Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is the disciplined cycle of deciding what you need to know about competitors, collecting it legally, turning the raw material into something usable, analysing what it means, and getting it to the people making decisions before the moment passes.
Six stages loop round in a circle, from deciding what to find out back round to acting before the moment passes.
Reach for this when…
- Competitor information floats around informally and nobody owns turning it into a decision.
- You found out about a rival's move from a client instead of your own tracking.
- Leadership wants 'more competitive intelligence' without saying what question it should answer.
How to run it
- Planning: agree the specific decisions this intelligence needs to inform, not intelligence for its own sake.
- Collection: gather from public, legal sources - filings, job ads, pricing pages, customer conversations.
- Processing: turn what you've gathered into a usable form - translate, verify, and organise it so it can actually be analysed.
- Analysis: turn processed information into what it means for your position, not just a summary of facts.
- Dissemination: get the analysis to the person making the decision, in time to use it.
- Feedback: check whether it changed the decision, and adjust what you collect next cycle.
A worked example
Situation. Marco Ferrari ran Terra Agritech, an agritech startup in Bologna, Italy, where competitor news reached him third-hand through sales calls, usually after a deal was already lost.
Applied. He ran the full cycle for one quarter, starting with a specific question - which rival was undercutting on renewal pricing - and assigned someone to track job postings and public tender documents weekly.
Result. The pattern showed one competitor hiring aggressively into a region before entering it; Terra Agritech moved a renewal campaign there six weeks ahead of the rival's launch and held the accounts.
The catch
Most competitive intelligence efforts stall at collection or processing - people gather information and never get to the analysis or dissemination steps that make it useful. It also tempts people toward information that's easy to get rather than information that answers the actual question. Run the full cycle or don't bother starting it.
Intelligence that never reaches a decision-maker in time is just filed trivia.
Origin: Intelligence Cycle, adapted for business by SCIP (Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals)