Competition in business has seen a sharp increase over the last two decades and is only increasing progressively. According to Harvard Business Review, the internet and globalization have combined to render almost every company vulnerable to greater competition than ever. Barriers to entry are waning, innovations are easily copied, and disruption is everywhere.

In such a landscape, building a sustainable competitive advantage is nearly impossible unless you’ve got an efficient and successful competitive intelligence process in place. Understanding why customers choose one product or service over another has become critical to differentiation and business growth.

This is where a well-designed competitive intelligence process in business can provide a steady stream of market and competitor insights to keep you ahead of the curve. In this article, we’ll walk through how to create one and the benefits you can receive from a competitive intelligence tool.

What is a competitive intelligence process?

The competitive intelligence process refers to the structured approach organizations use to gather, analyze, and act upon information about their competitors and market dynamics. It is a core component of business intelligence process flows and helps companies anticipate market shifts, identify opportunities, and avoid threats.

At its core, competitive intelligence (CI) is about collecting actionable information on competitors, customers, and macro factors that influence business strategy. However, without a clearly defined process, this intelligence becomes fragmented and ineffective.

Every organization tailors its process of competitive analysis slightly differently based on their needs, industry, and available resources. Yet, the foundational competitive intelligence process steps are usually consistent.

Steps to create a successful competitive intelligence process

 

Steps To Create A Competitive Intelligence Process

A competitive process will get better and more refined the longer you use it, as it is only after you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t work in the process that you can make changes and improve it. Until then, using the best practices as listed down by successful global organizations would be ideal. Here is an outline of the process that’ll help you create your own.

Step one: Identifying the competition

There can be no competitor analysis process without identifying who your competitors are. The first step to initiate your CI program, thus, should be to identify your top five direct competitors, as well as five of your indirect competitors, your new or emerging competitors, your aspirational competitors, and your perceived competitors.

If your competitive landscape isn’t that large, start with the top three of each. This data should then be used to perform a competitive landscape analysis, which will help you understand the market and competitive landscape clearly. You may segment your competitive landscape even further if you want, and compare competitors by industry focus, product or service type, marketing strategy, customer sentiment, etc. This is a critical part of the process of competitor analysis, as it lays the foundation for further intelligence gathering.

Step two: Gathering information

Once you’ve identified your competitors, the next stage in the competitive intelligence process is to gather intel. This is where the actual research takes place. You’ll gather information on the competitors’ online presence, their products, websites, teams, announcements, social media engagements, content, etc.

Doing this manually is possible but resource-intensive. Using a competitive intelligence tool or software can automate this step, allowing for real-time and ongoing collection of intelligence. The more actionable information you have on your competitors, the easier it’ll be to perform a competitive analysis later on, which is why it is important to pay attention during this part of the CI process.

Step three: Performing a competitive analysis

This is an important step, as without proper analysis, your gathered intel isn’t likely to add any value to the various stakeholders in the organization. Using the gathered information, CI managers or analysts conduct a competitor analysis process by identifying patterns, threats, and opportunities.

This competitive analysis will be communicated to the stakeholders to give them a clearer understanding of where they need to improve to get ahead of the competition. In addition to competitive analyses, stakeholders should also be provided with daily alerts, weekly and monthly reports (especially for the leadership), as well as battlecards (for the sales team).

These can either be created by the CI manager, or if you’re using a competitive intelligence software like Contify, can be created directly in the platform itself, and shared with the respective stakeholders. This step ensures that your competitive intelligence process and tools for intelligence analysis are aligned and provide real business value.

Step four: Sharing the intelligence

As already discussed in the previous point, you need to share the deliverables created using the gathered intelligence with the key stakeholders in the organization. It would be unfortunate if the CI team works hard to create intelligence deliverables that aren’t consumed due to a lack of proper delivery. A lot of organizations use emails, internal chats as well as meetings to communicate their intelligence to the stakeholders, but these can be missed. The best way, perhaps, is to integrate your competitive intelligence into your CMS, so that the intel can be delivered directly to the stakeholders wherever they are. A number of competitive intelligence platforms these days support integration with CMSs, and can be used to your advantage.

Step five: Turning insights into action

The purpose of competitive intelligence is to provide you with “actionable” intelligence. Thus, the final and most crucial step of the competitive intelligence process is execution. The various stakeholders in the organization are responsible for this step, and the intelligence shared with them will help them play their respective roles in the overall business strategy. For example:

– The leadership or C-suite are the decision-makers in an organization, and will use the insights to create business strategies that steer the organization in the right direction. Ensure that you provide them with timely and relevant insights, and that you deliver these insights through a channel that they prefer.

– The marketing team will use the insights to implement new marketing campaigns and activities, as well as improve the old ones. Insights into the competitors marketing activities will also give them ideas about what sort of content marketing they should focus on.

