Be Competitive! 22 Tips to Kick Start Your Marketing

Posted on September 22, 2010 by ellendnaylor

Yesterday I attended this most informative AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals) Webinar by Mary Ellen Bates, CEO of Bates Information. I have been in business for 17 years, but lack Mary Ellen’s business acumen and marketing focus. BTW these webinars are an additional benefit that AIIP did not offer when I first joined 5 years ago. How many associations offer more services for their members these days than they did previously? Since all webinars are recorded, AIIP members can listen to them anytime. Join AIIP here.

The tippers Mary Ellen shared are helpful for anyone who runs a business, not just information professionals, researchers or competitive intelligence managers. In the spirit of cooperative intelligence I will share a few of her best marketing practices.

Use the telephone and snail mail more, since email is an overused form of communication these days, and many emails are not opened. Even if you call a former customer and just get their voicemail, hearing your voice versus the digital word is a great reminder.

Review your client list annually and assess the quality of your clients. This process will help you plan for the upcoming year and figure out ways you can help clients improve their competitiveness. An informational interview is a great way to learn about a new industry to ultimately target. Ask good questions about how they make strategic decisions, and don’t promote yourself in these calls.

At the conclusion of a project that you know you delivered well, discretely ask for a referral. This is also a good time to ask for a LinkedIn recommendation in my opinion if your project deliverable was not top secret.

Connect with all your clients and prospects through social media: not just LinkedIn, but also Twitter, Facebook, industry Nings and blogs. Comment on blogs. Interaction is the key to develop social networks.

Identify client topics of interest and offer products accordingly. You might interview 5 people and write up a white paper that addresses a topic of interest or industry pain points.

A very practical tipper: give yourself one full day to update all your social network, blog, and other membership profiles. Do they jive and connect with each other?

Mary Ellen suggests many ways you can connect in writing whether digitally or in hardcopy: birthday cards, holiday cards, articles, blogs, Tweets, newsletters, thank you notes: be creative! If you use snail mail, it’s more likely to be opened than email.

Personally I like to create unique marketing to clients and prospects: I snail mail New Year’s cards designed by my husband, Rodgers Naylor with one of his original paintings on the front. Some people have kept our cards, and even framed them, over the years. These cards benefit both of our unrelated businesses!

To learn more, I recommend that you buy the recently published second edition of Mary Ellen’s book, Building and Running a Successful Research Business: A Guide for the Independent Information Professional.

Filed under: AIIP, communication, Competitive Intelligence, competitiveness, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, LinkedIn, research, social networks, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Do You Question Your Assumptions?

Posted on September 16, 2010 by ellendnaylor

How often do you read articles from the same sources and continue practices that you are comfortable with—without questioning your assumptions? I focus on research, competitive intelligence and cooperative intelligence and found “Think the Answer’s Clear: Look Again” a recent NY Times article a great example of questioning your assumptions.  Dr. Donald Redelmeier, a physician researcher published a study in 1997 in the New England Journal of Medicine which concluded that driving while talking on a cellphone was as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. While commonly believed today, this was news in 1997!

Dr. Redelmeier has conducted several studies around behaviors while driving since he believes “Life is a marathon, not a sprint,” and “A great deal of mischief occurs when people are in a rush.” One of my favorites is around the psychology of changing lanes in traffic. “You think more cars are passing you when you’re actually passing them just as quickly. Still, you make a lane change where the benefits are illusory and not real.” Meanwhile, changing lanes increases the likelihood of a collision about threefold!

Dr. Redelmeier says it so nicely, “Do not get trapped into prior thoughts. It’s perfectly OK to change your mind as you learn more.” He extends this belief not only across his research quests and findings, but also in his practice as a doctor. He is more likely to intercept diagnosis and treatment errors at an earlier stage since he is willing to change based on new information. I want to be treated by a doctor like Dr. Redelmeier.

Dr. Redelmeiers’ practices can be adopted by competitive intelligence and research professionals. He is a critical thinker who observes behaviors, questions them and conducts research which proves or disproves his beliefs. He has learned that so many accidents in life happen when people are in a hurry. This is true in competitive intelligence research as well as most business functions. We are in too much of a hurry to produce our work, and the quality suffers. We don’t learn from our mistakes since we’re too busy and onto the next project.

