Webcast: How to Build Successful Products with Competitive Intelligence

Hello everybody, name is Raina McKaylee. I'm delighted to host this webinar session, How to Build Successful Products with Competitive Intelligence. Wherever you are, for me it's afternoon. I'm sitting here in Germany, so it might be evening, might be morning for you. You're pretty much welcome, and I can promise this will be a very interesting session for all of us. Our today's speaker is Fouad Benyoub. Let's just give us a little hello.

Hello everyone.

Yes, so it's good to know that our microphones are on and we all can hear you. Yeah, what is this webinar series, we call it Insight Webinars, all about? Well, that's about competitive/market intelligence, and I happen to be director of the Institute for Competitive Intelligence, so this is pretty much the link already. We are into education, we are into conferencing, we're into certificates, and We love to talk and we love to see presentations from practitioners, from academies. So new ideas, innovative ideas, as well as best practice. And this is very much the reason why today's webinar is all about products and competitive intelligence. Sounds a bit strange because usually everybody's into services, but more into internet e-commerce and all this. Fussy stuff. But yeah, today we're going to talk about real good hardware, i.e., products. And our speaker of the day, if I may introduce you in a few, few words, uh, sitting in Canada, Montreal. So we are halfway around the globe, I guess. And of course, he's a CI professional on its own with a master's degree in competitive intelligence and international Business Development from the University of Strasbourg. That's France, of course. And with a bachelor's degree in Operational Research and Applied Mathematics. So this is a pretty interesting background on its own. But then over the years, you have definitely qualified for various functions from actually developing products to being consultants and helping companies to come along these lines. And I've seen your CV that you are usually always related or somehow playing along the lines of this market and competitive intelligence. Very interesting. And please, now that I would love to hand over the presentation to you, I would love to hear a little bit more about your background if you want to share with us a bit more insight. And then of course we see your presentation. During the whole presentation, Everybody who's attending can use our chat room that's on your panel, small window that you might have to open, and there's a chat function in that. So please ask your questions to Fouad. In the end of our session, that's about 20-25 minutes, when we have the end of the PowerPoint presentation, we will take these questions and then Fouad can answer and try to elaborate, or you can suggest some additional ideas and we can talk like that. So all in all, it should take us some 45 minutes for the whole session. Okay, so I guess it's all yours.

