Competitive Intelligence Solutions
Staying Ahead of Your Competition
FINDING & VETTING
Uncover business-critical information from increasingly complex human and data sources
ANALYZING
Expose impactful information through in-depth analysis using automated tools combined with CI-professional best practices
UNDERSTANDING
Successful competitive intelligence projects translate into actionable insights that benefit sales, R&D, marketing and other key functions
TAKING ACTION
Ongoing competitive intelligence as part of your routine with focused ramp up at critical moments helps you WIN when it matters most
DATA SOURCES AUDIT
To deliver accurate, focused analysis, we start by ensuring a clear understanding of how and why data is collected
Not all CI data sources are created equal, and part of our needs assessment is to determine the best source possible to get the right answer to the competitor questions in a meaningful time frame.
- What is the purpose of this project?
- How can we achieve our goals?
- What are the deliverables?
- Who are the intended recipients?
- Once we have identified the answers to these questions we begin targeting sources relevant to your specific project aim
Deep Web - Google estimates that only about 0.04% of the web has been indexed!
Moreover, estimates suggest 70-80% of potentially usable business information is not indexed by search engines and can only be found by conducting a search that is within a particular website
That means much of your competitors information may not be searchable on Google. Insights about about people, technologies, companies, customer and competitor employee perceptions in informal and social networks, marketing strategies, clients, financial status, patent applications, and more
- Also, much of the data you need to better understand your competitors is also in structured relational data that require a keyword or subscription to locate the information, or its simply ‘invisible’ in formats that cannot be indexed like SEC Filings, Incorporation documents, World Bank statistics are examples.
- Dynamically generated or excluded pages where SEO is purposely turned off, registered-member engineering content are examples of ‘weak’ trend signals often hidden in blue-water technology efforts.
- Even with Google Patent and Scholar, we are only begining to see a global taxonomy
Modern Data Gathering Services
With so much information available using search engines, SEO tools, and analyst reports, why do more?
If you do however decide to dig deeper into the “Deep Web” (also called Deepnet, Invisible Web, or DarkNet), or World Wide Web content not indexed by search engines, you may expose insights about your competitors that change the rules of your game
- We combine skilled, manual primary research methods with data mining to surface hard to find information about your competitors. There is no substitute for ‘sweat and smarts’ in competitive intelligence efforts
- We also incorporate the multitude of advanced surface web analytics tools into our competitor data gathering efforts (a new one gets added to my list weekly) as standard practice, or leverage work done by your SEO experts
Voice of Customer (VOC) Research
You will get the benefit of traditional proven techniques used to extract customer wants and needs, combined with new methods like sentiment analysis and motivation mapping
- We work with customer advisory boards, user groups, customer databases and individual interviews to gather key, primary data
- You get competitor profiles grounded by both your customer points of view and those of your competitors’ customers, their partners, and influencers
- As much as we love that big data analysis allows us to look at ‘all’ the data, traditional sampling of customers uncovers biased sentiment unique to each market segment, often with greater depth
- And because we bring ethical and legal competitive intelligence best practices, we ensure your teams stay safe and correct
Focus Groups & 1-1 Interviews - Organized 'punditry'
We specialize in professional, ethical, and unbiased conversations with the key decision-makers at your customers, prospects, influencers and partners to gather their opinions, sentiments and voice of customer feedback regarding the products and services of both you and your key competitors.
We help your teams strategize, set-up, and execute focus groups, customer advisory boards, micro-user groups, 1-1 interviews. Critical to these sessions, we bring a level of professional management, and follow-up to analyze and sustain future dialog
Examples of work we can do to bring more horsepower to your high-touch research efforts
- Win loss interviews and analysis
- Implementation and post implementation interviews
- Customer satisfaction interviews and analysis
- Customer loyalty and retention interviews and analysis
- Lost customer interviews and analysis
Roadmap Prioritization
One of the most challenging competitive intelligence projects is to help product teams define and prioritize their product roadmap relative to the competition.
Even for blue-water solutions, the intended customer is executing on the business process with some historical solution.
To make matters worse, ‘agile development’, short-development-cycle Cloud-release schedules, global-24 hour development teams, and aggressive competition means your product teams must ALWAYS watch the competition, and make the right decisions at critical moments.
B2B Product Feature Prioritization
Unlike most competitive intelligence practitioners, who’s main work has been in corporate strategy, or life-long CI work, Sweet Spot Martech prides itself in our first-hand experience in defining, building and bringing to market highly successful B2B technology products
- We bring both the tools, experience, and competitive intelligence insights to your product roadmap
- We’ll right fit in with your product management, engineering, marketing teams and augment your leadership brain cycles
Selling with Competitor Insights
Our teams build easy-to-use competitive playbooks, battle-cards, coverage models, channel alignment, and prospect targets. We help frame customer conversations
- Our on-demand, elastic and tactical services help create deliverables designed to support more timely and relevant sales conversations
- You can no longer track everything relevant in your competitive landscape manually — you need smart tools, integrated into your CRM to find the right information amid the noise and develop actionable intelligence continuously.
Let's talk about your competition
If you are being overwhelmed by the amount of raw information coming at you, we can help