In “One Upping the Competition,” Ken Sawka suggests that companies also focus on post-strategy early warning. In simple terms, it’s recognizing the patterns of what a competitor might be planning based on their actions in real-time, and changing your strategy and tactics based on these observations. Does your company recognize the pattern changes of your competitors and your marketplace? Or are you too impatient and insular to do this? Once you recognize pattern changes, is your leadership nimble enough to change your behavior in time?

If you want to stay in business for the long haul, you need to be observant about your marketplace, question your assumptions, and be willing to make changes based on what you learn in time!

Filed under: Competitive Intelligence, competitor, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, leadership, research | Comments Off on Do You Question Your Assumptions?

Sales Intelligence from the Competitive Intelligence Expert Panel at SLA 2010

Posted on August 25, 2010 by ellendnaylor

I had the pleasure of moderating the Competitive Intelligence Expert Panel at SLA’s (Special Libraries Association) annual conference in New Orleans. All 3 experts were GREAT! Claudia Clayton has a strong marketing, strategy, and sales background as well as financial services expertise. Jan Herring is one of CI’s pioneers with a strong military intelligence background which he successfully transferred into corporations as he started one of the first CI programs at Motorola in the 1980s. Arik Johnson is a visionary in this field, the consummate consultant, always reaching out for what’s next, and the instigator of Competitive Intelligence Ning with almost 1500 members.

We spent 1 ½ hours taking questions from our live and virtual audiences. In the spirit of cooperative intelligence, I will share the panel’s wisdom through my blogs.

There were two related questions around Price to Win (PTW) and the trade offs of conducting win loss analysis using internal people versus outsiders.

Claudia says there are restrictions once the RFP is out, so much of the monitoring and analysis needs to occur in between RFPs. That way when the RFP is issued, your company will have a good idea of how low the competitor has the capability to bid. Jan recommends PTW guru, Michael O’Guin.  Michael wrote a couple of PTW articles for SCIP’s Competitive Intelligence Review in 1996, and presents at APMP (American Proposal Management Professionals) conferences. APMP is the society to join for PTW. The essentials behind PTW are to learn the competitor’s cost structure and the customer’s decision-making criteria. Arik recommended another PTW guru, Jim Mathews currently Director, Competitive Intelligence & PTW at TASC.

Claudia shared 3 ways to conduct win loss analysis:

  1. Use internal sources with/without assistance from a third party in development
  2. Use a third party while revealing your company’s identity
  3. Use a third party without revealing your company’s identity

Claudia prefers the third option to learn more objectively what the buying manager was thinking when s/he awarded the contract. If you chose option 2, sometimes the buying manager will give the ‘party line’ due to their bias around who is asking for the interview. I like option 2 since it is biased: your customers are biased in their decision-making. A skilled interviewer gets past that bias so quickly. I like to include Sales in this process to identify the gaps between Sales and their customers as to the customer’s decision making criteria and values. Sales can share their customer’s personality and motivation so I get the maximum value out of each interview knowing the customer’s preferred communication style.

Some companies split their win loss interviews among internal sources and a third party. The benefit of using internal sources is they know your products, your company’s culture and can keep building a relationship with that customer. All panelists agreed NOT to have Sales conduct win loss interviews since you won’t get an honest representation of what really happened! Jan’s best practice for win loss analysis: your company conducts its own win interviews and a third party conducts loss interviews. I think a third party should do some win interviews to avoid being blindsided by internal expectations.

Most importantly, use the results and take action. It’s remarkable that only 20% of companies even do win loss analysis given its great insight into customers and competitors, and many of these companies do nothing with the findings and analysis!

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, competitor, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, SLA, win loss analysis | Comments Off on Sales Intelligence from the Competitive Intelligence Expert Panel at SLA 2010

Jan Herring’s Words of Wisdom for Info Pros

Posted on June 18, 2010 by ellendnaylor

I spent most of this week in New Orleans at SLA’s annual conference. I really enjoyed it, and this blog hails competitive intelligence pioneer, Jan Herring. While his communication was geared to information professionals, competitive intelligence professionals take note!

Jan is so supportive of the competitive intelligence profession and I think is a true cooperative intelligence practitioner in that he is so giving. He was the CI division’s breakfast speaker, as well as a panel member on two consecutive panel discussions, Ask The Competitive Intelligence Experts and Competitive Intelligence Transitions for LIS Professionals. Jan is regarded as the father of modern competitive intelligence as he started Motorola’s first formal program, after a distinguished first career with the CIA.

