Sales Teams Should Power Competitive Intelligence

With sales teams on the front lines, they should be empowered to gather competitive intelligence. 

It’s easy to see how salespeople can benefit from having useful competitive intelligence (CI). What is not commonly recognized, though, is that CI teams are also more effective when they are closely allied with their sales teams. For instance, salespeople are the ones in the field and talking to customers so they can collect intelligence about the competition’s positioning, product specifics, and selling strategies. They also are well aware of how effective the competitor’s sales tactics are relative to their own strategy. So why not empower the sales teams to feed this information to competitive intelligence teams?

This information is extremely valuable to a well-tuned CI organization and can help that CI organization provide analysis and insight on how to improve a company’s revenues.

Sales teams are key to competitive intelligence collection

Successful organizations make information gathering as much a part of their sales process as they do the actual sales activities. Salespeople come into contact with a wealth of information such as new products to be introduced and new competitors coming into the market. Years back, Joël Le Bon wrote that “The sales force has abundant information about the initiatives and products that your competitors are planning and, therefore, the kinds of choices that your customers will be facing in the near future.” This makes sense. Sales professionals are on the front lines, so to speak, when they meet with customers, visit suppliers and manufacturers, attend conferences, and work at trade shows booths. In each case, valuable information can be gleaned about a competitor’s sales tactics, product lines, model specifications, and market trends. Salespeople are sometimes the first to hear about new technologies that competing companies are developing or are about to offer, and sales representatives can learn about service contracts their competitors are providing.

Collection sources and methods

Now that we know where CI can be powered from let’s see how the information can be collected.

What can salespeople do to collect competitor information? The easy answer is to keep their eyes and ears open. When meeting with customers, sales representatives should listen intently about what other companies are pitching; ask the customers about the products and service plans they’ve been offered by the competition, and learn as much as possible about the customer’s needs.

At trade shows, sales reps can visit competitors’ booths and pick-up literature. They can also participate in conversations about the industry and listen to what is being said about companies, products, and new trends. When staffing booths, reps can elicit information from visitors about competitor’s products. And when they talk with suppliers, vendors and other intermediaries, they can ask about a competitor’s future rollouts, product specifications, models prices, services options, and customer demand for competitor’s products.

Getting intelligence back to the CI team is critical

What can the reps do with the information, now that they have it?

When reps return to their companies, they need to have an easy way to convey what they learned to the people who can analyze, assimilate, and distribute it. One way to do this is to have a designated point of contact within the CI team to communicate their findings. Some companies may develop a specific type of debrief or report format that helps sales reps distribute raw information, and allows the CI department and other organizations within the company to use it. An even better way to do this is to use a collection system that can keep track of those designated analysts and which can automatically route intelligence to them.

CI educates the sales teams on intelligence requirements and value

Although sales professionals are indeed those people who make the first contact with sources of information that can be useful for strategic purposes, they may not be aware of the importance of that information. When this happens, they may neglect to collect it. Sales professionals are high-impact people that have strong customer orientation and who are always questioning the benefit of activities they participate in. A CI department that proactively educates sales personnel on the importance of collecting and reporting information will be much more successful. CI professionals can teach the sales field about the types of competitive intelligence that they are likely to encounter and instill a resolve to collect it.

Celebrate success from using CI

A great way to prove that CI collecting is worth the effort is to show how it helped to win a sales situation. Celebrating wins is essential and even more so when an organisation is attempting to ingrain new ways-of-working in the company culture.

It is also important to provide the sales force with feedback on how specific information was used, what decisions were made from it, and what strategies resulted from the collection effort. This feedback helps the sales force better understand their role and contribution to the overall strategic health of the company, and it will motivate sales reps to collect and report more. A process that makes it easy for sales teams to communicate intelligence after customer visits will help elicit information from sales.

Competitve intelligence and sales – give and take

It is this give-and-take relationship between CI and sales that allows a company to increase its competitive effectiveness: CI teams provide competitive guidance to sales, sales teams can collect new information and report it back to CI teams, and the CI teams, in turn, analyze, process, and update the material they provide back to sales. It is critical that the CI team demonstrates that obligation to the sales teams, and that the sales teams reciprocate by giving feedback.

Taking a step back to see how a CI process should flow makes all the difference. It makes sense to empower sales teams to curate information and to be the creators of competitive success within your organisation. You just need to ensure they know that they have this power.