Well, thank you, thank you, Rainer, for the presentation and this introduction. And yeah, as you mentioned, I started with mathematics, but it was too Cartesian, if I may say so. I did more marketing. And so yeah, yeah. So after that, I did a lot of marketing. So I worked in the energy industry in North Africa, and it was there when, where I discovered competitive intelligence. So I decided to go more deep into competitive intelligence. So I got my master's degree in competitive intelligence and international business development, worked in reinsurance. After that in mining industry and in telecom, also in North America. And now I'm in the technology industry. So what I'm talking— when I'm talking about technology, I'm talking about SaaS solutions. Well, all the solutions we have in cloud, let's say even Facebook, LinkedIn, or name it, any solution now it's in the cloud. And my company, I'm responsible for the product management, product strategy for our solution. It's basically a payroll HR time and attendance solution. And I discovered that even in industry which is not very well known, there's a lot of competition and a lot of things to get from the competitors when we want to, let's say, to enhance our product and to produce or to develop new features. So So this is how I came with this idea of building products or successful products with competitive intelligence because the input of competitive intelligence is very crucial to product evolution. And what I'm trying to do today is just to share with you guys what I learned. And sometimes I learned it the hard way. And yeah, just to make sure that there's some input I can provide and I can share. And anytime you can ask any questions about the content, or you can challenge the idea that you will see. And this is the goal. So it's more, I see it as a conversation, even if we are not talking on the phone or something like that, but feel free to ask any question you have or to share any comment you have. So, and if you need any additional information about my profile, so I invite you to go to my LinkedIn profile, and even if you want to connect and ask me questions after the webinar, so you're welcome to do it. So I'm gonna start with the presentation, and the title is very clear: How to Build Successful Products with Competitive Intelligence. And it's all about the intelligence— where, uh, how to say, how to find it, where to find it. And this is the first question: what kind of intelligence do we need for product management and to develop successful products? And second is where to find it. It can seem obvious, but it can be more complicated than that. I would start with Noriaki Kano. It's a Japanese guy. I don't know if some of you know him. He developed the customer satisfaction model known as Kano model, and it is a very interesting model because what I learned from this model, and I use it every time. It's about satisfaction and it's about implementation. And it starts with the delighters. When I'm talking about the delighters, we're talking about features in your product or service that create delight within the customers. It's the innovation bringing something new, new experience, creating the wow effect with the clients. And for this, it's like the Amazon Alexa, it's starting now, for Christmas season and all people are talking about that. It's kind of features like that. It's new, you have a lot of promotion, etc., and it's differentiator. If you are the first one to do that and it attracts, uh, attraction, so you are a winner. After that, you have performance needs. And when we are talking about performance needs or, or features that are in this category, you're not the only one providing this feature, but not all the companies are providing or your competitors are providing this feature or this service. So it's kind of differentiator. You have a bunch of competitors offering that and others not offering that. So you are still, how to say, able to compete. And after that you have basic needs. So basic needs, I consider it as a table stake. If you don't have these features or these services, or you're not providing such an experience for, for the clients. So you're out of the market soon, and we see that with the many companies. And why I'm showing you that, it's because of the competition and the lighter needs, or the lighters quickly become performance needs, because you're the first to do something. Take company like Uber or Airbnb or others. You're the first to create a business model and to create the light. But after that, you can be sure that you have competitors coming to the market and offering the same, same product or service and improving it just a little, and they can take some market share. So it's becoming performance needs. And after that, after a while, after a few years, well, it will be like commodity. Everybody is using it. And you have to innovate, you have to create something else. So innovation is becoming a commodity and we can find competition if we want to be, let's say, a smart follower. It's in the performance needs. And in the performance needs, you have like a few competitors trying or starting to offer the feature or the product and we need to know exactly what they are offering or what they are planning to offer because we can go even further and discover what they are planning to offer. To do, and this is what I can share with you. First, listen. And when I'm saying listen, it's what I learned to outperform our competitors. And even in our industry, we need to know their products better than their own people do. And it's a reality, and we can achieve that to some extent because We have the right methods, we have the right tools, and we have the right mindset to get this information. And we can go deep and we have the time for that because it's part of our job description. I hear lots of, it's just researching on Google and finding information. I hear that from time to time from salespeople, for example, but I don't know how many hours people have to search on Google. I don't know if they have the right tools and methods, and I guess They don't because it's not just searching on Google, it's documentation and searching inside and analyzing this information and verify if it's reliable or not. So we are able to know to some extent the products of our competition better than their own people. And I experienced that because I spend a lot of hours and generally I spend a lot of hours just knowing about the products and the features and the services. Here what I'm showing you is the product competitive analysis or the comparative tab. Well, basically when we started, I was happy to have this tab because it's simple. Feature 1, Feature 2, and our product and competitor product. But the reality is sometimes you have more competitors. Like for in our industry, we have more than 40 competitors. So what happens, so management sometimes are asking for more information. They say, what if we want to see more competitors? So I put more competitors. And let's say we have 8 competitors, we have 10, something like that. And after that, next question is, what if, what if we want to see more features? Because the reality, you can guess, it's not just 4 features, sometimes hundreds of features or something like that. So I said, okay, I will put more features. So here we are starting to have a tab representing like set of features and competitors. But after that, well, as you, as you know it, for competitor, it's not just one product. And if I'm talking about my industry, SaaS industry, you have like different packages. So you have the freemium, you have the basic version, and you have the professional, and sometimes you have the full version. And for that reason, sometimes management want to know exactly what are the products of the same competitor. So let's say we can try to do that segmented by product, by competitor. And you see this tab, it's starting to become complicated, but it's not over. When it's starting to become complicated, what people can ask is to segment it to have a better understanding of it. So this is what we tried to do, and we really did that for a product, for a new product we were about to launch. We really did create the tab because there was need, and they wanted to see exactly, how to say, one tab showing everything. And now with that, how can we present that? How can we analyze that? How we can draw conclusions from that? And it's not that obvious, and it's Sometimes it's