Getting your messaging right could be the difference between signing a multimillion deal or opening the door for your business to thrive.
But, how do you do this? Using new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) in your Competitive Intelligence (CI) processes and teams will enable you to see the impact your messaging has compared to your competitors in the market. It effectively serves as your personal concierge.
First, what is CI? It’s the systematic collection and analysis of information from multiple sources into a coordinated program. CI works 24/7 for you by providing up-to-date, most recent, fresh information based on your unique market and needs. In other words, it acts as your vital time-saver, loyal partner while making strategic driven decisions, and efficient planner for your new marketing or sales campaigns.
CI automatically tracks your competitors and market for thought leadership, content engagement, and positioning differentiators. From a prospecting perspective, it can also highlight companies undergoing triggers such as restructuring, rating declines, layoffs, etc., which helps your sales team reach out to the right account with the most relevant messaging.
What is AI? It accelerates the process of gathering data and putting it to work. For example, machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms to recognize patterns and trends to teach itself. It’s a powerhouse that can automatically gather, filter, and sort data from hundreds of thousands of sources, catch details and visualize trends that would be near impossible for a human to do at this scale.
Former Chairman and CEO of General Electric, Jake Welch said: “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.”
Leading, guiding, and optimizing marketing and sales teams should be at the top of executives’ minds. Building impactful messaging is the key to gaining the competitive edge, staying on top of the competition, and winning more deals.
Impactful CI should enable you to:
- Keep track of what competitors and the market are saying
- Understand the engagement and sentiment from target market with this content
- Build a faster and more effective content strategy
- Increase your top of funnel
- Improve your brand reputation and thought leadership
- Close more deals
Click here to discover how a global firm used CI to build a faster content strategy.
Messaging is typically owned by marketing and sales teams since they interact with the largest number of external people and prospects.
Marketing
Using a CI platform will help your marketing team gather knowledge on and compare competitor marketing messaging, track thought leadership, and initiate advertising engagements.
A CI platform should provide your marketing teams with concrete ideas on how you can improve your content and messaging strategies to reach your targeted audience. You can see how competitors are framing their solutions, which you can use to adjust your advertising, website, and content strategy.. The point is that marketing can rapidly test these materials to figure out the right positioning.
The insights you get out of it can help strengthen your sales, product, and company strategy. AI in this approach is critical in capturing small changes on websites, which it then turns into data points that are visualized to see trends and patterns.
Quick tip: subscribe to a competitor’s news to see what works and how their numbers look like. By analyzing your competitor posts you can identify the most successful ones and analyze what are they doing to get there.
Sales
Based on rapid marketing experimentation, sales teams will then pick up this messaging to use during outreach and deck creation. If a competitor is seeing success with a specific type of messaging, then your sales team can quickly implement and test the market’s response to the messaging. Additionally, if marketing is seeing high levels of engagement regarding a new topic, then this information can be passed over to your sales team so they can quickly initiate a related campaign.
High-performing sales teams are using CI platforms to capture objectives and have readily accessible responses to the objectives. Many sales teams are doing this through battle cards that enable them to collaborate with the full sales team on data-backed ways to win competitive deals at the highest likelihood.
Discover how you can improve your competitive intelligence here.
