But if you want to do a better job of keeping your customers longer and growing them into bigger customers, there's nobody you can hire to do that. It has to permeate your organization. It has to become a way of doing business. Keep an eye on competition With business cycles moving faster than ever, it's more important than ever to keep an eye on your competition. Jan P. Herring, a former CIA employee who started his own company in 1996, believes talking to people is the best way to improve your competitive business intelligence.
Free information is usually secondary information.
And the problem with secondary information is that everyone else has access to it. It doesn't give you an advantage. You won't gain an advantage over other people unless you spend more time and money than they do. But ultimately you want information that can't be found in any database. Human intelligence beats machine intelligence.