completely impossible. So just for that, when I saw this tab, I was thinking about going back to Excel spreadsheet. And in my experience, showing results or showing the competitive intelligence results in Excel spreadsheets, it's really not the best way to show it. And it's not the best way to, how to say, to integrate the decision process because it's complicated, and it's not the goal of Excel to show the results or something like that. So my idea is to propose, offer something kind of different to, uh, to show the results. Um, what we have to know: more competitors and products means more complexity, more, more needs— or sorry, means more competitive intelligence. And the more information, the more intelligence we have, the more we need to simplify this information, because at the end of the day, the intelligence is not for us, it's is for our clients, and our clients are the board members, the management team, and we have to provide a result which is very simple to understand. Otherwise, then people will not follow and we will lose their attention, and it will be, it will be, how to say, sad for us because we won't achieve the results we want. So I learned from operational research, and I mentioned I started doing mathematics, and one of the first lessons was that to resolve a complex problem, I had to split it into several smaller and easier to solve problems. And I'm going to show you how with this comparative tab. Okay, here what I'm showing you, and I'm sure you know about mind mapping tools, and what I do, I use mind mapping tools to map product features. For example, here, let's call it Competitor 1, and you have product segments. And for my industry, for example, you have an HR solution, let's say HR solution, SaaS HR solution. You have core HR and you have features in core HR, and you have talent management like recruitment, like onboarding, training, and things like that. And my goal is to, to have a deep view of the features of the product itself. This is not meant to be presented to the board members in a presentation. It's meant to collect and put the data in, in the same place. Why I'm saying that? Because in this map you can put the information from different sources and it's you can navigate inside any map. It's different from any PowerPoint or document or even the database when you put documents in SharePoint portal or something like that. For me, it's very helpful and it was very helpful for the competitors. So first, develop product map that show the largest scope of features possible. This is what I'm trying to do. For me, it's the collection and analysis phase. After that, what we can do, after we created the, the specific product map for each competitor, we can create tabs by segment. So you saw the tab before, I showed you the global exhaustive tab, which is very complicated. So what we can do, we can select segment by segment and create a tab by segment. Like I mentioned before, Core HR, we create a tab just for Core HR. For an HR solution, if its segment is recruitment, so we create a tab just for recruitment and we just compare our features with different competitors' features for, for, for the segment of recruitment, nothing else. And create that for different, um, for different segments. And the third phase is just to create a summary tab, high-level comparative tab, and we can list competitors But generally we don't need to compare with all competitors. What we show is 3-4 main competitors, let's call them Big 4, Big 5, or name it. And we put the segments, not the features, not the detail. We have them in backup, but we don't show them up front because we can lose our audience. And what we do usually, we put our product the segments and we compare, are we stronger than in this segment, are we comparable, are we weaker than them. And what we, what I use usually, because it's very quick to see, it's a color code. It's a green, for example, for stronger, yellow for comparable, and red we are weaker. So we have to do something about that if we want to stay in the market in the long run. So what I'm saying here, detailed maps, high-level CI presentations. You know it perfectly, you are in competitive intelligence and market intelligence field, and at the end of the day, the clients, they don't have a lot of time. And when I'm talking about the clients, I'm talking about the internal clients, the management team, and we have to be concise and quick in presenting the results, the necessary results. So I will continue with that. And this is my reality. I had, how to say, a request to see the features of the competition. I said to myself, is it just about features? And obviously the answer is no. I started to dig on the technology. And when I talk about technology, I'm talking about technology to provide a good user experience. I'm talking about development environment, Talking about security, because it's very important when you are offering something online. If you have security breach, or if you have a technology that is not very secure or not very updated, so you put your company at risk. And it's just one hacking story, hacking story of your database, and it's nightmare. Talking about databases, which kind of technology, which kind of databases, because how to say, the service you provide depends on every technology you are using. API integration, and we hear a lot about that. When we talk about API, it's just how solutions can communicate between, between, yeah, between, between any solution, between the solution themselves. If you have two solutions, one for, let's say, payroll, the other one for accounting, how they can communicate data from the payroll to accounting or from accounting to payroll. And you have data storage, and it is very hot topic because clients sometimes requires that the data is not stored outside the country. And this we need, we need to know, and this can differentiator between compared to, to a competitor. So I'm just talking here about technology because powerful features with poor technology make poor products. And we already saw that in, in different products. They have great feature set, but the technology is poor or it's outdated, it's not updated. So the clients are moving from there because they start to notice that it's slow, that there are a lot of bugs. Okay, here I'm talking about product development history and plans, and this is what I show usually to, to people inside the company, uh, the release cycle. I'm showing you all this, the release cycle, and after that I show the roadmap of the competitor, showing that gives us an idea about their agility. What is the cycle? Are they delivering features every month, every 3 months, every 4 months? One of the first things I learned in competitive intelligence is if we want to compare ourselves with competitors, we can compare about our financial strength and our development or time to market strength, how quick we can deliver features to the market. And this is a big differentiator, and we see it in our market too, because we see a few competitors that are very quick to deliver and others taking like a year to deliver features, and it can make a real difference in the market. And at least we can know exactly where we stand. Let's talk about pricing, and pricing is very, very important when you are comparing products with the competition products. Which kind of price models, and they are not the same segmentation, because while I'm saying that, sometimes you have a client or a sales rep coming to us and saying, look, this competitor is offering this product and it's very powerful and they have such and such features. And the first question I ask, what's the cost? What's the price for the client? Because sometimes the client doesn't know about the real cost they will have to pay. We are talking about sales pitch and you don't have all the information in this sales pitch. When you receive your first bill and you have the configuration fee, training fee, etc. So this is where you have, how to say, a big surprise. And for me, if I want to compare my product with the competition product, I try to know everything about the competition pricing policies and practices, discounting strategies too. What kind of discounting discount they are offering and price tiering strategies. Are they using the freemium base professional full solution or is it another model? And I believe it can make the difference because each feature comes at a price. So when a client is coming to us or