Behind each successful CI process is a corporate library or at least librarian support, as timely, focused secondary research is a valuable component of CI. Bonnie Hohhof of SCIP fame, was the corporate librarian at Motorola that Jan selected to help form the CI team. Jan still quotes Peggy Carr’s 2003 book, “Super Searchers in Competitive Intelligence” as a good resource on how research and CI are tied together.

Jan reviewed the basics of competitive intelligence including the traditional intelligence cycle and the knowledge pyramid to build insightful, actionable intelligence. Intelligence is the right information, delivered and prepared for the people in the company who have the authority to make decisions. In this vein, Jan shared former Motorola CEO Bob Galvin’s parable. Bob had made a bad decision around a market entry. There was one employee who didn’t share some key information, and Bob wondered whose fault it was that the employee hadn’t shared this information. His or the employee’s? Jan asserted that it was the employee’s and honed in on connecting with the right employees around key decisions.

Another gem was, “Get your information and insight into the Heads of decision-makers, not just their Hands.”  A great quote he shared from Robert Steele, “Information costs money. Intelligence makes money.” Jan recommends is that the insight created by intelligence findings and conclusions be measured or valued through ROI. Jan wrote an article on this topic in the Mar/Apr 2007 Competitive Intelligence Magazine published by SCIP.

Jan suggests that you learn to think like your leadership and communicate with them in their words being careful not to insert competitive intelligence verbiage. Know how they are motivated since what makes the management team successful isn’t what makes Info Pros or CI professionals successful. Tim Kindler of Kodak ties his CI deliverables to corporate management’s calendar of needs and events. Respected CI professionals are humble as they set aside their egos and false assumptions, but not too humble so as not to persuasively communicate findings to management.

There are three areas where information pros and CI professionals can improve:

  1. Financial based reporting – work with the finance department to develop and monitor financial benchmarks against your major competitors
  2. Early warning – build innovative secondary source monitoring as a base for your primary researchers to verify findings through people to develop early warning alerts
  3. CI software – develop software applications to support the monitoring, collection, storage and dissemination of information. More refined software is developed all the time such as Link Analysis and Evidence Based Research. A supplier to consider which assesses almost all CI software providers is Eastport Analytics. You can find some individual CI software providers at SCIP’s website.

A final key finding that Jan and Paul Houston uncovered during their research of 20 companies: it’s most important for firms to have a savvy CI manager/director who produces what management wants/needs. You need to do CI on your own leadership to keep a pulse on their ever changing needs.

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, competitor, connection, Cooperative Intelligence, leadership, research | 1 Comment »

Competitive Intelligence Talks at SLA’s 2010 Conference

Posted on June 3, 2010 by ellendnaylor

I will be attending SLA’s (Special Library’s Association) Annual Conference from June 12 – 16 at the New Orleans Convention Center. In the spirit of cooperative intelligence, here is a synopsis of the 7 competitive intelligence presentations.

Delving Beyond the Published Record: Market Research & Knowledge Management: Mon., 6/14/2010 2:00 – 3:30PM Convention Center, Rm R07

Info pros are extremely adept at secondary research. This session led by Victor Camlek, VP Marketing Intelligence at Thomson Reuters will show how market research uncovers new knowledge, while expert knowledge management systems across the enterprise lead to stronger return on investment for valuable market research studies as well as other organizational initiatives.

Intelligence Early Warning Systems: Beyond Monitoring: Mon, 6/14, 4:00 – 5:30PM Convention Center, Room R07

Ellen Naylor, President of The Business Intelligence Source, discusses what Early Warning practice means to both intelligence and information services, how to develop it, and how early warning systems may be used to provide timely advanced insights on developing trends and events, competitive circumstances, and issues important to decision-makers.

Competitive Intelligence Division Breakfast Meeting: Tue., 6/15, 7:30 – 9:30AM Convention Center, Room R05

Jan Herring, President of Herring & Associates, will offer both tactical and philosophical advice quantifying the value of competitive intelligence operations as well as other topics of interest.

