5 Emerging Trends in Competitive Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence is nothing new to businesses and its importance in business function and decisions is increasing year to year.
It can be difficult to identify the trends in competitive intelligence.
Luckily, we’ve identified 5 emerging trends in competitive intelligence after helping F1000 companies with CI.
Keeping Clients is More Important Than Ever
Keeping clients is more important than ever, especially within the last year. As businesses are in the process of recovering, sales reps are finding even more value than ever before in keeping their clients happy.
Your client’s happiness helps your business, not just from retention, but also when prospecting others. You can use their positive outlook to your advantage, especially with customer testimonials on review sites like G2Crowd and Capterra.
Review sites are becoming a prominent research tool for CI teams. Understanding what your clients like about your product or service, and what your competitors’ clients dislike about their product or service is extremely beneficial in the competitive landscape.
Beyond the Competition, More Focus on the Market
Competitive Intelligence has moved beyond just being about what information you can gather on what your competitors are up to. Now you have to monitor the market too, what is your audience up to?
Luckily, products like Insightsfirst exist. These products can monitor what your competitors and market are up to using artificial intelligence (AI). AI Continues to improve competitive intelligence for organizations and it’s quickly becoming a staple feature for CI teams.
If you want to learn more about AI’s role within competitive intelligence, check out our upcoming webinar.
WEBINAR: Industry Knowledge & AI
The Secret to a Successful Market and Competitive Intelligence Program
Sales Teams are Hungry for Intel and Support on Messaging
Sales teams are getting hungrier for more intel on their competitors. More deals are being challenged by a competitor and the vast majority of businesses say competition is growing. Plus, B2B buyers are more informed than ever, and sales reps have to know the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors and understand market dynamics to educate buyers and then close their deals.
60% of buyers only want to connect with a sales rep after they’ve researched their options and come up with their shortlist. Because of this, you’ll see that sales teams are reaching out to their marketing team counterparts more often for help with better-crafted messaging when prospecting.
Not only are sales teams needing more help with messaging, but marketing teams are producing more content due to the demand for relevant, effective, and helpful tools and resources.
More Money, More Intelligence
As CI grows, so does the need for more budget. CI teams are seeing a need for an increase in their budgets, and their headcount is increasing as well. It looks like budget and team size is trending upward for CI as the landscape and various industries become increasingly more competitive over the next few years.
Competitive Intelligence teams increased their team size by 24% from previous years.
Expect CI teams to grow and budgets to increase as more and more businesses see the value of competitive and market intelligence when trying to gauge the current and future landscape in their respective industries.
Actionable Insights, Everywhere
More data ≠ more insights.
More insights may be a benefit, but more data also leads to more challenges. Organizing data is a big challenge for businesses in the future of competitive intelligence.
Businesses need more hands, more resources, and more bandwidth overall to continue to organize their CI data in ways that allow them to make relevant insights.
More data is great, but only if you can decipher trends and patterns and determine the best plan of action to tackle your competitive landscape.
There are actionable insights with every bit of data collected and it’s important to utilize a CI platform that can organize the data in ways that show you the trends and patterns.
Craving more information on Competitive Intelligence or just want to read up on CI?
Check out our Ultimate Guide to a Successful Competitive Intelligence Program