sales rep coming to us telling us, yeah, they are offering this and this and this feature. One of the first questions we ask is the price, because maybe it's not the same price level, it's high, and maybe it's, how to say, if they are practicing a lot of discounting, it's just to get the maximum clients, but it's not quality clients. So it's a very important aspect. Reviews, and it's taking more and more importance. And we are talking about features, performance, weaknesses, customer support, and onboarding experience. We are already there, maybe not in our companies for, for to compare the products of our company, but in our everyday life we rely more and more on ratings and reviews. And this is what we do even in competitive intelligence when I want to compare with the competitors' products. So I go to, to some portals and you have a bunch of them on the internet, and they compare the features, they compare the weaknesses, and they compare everything. And you have clients talking about what went well, what went badly. And the reality is we want to know how the competitor's product is perceived in the market, and perception sometimes is reality. And from the customer point of view, It is a reality because the customer doesn't have the time to analyze or to dig deep into the product features or something like that. Usually what they do, even if it's a small business owner, they will search on Amazon, for example, for a product, and they will go to see the reviews. And if the first reviews are not good, chances are the product is disqualified. So for us, it's important to know that. And you have product markets too, because as for the pricing, sometimes people come to us and say, "They are offering this and this feature and they are offering all the features." And the important question is, for what kind of company? Are we talking about small companies, medium-sized, or large companies? And several times we realized that it wasn't the same market because it wasn't the same size of company. It wasn't the same industry because there are specific needs for each industry and we have to ask these questions. And when I say ask these questions, it's looking for the intelligence about that. This competitor, what's his target market? Which size of companies? If it's B2B, are they targeting, or even B2C, which kind of client are they targeting? So the personas is very important. The region, you can have specific needs by region. And if I talk about payroll, it changed from country to country. And even here in Canada, from province to province, you can have different rules. So maybe it's an entry barrier and the company will never end up in our market. Why? Because they are targeting a specific region and they can't adapt because they will have to invest a lot. That. And you have business needs. It depends on, uh, how to say, niche market. For example, you have specific needs that a solution responds to. So if someone is coming to us and telling us they're offering this and this and this feature, maybe it's for a specific market, a specific niche market, and we want to— we don't want to go there. So very important, are they really targeting the same market? And for us, can, how to say, make us think more clearly about whether we want to compete with them or not. And they have the investment, of course. R&D, very important to know how much they are investing in their innovation. Staffing, are they recruiting more salespeople, more customer service, more development team, more product people? And this is very important to, uh, to say, try to understand the strategy behind behind the hiring of people. The budget in marketing and sales, and even online marketing and sales, and you have a lot of tools to compare, I would say, the investment for the strategies on the internet, let's say pay-per-click strategies and things like that. And you have acquisitions. In our industry, for example, we find some competitors trying to acquire companies just to enhance their product or to enlarge their offer. And we follow that too because it can be hurtful to our business. So, and yeah, very important to know how the competitors are investing in their products. Let's move very quickly. So to answer to the question, is it just about product features? And the answer obviously is no. We have all of this and all All of these pieces are the parts of the puzzle to have the big picture, and our job is to show the big picture. So we go through the features, technology, markets, pricing, reviews, investment, and maybe you have a few other items you can add, but the idea is to have the big picture and to show the board members, your management, the big picture to make the decision. Here, what I put Sorry, I'm just gonna do this. Under-promise, deliver light intelligence. Before, I have this sentence saying under-promise, over-deliver. But in competitive intelligence or intelligence generally, over-delivering is not very, very, very, how to say, very good sometimes. Why? Because you have a lot of intelligence, But let's say 80% or 90% of the intelligence, you won't present it. You will use it from time to time because it's needed in the project. But what we have to deliver or what we have to share is the right intelligence, just the information needed to take the decision at the right time. And this is what I'm saying here. If necessary, challenge and reshape the scope of your competitive intelligence projects. Why? Because sometimes it's, it's just a simple request, but you feel that you need more to have the big picture. And this is my case when I was talking about features. I went, I went beyond that. I went discovering a few other things, and it made the difference in the decision process. Okay, where to find it? I'm going to go very quickly because the time is running fast. Here are different sources, and I invite you to go to, say, training, how to say, TradeTools, for example. You have a training product demo theaters developing. You have the videos you can find on YouTube, on any other platform, and it's hours of videos of training, and I go through them. You have training documentations, you have clients sales rep who can share a lot of information. You have online support portals. You have a lot of documentation you can get. Interviews and conferences of CEOs and product vice president or directors, and they are sharing elements about their roadmap, their product. You can also monitor developers and product managers. And you know that a lot of things are said in social media, and you can find a lot of information there. And you can follow also the job posting. Of the competitors. You know what they are hiring or who they are trying to hire. So very important for you. Intelligence versus, versus opinion. Don't challenge expectations with opinion, but with intelligence. Let me explain. If there are expectations within your company or within our company about competitive intelligence, about whether we can find the intelligence or not, And this is a real case I had to face. People were saying it's impossible to find this intelligence and it's impossible to find this information. And it's like they already had the perception that it was impossible. And for me, what I said, let me take a look at it and I will get back to you. I didn't even say in my opinion I can or I can't or something like that. What I did, I already knew that I was able to find this intelligence. So what I did, I found this intelligence, I prepared my report, I presented the report, and I identified all the sources. So what I did, there was no challenge over there, and they were not able to challenge anything about what I presented because it's more intelligence. There's no opinion, there's no guesswork. In presenting the intelligence. Very quickly, how to help decision-making: learn, adapt, help, then influence. Competitive intelligence is a gift to give. And why I'm saying that— many times I arrive to meeting and I start presenting competitive intelligence results, and people are very happy because they didn't have expectations. When you are going to salespeople, sales meetings, operation meetings, for example, even dev team, you present competitive intelligence and they didn't ask for all the details you are presenting, they were happy. Start with that, put something on the table, and after that we can ask about the intelligence they can provide us. So it is always a gift you give before, before asking for anything else. Prioritization