In this short dialogue, Speaker B asks why communication and influencing abilities matter for competitive intelligence (CI) professionals. Speaker A explains that while CI teams often excel at gathering and analyzing data, they frequently fall short in conveying insights. Two core communication rules are highlighted: having valuable content and delivering it effectively. Effective storytelling—starting with context, defining the issue, and demonstrating relevance—prevents presentations from becoming a dry list of facts. Beyond messaging, influencing skills are essential for navigating the organization’s network of stakeholders. Speaker A references the Mandelbrot matrix to illustrate how stakeholders differ in interest, power, and required engagement (inform, satisfy, monitor, collaborate). Understanding these relationships helps avoid antagonism and positions CI insights for adoption. Confidence is also crucial; CI professionals often possess deep knowledge but may appear hesitant, undermining credibility. Building confidence and mastering influence tools can be learned, enabling CI practitioners to act as “gray eminences” within their firms rather than merely sharing data.
What is—
and you talk about communications, right? So what is the importance of developing communications and influencing skills for the CI professional?
What I saw in my experience, most of the time we gather intelligence well, we analyze well, we, uh, communicated not so well. And it's a lot about how, how to say, and I learned that from communication. Two rules in communication: have something good to say and say it well. So the first part, I think we're good at. We have something good to say because we have the content, the substance. But how we convey the message, how we position ourselves in the organization, and even when we're presenting, we have the floor, we have the platform, and And then it's like just showing facts and people can just see the documents. Sometimes they don't want even to attend to presentation because it's kind of, well, let's say sometimes it's boring, sometimes it's not. We lost— we lose them sometimes because there's too much content, the story is not there. When I say story, it's the beginning to the end. Let's say start, start by defining, describing, and demonstrating, not starting directly to bits and bytes, things like that for communication. That's just the first part. Influence is developing those people skills to make sure that we're not, for example, antagonizing anyone just because we disagree with the person. We know who are the stakeholders, and you have the Mandelbrot matrix which can help a lot with that. I was mentioning before, the organization is not a hierarchy, it's a network of people, and you have people more connected than others. We have to understand those connections because even if we present something about the computer talking about a feature, maybe, how to say, it's not good news for some folks inside the organization, and we have to be careful about that. How to say, for, for your stakeholders. They have their interests and they have their influence also, or power. And there are different ways to, to, to, to, to deal or to collaborate with those people. For some stakeholders, you just need to keep them informed. Others, you keep them satisfied. Others, you have to monitor closely. And others, you have to work closely with because they will be promoters for CI and things like that. So it's not just even about communication, it's beyond that. Who's who in the organization, what's their interest in CI, and more, more than that. It's that, that's a type of people skill that we need to develop. And I think even in influence, it's the confidence, the confidence as CI professionals, because we have so much knowledge. I think we know most of the time more than anyone else in the organization. But still, when it comes to presenting it, we are like hesitant and things like that, and people see it. And when they see it, it's not, it's not good for your credibility. So yeah, this is maybe building that confidence, uh, and, and it can be learned, uh, it can be learned. So I, I really believe that even Influence and having the, uh, the tools for that are plenty of tools, but we have to get interested in, in being better communicators and influencers, not in the sense, let's say, social media and things like that, but more gray eminences inside the organization.
Eminence, great. So I think, so this is really the reason why I wanted to bring you to talk about
