Competitve Analysts: Get Sales Teams on Your Side
How can competitive intelligence practitioners get sales teams on their side so that everyone can reap the benefits?
As a competitive intelligence practitioner, have you ever noticed that one of your best resources for competitive intelligence is your sales team? It makes sense; they are the ones on the front line speaking to customers and handling objections quite often raised by your competitors. Given this fact, we wonder and very often mention (you might have noticed), how so many CI programs neglect the fact that the sales reps are the champions of information. Everything can change once full organizational support is given to these champions.
The sales teams face the competition every day and are typically the first people inside a company to find out what the competition is up to. Every day, they hear from your customers all the great things your competition is planning, so it pays to keep track of these things—it can help you build profiles, trends, and threats. It will give you the first view of what really is happening in your industry.
One of the most common complaints in the CI world is “The executives don’t listen to my advice.” That’s because the probably think that your advice doesn’t affect dollars. Get sales on your side, and they’ll tell you exactly what is happening in the industry and how much it costs your company. Commissions are lost, and quotas aren’t met because of a lack of communication about that new under-the-radar competitor or to the established competitor that just implemented a new technology standard. Piece together a few bits of information like that, and you have first visibility into a longer-term trend and real threats to your company.
“But sales won’t talk to me. I can’t get time on their calendar.”
An understandable complaint, but one that can be easily overcome once your sales team realise that you want to and really CAN help them close deals faster. When you can organize your intelligence so that it helps you with your strategic focus and it helps your sales teams do their job, then you are in the perfect place. The more it becomes a two way street with obvious benefits on both sides, everybody wins, and it means real, bottom-line benefits for your company. Hard to argue with that, we think. Everybody can benefit from the outputs.
So make friends with your salespeople. Show them you care. Show them you can help win their deals. And then use them to feed your strategic systems, which in the long-term will help you win more deals and collect more intelligence. It’s the circle of life in the CI world. (You know the music that goes here.)