process, and here I'm showing how it works for prioritization, and you have few steps here. And we talk about market, we talk about competition during the prioritization process. But in my experience, we are talking about product-market fit and we're talking about competition and market analysis. But what I realize, sometimes it's not taken seriously. We can, you can hear the word competition and hear the market. But it's not deep. It's not deep. And our job is to go deeper than just the surface. And this is what I did. And this is what I'm doing all the time, even when I'm talking with the companies. This is what I'm— what I say. We have to change this. We have to go deeper and to integrate this competition dimension into the prioritization model. Here, make product dev and salespeople your friends. You need friends because they will give you information, a lot of information, or they will challenge you. They are not neutral. They'll be your friend and they will give you intelligence, they will get your intelligence. Otherwise, they will challenge you about what you are finding, and just keep it in mind. Here, product mapping or product roadmap. Usually you, you have this kind of roadmap and steps: first year, second year, and third year, Project A, and it's segmented. But this is the last part of product roadmap. Usually it starts with vision, strategy, goals, value proposition. And here we come with the 3C analysis. And when I say 3C analysis and I apply it in In my company, it's competition, clients, consumers. And competition, we have to provide a clear view about the state of the competition, what they are offering, what they are doing, what they are putting in the market. The clients, we have to get information about the clients, and the clients share a lot of information even about the competition. They are targeting them, they are trying to to make them switch into their company or to their services. And we have to know that, know everything about that. And when I say consumers or non-clients, so go on the market and see exactly what's happening in the market, what kind of products are selling and who's selling those products, and what's the need in the market, what the companies are looking for. And after that, we have strategic area of development and features development plan even for 6 years or 1 year, 3 years, name it. What I'm saying here, deliver concise and relevant intelligence report with clear product recommendation. So it's this in the second part, the analysis. If we have, how to say, a strong analysis about the competition, the clients, and the consumers, it would be very helpful for the company to just make the decision. Yeah, only share the intelligence they can't ignore. Once again, overdelivering is not always good for us. What's good for us is delivering the right intelligence, what they really need to know, what they really can't ignore. And here, it's the tool I work with like every day. It's the prioritization matrix, and you have set of criteria, strategic alignment and revenue generation, etc. And you have the level of importance of each criteria. And on the other side, you have features— feature 1, feature 2— you want to develop. And usually what we do, we rank each feature from 1 to 5, and then after that, we obtain a score, feature score, based on, uh, the ranking and the level of importance of each criteria, right? But the missing part usually is competitive advantage and competitive pressure. And this is what, what, what we add in our prioritization matrix. And this is what my advice, if you use this tool prioritization matrix, is to add competitive advantage or competitive pressure inside and to, to rank it. For feature 1, do you have any competitive pressure to put this feature on the market? If this is the case, so you rank it at 5 or something, or 4, something like that. And you have all the study behind that, you have your sources, you have your analysis behind that. So the main idea behind that is to include competition as prioritization criteria. Summary— sorry, and I'm coming back again to what kind of intelligence, and we talked about features, technology, pricing, investment, etc. Where to find it? And where to find it, you have several sources, but this is usually what I use to find the information. There are more, but I think even with that we have a lot to do. And how to help decision-making? And it starts with communication. You need to communicate on a regular basis, CI on a regular basis, give it to people, build a summary report like a monthly report just with 3, 4 information about the main competitors, the main competition activities. And it will be very helpful for people to understand the competition prioritization process. So as I mentioned before, market and competition review as a starting point, product roadmaps, we can add competition in the 3C analysis. As well as for the prioritization matrix, when you can add the competition advantage or pressure, and you can rank it, and you can add it in any decision about any feature you want to develop. And yeah, one point I want to make is make CI the initial part of each new project. If you have major projects within the company, it's very important to make competition Competitive intelligence part of it. So what we have right now, and I want to— there will be my— it will be my conclusion. Who are we for our companies? And this is the picture I want to share with you, because we are at the end of the day people who are here to enlighten decision, not just people who are here to gather intelligence, to analyze information. This is Yeah, this is good. Even sharing information is good, but the real value of us, our value for the company, is to impact or have an impact on the decision-making process, to influence the decisions of our companies. And why I'm saying influence? Because it's for the greater benefit of the company. It's not for us. And we have to earn our seat in the boardroom as the facilitators of the decision. How we can do that is by being very, very, how to say, organized within our intelligence. And as I mentioned before, being organized, meaning having the right intelligence to share and to integrate any new any project with the competitive intelligence, market intelligence part, make it a systematic process within our company. This is where we stand, this is where we need to be if we want to have an impact on the decision-making process. And this is my last slide, or yeah, there's one remaining. Here it's a painting from Jérôme, it was painted in 1880. 1973, I think, and it's called Eminence Grise. And what we see here, it's Cardinal de Richelieu going upstairs, and you have François Leclercq du Tremblay, who was his Eminence Grise, gray eminence, going downstairs. And as you can see, all people are looking at and paying respect to François Leclercq du Tremblay, and he was known to be very powerful and very influential. And this painting is very, how to say, uh, powerful because it shows that the most powerful man, Cardinal Richelieu, wasn't the man who was the most, uh, the people was paying respect to. And I see our role as great eminences, even if it's a The meaning of gray eminence can be interpreted a different way. We are influencers and our role in our companies is to influence the decision, to go beyond gathering, analyzing, and sharing intelligence, to be there in any project to ensure that the decisions are made based on intelligence, not opinions. To reduce the guesswork in the company decisions. Well, there will always be a guess or guessing in any decision, but to reduce it and to replace it to some extent with the intelligence we can provide to our companies. So last word I have to say, competitive intelligence success is more about influence than intelligence. And this is truly what I believe. And this is what I saw from different experiences I had from the day I started doing competitive intelligence and market analysis. We can be very, very good at gathering intelligence, but if we are not able to make it through the decision process and to influence it, to impact it, so where it's we are not doing our job completely. So I don't know if you agree with me, if you disagree, but by all means, I'm here to answer your questions. And I'm, as I mentioned before, uh, you're able to challenge everything you see here. Maybe you have other methods that are working as well. So, um, yeah, I'm open to all your questions and comments and Yeah, go ahead.