InfoCitizen: Creating and Finding Value in Online Communities: Tue 6/15, 10:00 – 11:30AM Convention Center, Room 221

Whether participating in or building an online social network, competitive intelligence info pros can derive tremendous value from communities, using them to find experts, make connections, and glean information. Scott Brown, will share real-life examples of best practices in participating in online communities and provide tips to help you get the most out of your network.

SPOTLIGHT SESSION: Ask the Competitive Intelligence Experts Panel: Wed 6/16, 8:00 – 9:30AM, Convention Center, La Louisiane Ballroom

Info pros are increasingly switching to competitive intelligence, since there’s always a demand for market intelligence. Bring your pressing competitive intelligence questions, concerns and stories to this informal panel facilitated by Ellen Naylor, President of The Business Intelligence Source.  Panelists include Claudia Clayton, Founder & Managing Director of ViewPoint; Jan Herring, President of Herring & Associates; and Arik Johnson, Founder & Chairman of Aurora WDC.

SPOTLIGHT SESSION: Competitive Intelligence Transitions for LIS Professionals: Wed 6/16, 10:00 – 11:30AM, Convention Center, La Louisiane Ballroom

This panel discussion, facilitated by Toni Wilson, President of MarketSmart Research, will focus on how to leverage your skills as an LIS professional into a competitive intelligence career. Learn how to accomplish this in your current job or in a new opportunity, either as an in-house info pro or as an outside consultant. Panelists include Jan Herring, President of Herring & Associates, Anna Shallenberg, SLA’s Conference Leader and Victor Camlek, VP Marketing Intelligence at Thomson Reuters .

As an aside I will be helping at AIIP’s (Association of Independent Information Professionals) booth, #1539 in the Exhibits area from 10-Noon on Monday, June 14 and 15:00 – 17:00 on Tuesday, June 15. Please stop by and say HI.

Filed under: AIIP, Competitive Intelligence, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, research, social networks | Comments Off on Competitive Intelligence Talks at SLA’s 2010 Conference

Use Rivalry to Spur Innovation & Competitive Intelligence Sharing

Posted on May 27, 2010 by ellendnaylor

In a recent McKinsey Quarterly, Mark Little, head of General Electric’s Global Research Group described how GE uses rivalry to stimulate innovation. I think these practices help GE be the powerhouse in the many fields where it is a market leader. Rivalry can mean outright competition—a zero-sum contest in which two individuals or teams go head-to-head and one is declared the winner at the expense of the other. But in the case of GE, rivalry is linked to a second notion, called paragon which means comparison. The motivation behind collaboration often is rivalry as two or more teams compete to develop the best product.

Scientists are motivated a lot like anyone else in that they want to be the best: yes, they’re competitive! Due to my love of aviation, my favorite example cited was the GE90, the large, high-thrust engine developed in the 1990s for the Boeing 777, which was developed by two independent teams. While one team won the competition, the other was assigned to challenge and push the winning team. While this pushing process made the teams uncomfortable, it made the GE90 a better engine and helped advance product development.

In the competitive intelligence field, I think of wargaming as a similar exercise where members of each team collaborate and role play as if they were specific competitors, so there is a healthy rivalry among the teams. However, the goal overall in a war game is to help your company be more competitive. More specifically the goal might be to prepare for a competitor’s new product launch, so it isn’t just the competitors who are represented by a team. One team might represent the marketplace which might include customer’s reactions and regulatory hurdles, for example.

Another example where rivalry works is in sales intelligence, when you reward individual sales people for being the best competition detective. Winners might share information around a new competitor entering your company’s space; a significant change in a competitor’s management team; how a team achieved a win back against a key competitor; new innovation in the marketplace; or how to win sales in spite of regulatory constraints. This is fun since most sales people like publicity and you can lay it on thick through your company’s communication channels: sales rallies, sales teleconference calls, complimentary write ups in the company wiki/newsletter or intranet and a handwritten letter to the sales person’s boss and others like the VP of Sales! While your reward system will never compete with a sales person’s commission, this publicity can. This playful rivalry will only grow over time if you figure out different ways to let Sales compete and continue to publicize your thank-you to the best competition detectives.

The real learning is you can use healthy rivalry to stimulate various behaviors since most people are naturally competitive and want to be the best. You need to figure out how best to motivate individuals to reach your company’s goals whether it’s product innovation, competitive intelligence or sales intelligence, the examples cited here. Depending on an individual’s personality type, this healthy rivalry might be fun or it might make them squirm a bit.

