Importance of Competitive Intelligence Solution
By: Natasha Richardson
Tags: Intelligence Solution, Market Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence

Image by Gerd Altmann

Introduction

Competitive intelligence (CI) can be defined as the process of collecting, processing, and analyzing information, particularly about your competitors. Competitors can be defined by a lot of means, but for quality, competitive intelligence analysis, organizations prefer researching about competitors who are from the same industry, sell the same products and services, and importantly also serve the same geography. But that’s not enough, next comes the task of gathering this information. Organizations take the help of competitive intelligence solutions for this. In this blog, we will learn the benefits of using competitive intelligence solutions.

Benefits of Competitive Intelligence Solution

If we start from scratch, organizations get stuck at the first step because of how important it is. They often wonder how do we get access to such crucial information that can help us elevate the value of our business? Now if we look back in time, competitive intelligence was not that difficult to unfold from the pages of the internet earlier as there was not much irrelevant information and the sources of competitive insights were limited like company websites. But with the internet drastically growing and reaching every nook and corner, competitive intelligence solution is a mandate for every organization because of the following reasons:

Find and Track Relevant Insights

As mentioned in the previous section, secondary research on the internet is not a cakewalk in today’s time. This is because there are multiple sources of a single informative insight and for us to dig through the junk of irrelevant information is almost impossible. Or even if it is possible, it would exhaust so much bandwidth of resources without giving quality results. A good competitive intelligence solution harnesses the power of technology to automate the sourcing of relevant competitive insights.

2. Structured Actionable Competitive Intelligence

Secondly, the competitive intelligence research would be a multi-step process wherein research analysts would first search the information manually, filter the relevant results, find the source of the information, and then finally structure it into a usable form which will again take a lot of time and cost. But instead of following all these steps, leading organizations leverage AI-enabled competitive intelligence solutions that not only effectively track relevant competitive intelligence, but also present it in the structured form with one’s organizational taxonomy structure.

3. Save Time and Cost

Time matters greatly in today’s business operations environment if we are looking at the competitive intelligence landscape. This is because important information reaches everyone sooner or later but the first-getter seeks the most benefit out of competitive intelligence. Therefore, organizations do not miss a chance and use competitive intelligence solutions that automate competitive intelligence analysis and provide nearly real-time results.

4. Helps in Breaking Information Silos

Strategy building is a crucial aspect of every organization’s decision-making and one of the most important aspects for decision-makers and strategy analysts is to get a holistic understanding of their market, product/service, and competitors. Such a crucial element cannot just depend on manual research. Therefore, organizations envisioning growth in their strategic plans choose the abilities of competitive intelligence solutions that provide a centralized system for competitive insights and thereby, enable team members to make better use of competitive intelligence.

Conclusion- Competitive Intelligence Solution for the Win

In the age of automation, one cannot choose to move backward in the path of manual research but just look forward to improving competitive intelligence analysis. In a nutshell, a competitive intelligence solution is the way forward for organizations to enhance their strategic management, innovation, and get structured updates in real-time. Not only this, competitive intelligence solutions automate the personalization of competitive intelligence for different teams in an organization enabling them to make better use of competitive intelligence and build competitive advantage for their organizations.