Thank you. So this was pretty interesting and very comprehensive. So I hope, yeah, everybody was following through your slides. And I didn't mention in the beginning, but these slides or the whole presentation will be made available on our website later on. So there's definitely a chance to, to see some slides. So as you mentioned already, please send your questions while we're now discussing, at least for another 15 minutes. And the first question was about your slide, was a slide title, Prioritization Matrix. Maybe you can hop back because there are some, some issues about that. Of course, then it's easier for us to discuss it if everybody has it really in front of you. That's it. Yeah, so first question, where do you get all the information from competitors? For this slide. So I think he's talking about— she or he is talking about sources of information here.

Yeah, it's quite simple. If I take feature 1 and I'm thinking about features we know, we do before having this matrix our work of gathering all the intelligence about or the information about this feature, and we know which kind of competitors are offering that. How would we know that? Either we know that from our clients because our clients are calling us and they're asking us if we have such and such feature. And when we, when we educate our people well, they will ask, where did you get this information? Where did you hear about this feature? And then when we learn that such and such competitor contacted them and tried to to provide them a demo to show them this feature and what it does. So the client keep notes and when they are talking to us, sometimes they are talking to us just to get a discount and they are coming to us with this information. It's just an example, but let's say this competitor is offering feature A and they are saying that they can, it can do this, this and this. And what are you offering to us? Because otherwise you have to offer us some kind of discount because it's not comparable. And for our people, it's more asking the question, what exactly does it do? This is one part. The other part is the job we are doing as competitive intelligence people. First is educate people inside the company to make them help us get the intelligence. And do our own work. So navigating through the public information available, so on even in the competitor's website, you can find this information about the features. And generally, when they have a feature, they— you have the documentation, the documentation, promotional documentation, and you have training documentation. The training documentation, it will be more trickier to get it, but you can find it either within the the Competitor Help or Support Portal. So if you go over there and you have the search tool and you just search for the feature, and many times I found a lot of documentation and PDFs and even training videos about this feature. Or what we can, what we can do is to go through the videos or conferences they have. Because they are showcasing their products, for example, in some trade shows. And if you are there, they are talking about this and this feature. And it's not something very, in our industry, very, how to say, hidden.

