte or something like that. I prefer black coffee, and no matter whether it's espresso, double espresso, or even a filter, I don't mind. At least I have my dose of coffee per day. But anyway, it's not the most important skill for CI. I would say on daily basis, well, for me it's a lot of common sense. And common sense to, to know or to learn about competition, you have to spend time doing that. So every day you have at least half an hour, an hour you spend. And I do that every day to look at, uh, what competition is doing. For each day. And for the team, what I created, uh, it's, uh, the daily intelligence, or intelligence of the day. Each day we have one piece of intelligence at least saying, okay, this is what we found. And we follow the rule of what, so what, now what. Once again, common, common sense. Not going to, uh, how to say, complex, uh, methods, at least not in this conversation. We can— there's So many methods to be used for analysis. But if we go back to fundamentals or fundamental principles, the what is the information, so what, and now what, what we can do about that. And every day is developing the habit of gathering that intelligence, making sense of it, shape it in a digestible format to be consumed by people. And it's day in, day out, and it's week in, week out. So at the beginning of the week, we have our weekly plan. To see what kind of key intelligence topics we will deliver. And if we start with one key intelligence topic per week, depending on the pace of the organization, it's fine. If you say you have minimally, you have 3 to 5, how to say, intelligence alerts you can share with people, depending on how critical it is. If there is nothing interesting, well, we don't need that. And one state of the competition weekly report, that can be a program for a week. But I think it's a lot about forming the habits among team members to be every day aware of what competitors are doing, and each piece of intelligence having that process to say what, what we found. Okay, so what, why is it interesting for us, and what can we do about that? Is it actionable or not? Is it helpful to people, even to sales, or to make a deal, to marketing, to product management? Maybe it's just a feature or usability, uh, how to say, uh, improvement that we need to do in our product. But that mindset— I'm not gonna go to a more complicated or more sophisticated methods because we have a lot for the big picture, for side-by-side comparisons, etc. But most often than not It comes back to the, the most simple aspects of it. Uh, make sure that it makes sense for people. Make sure that you make it, uh, digestible for people. Otherwise, even if it's the best intelligence you have, the best insight, if it's not shaped the right way, people will just not understand it.