In the spirit of cooperative intelligence, here is an article on sales intelligence for your reading pleasure.

Filed under: competition detective, Competitive Intelligence, competitiveness, competitor, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, D. Sales Intelligence Articles, product development, research | 2 Comments »

Read Competitive Intelligence Advantage by Seena Sharp!

Posted on May 21, 2010 by ellendnaylor

In the spirit of cooperative intelligence here is my ***** Amazon review for Seena Sharp‘s book, Competitive Intelligence Advantage where she provides incredible wisdom around the practice of competitive intelligence and draws upon her wisdom from over 30 years experience.

Seena Sharp

Seena defines competitive intelligence (CI), an unfortunate word combination which is why I believe it’s made such poor inroads as a commonly practiced and understood discipline. There are relatively few CI degree programs globally and many schools, including leading MBA programs don’t include much CI instruction in their curriculum.

Executives like most people misunderstand CI and often focus on monitoring competitors, a subset of competitive intelligence which should include a robust external dive into all the factors which can affect your company’s success — starting with your customers. Too many executives claim to know what customers want better than the customer, and don’t listen or query. While customers can’t always articulate their needs using your company’s products, it’s up to you to figure out and develop products or services that will solve customer’s problems in these changing times. In this vein, I loved Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ attitude, “Figure out what they (customers) want and figure out a way to do it.”

Let’s face it you want to sell more to your customers and grow your customer base. If you can learn enough to think like your customer, and recognize market changes and develop opportunities to meet or exceed your customer’s needs, you will maintain a competitive advantage. But if you just look into the rear view mirror at your competitors and ignore looking forward and improving your customer’s experience with your products and services, you will lose market share.

Seena correctly defines competitive intelligence to include analysis of customers/prospects, buyers, suppliers, distributors/channel, technology, culture, regulation, demographics, the economy, substitutes, other industries and competitors.

The book is chock full of examples and case studies on the benefits of using CI, including details supporting each of the components above.

Another point Sharp emphasizes is the need to re-examine our assumptions in these changing times. To make this point she quotes Will Rogers, “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Likewise, when examining competitors, consider “what they know that you don’t” to uncover new markets, applications and customer niches.

Remember that your competitor’s focus may be different from yours. Their priorities and strategy may be different from yours and they also make mistakes, so be careful what practices you adopt from them.

Seena also gives tippers on starting a CI initiative in your company. One of my favorite practices she recommends is: re-evaluate what you “know” every year: question conventional wisdom and the culture behind “this is the way we have always done it.” Another is to use customer complaints as an opportunity.

In the realm of CI, Sharp focuses on gathering “need to know” rather than “nice to know.” In the later chapters of the book, Seena focuses on how to collect CI, ranging from open sources all the way to identifying and querying people sources for collection.

I believe that the quality of your answers is directly related to the quality of your questions and CI people need to be persistent in questioning to get at what decision-makers really need. Sharp provides lists of questions for readers starting with good questions to ask about competitors, but also relevant questions to ask by categories like “Tracking Change” and my favorite list on page 163 “Questions a Company Should be Asking Regularly.” This list is provocative and gets the reader to reach out for people, relevant information from many sources and question anything that’s new or looks odd. Answer the questions on that list, and you will eliminate nasty surprises!

CI only produces good news–even when the news is bad and avoids the cost of making ill informed decisions and nasty surprises. In the new world economy can you afford not to conduct CI before making pivotal decisions? What is the cost of NOT having the necessary intelligence for your important decisions? How much does it cost to make a blunder in the marketplace?

Read Seena Sharp’s book and follow her advice and you will improve your company’s competitive advantage!

Filed under: Competitive Intelligence, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence | Tagged: , | Comments Off on Read Competitive Intelligence Advantage by Seena Sharp!

Competitive Intelligence: Remain Ethical & Avoid Deception

Posted on May 14, 2010 by ellendnaylor

Last month I was interviewed by Adam Sutton of MarketingSherpa, and in the spirit of cooperative intelligence I am going into detail on each of the 5 tactics we discussed to improve competitive intelligence collection. This week I cover the last tactic. For the full article you need to subscribe to MarketingSherpa.