Yes.

Kind of public. They can share it and what they want to share it.

So here's the add-on question to that. There must be many segments within your clients, and each segment might have a different perception or understanding of feature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So how can you compare, I guess, across segments now features? Because in the end, it's, um, from what I understand, uh, it's very much an application for your clients, so they don't care too much about what you've done. In the end, it's Can I press a button and do what I want to do? But this depends very much on my business model and my relative ranking of something. So again, I think the question is how do you sort of really get all the inputs to one straight matrix like that?

Yeah. What we do, one feature is one project. So for each project, we have like a task force, let's say, and we produce a report. About the features. What I do usually is provide a competitive intelligence report and market report about this feature, uh, even about adoption, even about intention of adoption, and about the competitors, how they are offering it, what's the detail about this feature, and how they are promoting it, how do we find it on the web. So basically, if I talk about the method, I take a feature or segment, like 2 or 3 features. And we have, it's a project on its own. Let's say about API integration, for example, it's a project on its own. And there's presentation just about the competition. And we are going through different competitors, gathering the intelligence about how they are doing it. And we analyze it inside. And this is how we come to the prioritization matrix. Before having this matrix, we present the results with our findings and we talk with our clients, we talk about with our sales reps, we do our research in different sources of the competition itself. As I mentioned before, documentation, conferences, training, demonstrations. After that, we consolidate all this information, we present it to, let's call it prioritization committee, because there are a set of people participating to that. When we present that, we make sure that we put the most important information for them to understand what's the impact of this feature, of having it or not having it, because we prioritize this feature to say, yeah, it's nice to have, and we see it even from our client, they are not asking for it, or they are not talking a lot about it. And even if when we talk about it, they are not— they will say it's nice to have, but it's not something— how to say— it's not the deal breaker. They will not leave our company as a client just for this feature. So we do this work, and it's partly with people inside the company, with Fouad Benyoub, and our research, and we consolidate all that we present it before arriving to this matrix. Why? Because when we have to work on this matrix, we want people to be kind of on board. They have all the information, and then we can have smart discussions about whether or not we have to put this feature on our roadmap or not.

Okay, so this is pretty much about features already in the market. So how do you use this for to be developed? I.e., innovative stuff? How do you come up with new killer applications or something like that?

Yeah, yeah. Well, this is with our product and development people and with the insight I can provide for the company because even if they are not in the market, we target the needs of the companies. Like for example, for us, it's small businesses and we are trying all the time to identified the personnel inside the company and the people who are using our products, the people who are taking the decisions and struggles of the companies. So it's coming to creating the value proposition. So we identify the pains and the gains they are looking for on the activities before talking about any features. So we are studying the company itself. So we're talking to our clients again and we are talking to our sales reps. And we are watching or getting all the studies. I can name in our industry, we can find the Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and others. And they have resources to see the, I would say, the adoption rate for features or even future needs of the companies, where they are going. So one of the main trends we are seeing right now, for example, and we, there's not a lot of feature in there is mobile for B2B applications. And with the millennials and Generation Z, it's all about mobile. It's all about social. And they will want more features— not more features. They don't know exactly what they want. And it's not their role. But for us, it's identifying their work, their activity, what they are doing, how they are doing it, what their struggle right now, and even in the future and to try to, to, to find an answer to that because the feature is an answer. And this is what we are doing, and this is what we are doing on a regular basis, just to identify this feature that will make the client win, like, let's say, half a day or 4 hours of work per week. 4 hours per week of work per week, it's something. And it can be something as simple as switching from an Excel spreadsheet to a feature in our solution. And we, we did that, and we do— we're, we're always trying to do that, to find this, this pain the client has and to transform it to a feature, even if the competition is not here. But yeah, it's more about identifying or talking to the clients and identifying their their, their work and their struggles and what they want to achieve, and to be there to offer them something.

Okay, so next question. You introduced the Kano model and competition from the Japanese professor of thought. Could you go to this slide? Was pretty much in the beginning, I guess.

So, well, what we can do, I can go Straight up that.

Yeah, like that. I think there we go. And then the question is, do you use this approach or slide for landscaping your competitors? So do you really— I guess the question is, do you throw in bubbles, and bubbles equals competitors, and you can see how they move across this system?