– Sales team will use the intelligence to improve their sales collateral, demo scripts, and the overall sales process. In addition, intelligence can be used to create or improve sales battlecards and competitor profiles. CI is especially important for sales teams as they’re the ones competing with your rivals in the field, and need all the information they can get on your competitors.

– The product team will use CI to improve their own products or services, and/or work with marketing to position the product/service in a way that influences customers/clients to buy it.

Without this crucial step, your process of competitive analysis remains purely academic.

Download M&CI Process Template

 

Benefits of using a competitive intelligence software in your process

 

Benefits Of A Competitive Intelligence Software

You’ve probably noticed that competitive intelligence software has been mentioned in this article several times. While different competitive intelligence software might have different features, and thus provide different benefits, the overarching benefit every competitive intelligence tools will provide is saved time and resources. Digital technologies have changed the way business activities are undertaken, which also includes competitive intelligence. For the purpose of this article, let us focus on the benefits of a popular market and competitive intelligence software.

– Comprehensive Market Analysis: Assists you in identifying trends in the market and determine where the industry is headed by delivering personalized insights to your stakeholders.

– Competitor Tracking: Helps you track your competitors’ digital footprint across websites, media coverage, announcements, and thousands of other sources, in an ever-changing market landscape.

– Competitive Intelligence Automation: You can automate routine competitive intelligence tasks, streamline analyst workflows and save time spent on manual research and information processing through Contify’s competitive intelligence system.

– Sales and Account Management: Provides noise-free, intelligent updates customized to each member of your sales and account management teams to drive conversations and conversions.

– User-friendly Formats: Insights and intelligence are delivered in formats that facilitate analysis and decision-making, like reports, daily alerts, news APIs and/or custom newsletters.

– Suitable For All: It is suitable for all businesses and teams. Different pricing and versions are available as per your requirement. The MI essential provides all essential features needed for small and medium-sized companies, while the Market Intelligence Enterprise is a comprehensive and customized solution tailored for big corporates.

– CMS Integration: Easy to integrate into your organization’s CMS, so that you get insights delivered directly to your stakeholders’ inboxes.

 

How Contify can help in generating more leads

 

How Contify Can Help Generate More Leads

Most organizations would agree that lead generation is a joint responsibility of the marketing and sales teams. A streamlined competitive intelligence process directly contributes to lead generation. Here’s how Contify supports this:

1. Ensures you stay on top of your competitors’ marketing move and strategy

Contify lets you formulate a proactive marketing strategy by learning about your competitor’s strategy much before it’s announced in press releases, through continuous monitoring of their websites, news, blogs, and articles, along with information from over 200,000 sources. Discovery of the competitors’ strategies in advance can help design counter-promotion campaigns, which will also generate leads.

2. Helps you create competitive differentiation

Contify lets you craft messaging that resonates with your customers. By analyzing your competitors’ messaging, you can develop your own differentiated and persuasive messaging. Contify can also help identify the unmet needs of the customers to develop marketing collateral that help differentiate your offerings from those of your competitors, thus, generating more leads.

3. Facilitates sales enablement

Contify helps drive revenue and improve sales by helping create winning case studies, marketing collateral, and battle cards with actionable and relevant intelligence on competing products, pricing, and promotions. This will help your sales team effectively handle objections, craft rebuttals, generate more leads, and win more deals.

Take a free trial of Contify’s Market and Competitive Intelligence Platform >>

Request access

 

Conclusion

 

Following the competitive intelligence process described above will let you pull out key pieces of intel and communicate them to your team effectively, allowing you to derive value from your CI program. However, competitive intelligence tools and software have become a necessity in a world where more and more organizations are using competitive intelligence. Using CI tools and software will make your CI process much more efficient, as most of the labor and time-intensive tasks in the process are taken care of automatically.

The goal of competitive intelligence is to enable your organization to better understand your market and competitors, make stronger strategic decisions, and ultimately increase revenue. In an era of aggressive competition, investing in a robust competitive intelligence process in business is a necessity.

Frequently asked questions

What is a competitive intelligence process?
A competitive intelligence process is a structured method used by businesses to collect, analyze, and apply actionable insights about their competitors, market trends, customer behavior, and industry shifts. It helps organizations anticipate changes and make strategic decisions that offer a competitive edge.

Why is competitive intelligence important for businesses?
Competitive intelligence (CI) is essential for businesses to understand their position in the market, respond to competitive threats, identify new opportunities, and create data-driven strategies. It enhances decision-making and supports sustainable business growth.

How can CI tools improve the efficiency of the intelligence process?
CI tools automate data collection, streamline competitor monitoring, deliver real-time alerts, and generate insightful reports. Platforms like Contify make the competitive intelligence process faster, more accurate, and scalable by minimizing manual tasks and ensuring high-quality, timely insights.

Who should be involved in a competitive intelligence program?
A successful CI program typically involves cross-functional collaboration between CI analysts, product teams, sales, marketing, and executive leadership. Each department plays a role in gathering data, interpreting insights, or applying intelligence to decision-making.