Client wanted to use competitive intelligence effectively, to improve business performance

Our client, a global technology leader, operates in a highly competitive business environment in India. They rely on the competitive intelligence gathered by their sales team to improve their business performance in the country.

The company wanted to make their process for gathering and sharing competitive intelligence more efficient and effective. To achieve this, they wanted to:

– Use forward looking competitive intelligence (CI) to improve their business performance

– Improve the CI capabilities of their current CI team by introducing them to CI processes and best practices

– Highlight ways to enhance their current CI processes

ValueNotes designed and conducted a two-day workshop for their sales and marketing team

Based on intensive discussions with senior executives and competitive intelligence champions within the client’s sales team, ValueNotes designed a workshop for senior and middle level executives that covered the following:

• Are they asking the right questions? As answers to the wrong questions would not give the client the right inputs for meeting their objectives, we conducted a session on needs assessment.
• Are they seeking the answers in the right places in the right way? It is possible to do CI more efficiently by choosing the right CI methodologies, sources of information and effective elicitation techniques.
• How are they using the information gathered to further their business objectives? Appropriate analysis frameworks need to be created in order to gain actionable inputs from the intelligence gathered.

ValueNotes leveraged their in-house technology expertise, undertook intensive secondary research, and had extensive discussions with the client to understand their industry ecosystem and develop a first cut of key intelligence topics (KITs) for the client. This enabled ValueNotes’ consultant to design impactful presentations, case studies and interactive sessions for the participants, which facilitated collaboration and brainstorming. The team was able to develop refined set of KITs, key intelligence questions (KIQs) and create a practical framework for CI.

The client was able to set-up a robust framework and make CI a part of their ongoing processes

The workshop helped the client to clearly pinpoint their own intelligence needs including:

– Early warning intelligence topics

– Strategic intelligence topics

– Key competitor intelligence topics

They gained insights on new ways to collect intelligence, and ways to incorporate CI techniques into their everyday interactions with industry participants. They related specific business decisions with the intelligence gathered, by developing analysis frameworks that could deliver actionable intelligence. The team made CI a part of their regular business review process.

This improved the CI capability of the organisation and enabled them to use competitive intelligence for accelerating their business objectives.