But usually what we do is in this illustration, we put features or segments. Like for example, I'm talking about mobile and mobile is part of the delighters for the new generation. All right. And what we do for this, for mobile, for example, what I do, I put the names of the competitors who are offering this. And as I mentioned before, if it's part of the Big Four, our Big Four competitors that, that, that who are starting to, to offer, offer that, it's important for our team to know that. But basically for this, this, this Moodle, what we put, it's features. And you have this I'll say the line, and you have a number of features I put in there, like for performance, for example, employee self-service or manager self-service is part of it. And I put the feature, and when we put for each feature, if we click, for example, it's presentation more, but if we click, you can— we can find the competitors who are offering this feature. And if we find that our direct competitor, the one who's hurting the most is offering that. So for us, it's very helpful because it can, I'd say, influence whether we want to go there or not.

Yeah. Here's a question whether you use it in a dynamic environment. So virtually see how the industry is transforming. As you explained, when you sort of introduced this chart, you mentioned this commoditization of an industry. Something is hot, sexy, and suddenly all the smartphones have the same features and you can't compete on features any longer. So the question is again about this slide that, uh, can you use it in a kind of, uh, trajectory dynamic way that you can see how, how and by which features in the end you compete? Because, because I guess the point, the background is, and that's definitely from my own perspective, I don't know this model, but it seems to be very interesting to see how industries virtually evolve and how competitors are either first movers or those who go for innovative stuff versus the other ones might wait until there's a gold standard and then they kill by marketing power or simply by M&A the kind of small innovative company. So here we go. How do you use this slide again? Because it seems to be very interesting. Questions indicate that it's not well known.

Well, basically, I mean, there's 3 main points. Basically, this slide or this chart will be about asking questions to the clients. We can use our knowledge to put the information in it for the Delighter's performance needs and basic needs. But in the company, if we have the, how to say, means to do that. We can do surveys and there is a set of questions to ask clients to get this information and to put it in this chart. This is the first point. Second point, when we use that, and you're right, I was talking about innovation becoming a commodity and it was one message I had for the team inside. It was about the capability of delivering features quickly, not the feature itself, because the feature, uh, in few months it will be irrelevant. Everybody will be offering this feature and we are done. So the idea behind that and putting that is to show a feature and to show the competitors offering that. And even if they are not offering that, um, when we do our homework we can identify a few features in their roadmap. And we can even talk about that because we see the trend, general trend, and we see what they are about to do. And we can put it in this, in, in, in an equivalent chart. And I told you first, if, if we have the means, we have to go to the clients and do some kind of survey and get the information and ask the right questions. And there's complete methodology available just to know exactly which kind of question we have to ask to get this information. Second, I use that generally to, to talk to, to our team to tell them about our capability of delivering features. It's not the feature itself, but if we are able, as you mentioned, to identify what's the need for the company, what feature will be will be a killer feature, that's our job. And we'll be, we need to be able to deliver it, to develop it and deliver it quickly. And I use it as a tool for the prioritization. And at the beginning of the process, and say we are in waterfall and we have 3 delivery per month, per year, or 3 release per year. At each iteration, at the beginning, I present the roadmap, I present the 3C analysis, and I present something like the Kano model just to let them know exactly what are the delighters now, what are the performance needs now, and basic needs. And if, for once, let's say we go through that and for me, let's Last year, for example, we were talking about— or 2 years ago, we were talking about employee self-service as a delighter. But right now, we see it as a performance need. Performance need. It's not a delighter anymore. A lot of competitors are putting a lot of money, as you mentioned, in marketing and sales. And salespeople are just talking about that. So it's common to hear clients talking about that. And yeah, I don't know if it gives you the answer you were looking for, but this is how I use it. It's, it's, it's to deliver a message, to get the information about the lighters, performance needs and basic needs, and to put it at the beginning of any prioritization cycle to give the, to give a clear idea about what's, what's, I would say, delight, part of the delighters and what's common basic need. And in my experience, we can spend a few hours talking about the feature and yes, it will change the life of our client. And when I show that it's becoming a basic need, sometimes just, we must have that or no, or we don't need that. And sometimes we make choices to not develop few features everybody else is developing. Why? Because we know from our usage statistics that the clients will not use it. It's not— it's nice to have, but sometimes all the competitors are putting a lot of money marketing it and salespeople talking about that. So they sometimes convince clients or convince companies that it's needed, but in reality, we do our own research and we know that it's not really needed. So it's, it's, it's to help us to, to see clear and to take decisions.

So yeah, that's pretty much— there are no other questions popping up. So, and we have already gone beyond the hour. So thank you very much. It was very interesting, very comprehensive and rich presentation. I guess there's a lot of food for thought now. So, well, I think some of the notions here, uh, and, um, I can only, uh, congratulate you for this, uh, very comprehensive process that you described. So that's really product development and support of product development by CI. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me and thank you to all attendees to be, to be here. And as I mentioned before, even after, if there is any question, so you can always contact me and I would be happy to answer to it.

Yes, thanks a lot and enjoy your day, evening, whatever you do.

Okay, bye-bye. Thank you, have a good day.