Build Competitive Intelligence for Market Success

Rapid technological advancements: Keeping up with the swift pace of tech innovation and emerging tools, frameworks, and methodologies.
Diverse and fragmented competition: Monitoring numerous competitors, from startups to giants, including indirect players and potential entrants.
Complex buying cycles: Understanding the multifaceted B2B sales cycle, competitor positioning, and post-sale customer relationship management.
Data overload and quality: Managing vast data sources, ensuring relevancy, and maintaining data credibility amidst potential misinformation.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

A sales-focused competitive intelligence program is most effective when enabling sellers to improve their win rates against key competitors, stay abreast of changes in the competitive landscape, and be measured by CI-influenced wins.
A well-designed competitive intelligence program can help sales teams amplify your product and company capability strengths and overcome your weaknesses during sales interactions, making them more effective at winning deals over key competitors.
To remove barriers in competitive intelligence, one must address the main challenge of inadequate executive support by educating stakeholders on CI benefits, ensuring resource acquisition, making reliable data source investments, fostering a collaborative culture, and maintaining ethical and legal compliance.

Competitive intelligence for sales presents a viable, potentially game-changing opportunity if appropriately evaluated and resources (people, processes, resources, and technology) are formally committed and managed throughout all phases of the sales cycle.

Impact and Result

This SoftwareReviews blueprint provides product management or a competitive intelligence team with guidance, tools, sample training agendas, and training output while measuring CI influence in competitive sales situations.

Sales CI is:

Gathering and analyzing information about competitors, such as their products, pricing, marketing strategies, sales tactics, strengths, and weaknesses.
Using insights gained from CI to inform sales strategy and tactics against key competitors. Outcomes include developing more effective messaging and positioning, identifying pricing and packaging opportunities, and handling competitive threats.
Providing sales teams with intelligence on customer needs, preferences, and pain points relative to key competitors to help them tailor their competitive positioning to win more business.
Creating a deep understanding of the competitive landscape to inform sales about new competitors as they emerge.
Conducted ethically and within legal and regulatory boundaries.

Build Competitive Intelligence for Market Success Research & Tools

1. Build Competitive Intelligence for Market Success Storyboard – Research that shows how using product management can significantly increase win rates and measure the success of CI team funding from management.

By following the step-by-step process, you can learn how to compare the ranking of your product, brand, or company against top competitors using industry benchmarks and best practices.

2. Market Analysis and Battlecards Workbook – A detailed template to guide you in building a CI team to research and provide sales assets to help sales win in a competitive market.

This fully customizable, prebuilt PowerPoint presentation template documents the market analysis results and produces the sales battlecards.

3. Build Competitive Intelligence for Market Success Workbook – A tool to help you research and prioritize competitors and build CD sales data for output into battlecards.

This 12-tab Excel workbook will determine your competitors' strengths and weaknesses as they relate to your sales CI strategy and positioning. Develop competitive criteria, models, and data to help evaluate your desired sales opportunities to correctly position your company and products in your battlecards. The workbook includes budget, win/loss analysis, win/loss ROI, and customer interview questions as well as tracking and external reviews, market share, SWOT, and websites for research.

Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

10.0/10

Overall Impact

$13,600

Average $ Saved

Average Days Saved

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

Crystal Flash Inc

Guided Implementation

10/10

$13,600

Really appreciate Joanne's expertise and how she makes it all relevant to our business/industry

Competitive intelligence (CI) leaders can best deliver CI-influenced sales wins by arming sellers with up-to-date battlecards, product alignment, and a budget that supports success.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Build CI Sales Team

Call 1: Share the CI team vision and outline activities for CI sales strategy planning process. Plan next call – 1 week.
Call 2: Review your documented scope and objectives against your internal interview questions, answers against resources, and budget. Plan next call – 1 week.
Call 3: Train the CI team by assessing your company's CI capabilities and budget using the SR CI Excel and PowerPoint tools. Modify or add any requirements as needed. Plan next call – 1 week.

Guided Implementation 2: Conduct Competitive Research

Call 1: Develop CI research framework and best practices for the sales’ competitive analysis. Plan next call – 1 week.
Call 2: Review competitive win/loss analysis results and prioritize information for new sales battlecards. Plan next call – 2 weeks.
Call 3: Review to prioritize research types and top competitors for detailed CI research. Plan next call – 4 weeks.
Call 4: Review market analysis prefinal battlecards for testing. Plan next call – 1 week.

Guided Implementation 3: Test and Measure CI Program

Call 1: Review findings from the battlecard test to make any adjustments to the final battlecards, training plans for collaboration, and full sales training rollout. Plan next call – 1 week.
Call 2: Review and prioritize metrics for competitor monitoring, ROI of CI team, and other research types for sales CI assets. Plan next call – 1 week.