Tactic #5: Remain ethical and avoid deception

Make sure anyone you use to collect information is operating under the same ethical standards as held by your company. If you need help figuring out what your ethical standard should be, check out the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professional’s (SCIP’s) website for its code of ethics.  Most associations have a code of ethics and often your industry or your company will have ethical guidelines. I also like the Association of Independent Information Professional’s (AIIP’s) code of ethics.

As a consultant I am sensitive to the topic of ethics since there is such a variance among my clients. Some industries are more conservative than others. Countries have very different ethical standards. Some clients have the attitude of “Just get the information for us, I don’t care how!” Others go as far as to have me sign on to their company ethical standards.

Don’t expect consultants to be unethical to collect for your company. You wouldn’t ask your employees to be unethical, and consultants when working for you are an extension of your company. It just isn’t worth your reputation to be unethical, and it doesn’t feel good to me to be asked to unethical. I have had companies ask me to attend trade shows and sign up as the employee of a large company. That’s unethical and also unnecessary. People will talk and share at trade shows even if you are a direct competitor. Of course, they’ll share even more with a trained collection consultant who is not a competitor.

More companies have written ethics statements these days, although I don’t find that companies are any more ethical today than they were 25 years ago when I started in this field. I find that having an honest discussion around ethics at the proposal stage is helpful so I can decide if my ethics and the company’s are similar. I find that each case is a little different, and you need to arrive at what feels right with each customer and each collection project, but that having ethical guidelines is helpful. Ultimately it’s your conscience that will guide your behavior and ethics is part of that.

BTW, SCIP’s Competitive Intelligence Foundation published a book on ethics Navigating the Gray Zone which will give you a lot of tippers around ethical behavior and how companies have developed ethics policies over the years. Here is a short article I wrote on ethics, Ethics: The Cooperative Angle.

Filed under: AIIP, Competitive Intelligence, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, SCIP, trade show | Tagged: | Comments Off on Competitive Intelligence: Remain Ethical & Avoid Deception

Boost Competitive Intelligence Effectiveness through Databases

Posted on May 7, 2010 by ellendnaylor
Last month I blogged about “5 Tactics to Research Your Marketplace using Competitive Intelligence Skills” originally published by Adam Sutton of MarketingSherpa.  As promised, I am focusing on each tactic. This week’s is #4.
Tactic #4 Build an information database
I look at building two databases: one as a repository of data that you gather on the competitive environment either through daily monitoring or analytical reports which can include material that is externally generated such competitor data, industry reports, relevant articles, regulatory trends, technology trends, distribution channel news, financial reports and relevant economic news as well as internal reports such as competitor profiles, win loss analysis, trade show analysis, product plans, strategic plans, technical assessments, wargame results, scenario planning results…all the material that you need at your finger tips for those quick turnaround projects as well as to detect patterns in the marketplace that make you pause, stand back and say “ah ha, something is up” or “something doesn’t look right”.
When selecting a software solution, you need to keep in mind the technology your company is already using, and piggyback off something that already exists, such as salesforce.com to get the scoop from Sales. Perhaps PR uses software for delivery of the news, which you can extend off of. Perhaps your industry relations folks get financial reports from Thomson, which you can build from. Get a grasp of what’s already out there and build rapport with your IT people since you will need to work closely with them for installation, depending on the size and complexity of your software solution. There are competitive intelligence software providers you might consider: I have a partial list here.
There are a few things I look for when building an information database for competitive intelligence other that installation and cost!
1. How easy is it to browse and find what you’re looking for?
2. How easy is it to update the system and refresh the data? How much time and expense do you need to factor in for updating? Many people underestimate both, so the system becomes outdated quickly and loses credibility with users for obvious reasons.
3. Is there a process to delete data when it becomes outdated?
4. How will the system maintained?
5. What are your security considerations around a software system?
6. Who will you allow to make changes to the system?
7. How will you control the integrity of the data?
8. How will you encourage people to make contributions?
A contact database is the second type of database and is crucial for competitive intelligence personnel and anyone who does research. This database contains contacts both internal and external to your company who are great sources of information about your industry, the marketplace, the competition… Mine is organized by skill set, and how and where I met each person. Perhaps your company’s directory lets you do this: you still need to connect with external contacts continuously to keep from being blindsided.
Quick access to people and information greatly speeds up your research timeline! I also keep track of my projects through my contact database, and specific topics my clients have queried about. That way when I find cool stuff, I can quickly sort those people who are interested in this topic, and communicate with them directly. Clients appreciate this since I don’t send them irrelevant stuff, but rather build on what they’ve asked for in the past. This promotes cooperative intelligence since it’s cooperative communication. I like to use ACT! http://www.act.com/ for my contact database although there are plenty of options: just pick one and learn how to use it!
Social media has opened up ways to connect and be found. I also use Twitter’s Tweetdeck to sort comments by the category where they’re an expert, which I perceive as another form of connection. LinkedIn groups are another great source of connections by subject matter expertise. You can use LinkedIn’s advanced search option.

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, LinkedIn, research, trade show, Twitter, win loss analysis | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Use Trade Shows as Fact-Finding Missions

Posted on April 29, 2010 by ellendnaylor

Recently, I blogged about “5 Tactics to Research Your Marketplace using Competitive Intelligence Skills” originally published by Adam Sutton of MarketingSherpa. As promised, I am focusing on each tactic. This week’s is #3.

Trade shows are a Mecca for competitive intelligence. Nowhere are there more people who want to share their knowledge and insight with you: industry experts, prospects, competitors, other industry participants such as suppliers and distributors and journalists. This is cooperative intelligence at its finest since everyone is marketing to you whether at formal presentations, exhibitor booths or even informal places like the conference bar or hotel café.

Here are some tippers to help you be more productive at the trade show:

Beforehand: Do your homework and prepare a game plan that includes both formal and informal intelligence gathering opportunities. Study the exhibitor floor plan and all the presentations to decide how best to use your time. Write out the questions you will ask to the various audiences to help you be more articulate.  Keep your action plan rough as you’ll need to be flexible to jump on opportunities as they arise. For example, you might find out about a cocktail party that you didn’t even know existed until you arrived at the conference! You don’t want to miss it since alcohol consumption makes loose lips. Just make sure they aren’t yours and drink very little or none. I learned that lesson in the late 1990s when I was invited to a cocktail party and had to return to the scene the next day. I was lucky that the show was on for that third day. The competitor’s employees were quite attentive as their exhibit area was almost empty except for me. I don’t recommend what I did there, although I made good connections and got great information!

At the Conference: Be observant. Most people think about gathering competitive intelligence from competitors’ exhibit areas and formal presentations. However, I have found the best intelligence is gathered at informal settings such as the conference coffee shops, the conference hotel cafe, the elevator, cocktail parties, the bus ride to the airport, even during the airplane ride–by simply listening.

It’s a great time to practice your elicitation skills. I spend my time sorting out how I will approach each competitor or press personality prior to the show and often have to revise my approach mid-stream since I meet so many people for the first time, cold. If you read body communication you can figure out who is most approachable and how they might be motivated. Who is leaning forward as they talk to the booth visitors? Who is the technical person you see fiddling with cable and the computer at the booth? They probably have technical knowledge and are willing to share.

Be creative: If the booth staff doesn’t seem friendly, just wait, in time they’re likely to be relieved. Perhaps you can ask another booth visitor if you can tag along with them. Be smart about who you pick: I accompanied one of the competitor’s key clients, so the account rep answered all my questions and remarks to impress the client. The client had a number of additional questions that I would never have thought of since my product knowledge in that industry was not as deep as his!

After the Conference: Start writing up your findings during the conference and see if your home office has more questions based on what you’ve uncovered. You can pull more information out of a conference especially if you have a few people’s input, even if you’re attending by yourself.

I have even ducked into the ladies room to write out some technical details after a booth visit before I forget. I review my findings every night and often wake up with better questions. I don’t write up anything in the airplane ride home since there might be other attendees around and I don’t want to arouse any suspicion. Also they might start talking about the conference among themselves. Share your findings ASAP with co-workers upon returning to the office!

Note #1: Your competitors and other industry experts are collecting information about your company at trade shows too. How do you qualify who you will share what, and how much to share? Your booth personnel are a target, as are your company’s presenters. Have you thought about how you will answer difficult questions in public? Have you trained your employees not to have private conversations in public places like the elevator, the restroom, airplane or restaurants?

Note #2: Here is an article with more detail on cooperatively collecting at trade shows.

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperation, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, creativity, Elicitation, trade show | Tagged: | Comments Off on Use Trade Shows as Fact-Finding Missions

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