Competitive Information and Sales Guides: What Sales Forces Need to Win

Sales guides often paint a too-rosy view of the company’s competitive position, or contain insufficient and/or outdated competitive information. Find out how such competitive information sets up a sales force to lose, what sales people need to win, and how to package information in ways that one’s sales force finds useful.

Eliyon

Eliyon is a search engine that indexes the profiles of business professionals and companies. As of late 2004, the Eliyon database included more than 22 million profiles of executives in the US, and more are added every day. To find new data, Eliyon crawls the Web and automatically extracts executive names and details from press releases, news articles, company websites and SEC filings. Originally intended … [ Read more ]

URLinfo

This tool will tell you everything you ever wanted to know – and more – about any URL. Simply type in a URL, and more than 100 tools are at your fingertips, neatly organized in a tabbed interface. Starting with the “General” tab, with just a click you can view Alexa’s ranking and feedback for the URL or gather WHOis information, for example. Move on … [ Read more ]

Stephen E. Rudolph, Ernest R. Gilmont, Andrew S. Magee, and Nancy F. Smith

Information is not intelligence, and gathering information is not carrying out competitive intelligence. Many companies have mechanisms to accumulate large amounts of information; significantly fewer companies have mechanisms for conducting competitive intelligence.

Intelligence uses information as raw material, screening, sifting, sorting, verifying, analyzing, interpreting, and compiling it to create a useful output. And just as information is raw material for intelligence, intelligence is raw material for … [ Read more ]

Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will

Being smart and successful in business is possible only for those armed with the “kill or be killed” mentality. Competition is inevitable, says author Shell, a professor at the Wharton School, but in a cutthroat world that rewards street smarts and cunning-along with good connections and unlimited funds-conquering business enemies is the necessary ingredient for true success. Shell explains “everything-you-wanted-to-learn-in-business-or-law-school-but-didn’t”: if you want to be … [ Read more ]

Evaliant

You can see exactly where and how your competitors are advertising online with the Evaliant service, which scans thousands of sites for current advertising activity (including selected search engines). Pick a brand, and you have access to agency contacts, a list of sites where the ads ran, how often the ads are appearing and what the ads actually look like – up to and including … [ Read more ]

Linktree Link Popularity Analyzer

Linktree offers a no-cost tool that will tell you, site by site, who is linking to your competitors but is NOT linking to you. Simply enter the URLs of at least five competitors, enter your URL, and voila! Out pops a list of those websites that are excluding you from the linking party, plus links to the pages where your competitors’ links appear. You can … [ Read more ]

Benson P. Shapiro, Adrian J. Slywotzky and Richard

Every company has a well-defined competitive field of vision, which is usually too narrow. Long periods of equilibrium only exacerbate the problem. A whole raft of “minor little players” operates just at the periphery. They are difficult to see because traditional competitors focus on each other and not on new entrants and “nontraditional” entities lurking at the industry’s fringes.

Keyword Counter

What’s your competition doing right that you aren’t? The no-cost tool found at Keyword Counter allows you to compare your site’s keywords, metatags, alt tags and descriptions to a competitor’s to see how you stack up. Simply enter the two URLs for comparison and within seconds you will be served with a list of the top keywords found on the pages, including the number of … [ Read more ]

Everything in Moderation: The 10th Annual Cost Management Survey

According to CFO Magazine’s latest survey, companies have been diligently pruning overhead, leaving them primed to capitalize on an economic recovery.

Editor’s Note: The actual text of the article is of limited and topical value, but the reason I have posted this is for the useful CI info found in the industry tables, which list average cost management index (CMI) values for a variety of … [ Read more ]

Portals to the World

For the global executive (or domestic executive with a global business, for that matter) the Web is a great resource for finding country information. One of the strongest resources is the Library of Congress Web site’s “Portals to the World” section, which offers links to a wide range of information on dozens of countries, with topics including education, embassies, geography and environment, national security, and … [ Read more ]

Working the Crowd

The best place to peek at a company’s proprietary secrets? At meetings and trade shows. Intelligence professionals tell you how it’s done.

UCLA Rosenfeld Library CI Primer

If you’re really a market warrior at heart, here’s a great place that details a step-by-step “check out the competition” process. The UCLA Rosenfeld Library has a site devoted to Competitive Intelligence that lists the questions to ask and links to the places to find the answers.
The questions fall into three categories: the corporate picture … [ Read more ]

MarketRelevance

A resource for following the direct mail industry, MarketRelevance captures over 25,000 traditional and email promotions each year. You can search by individual company or by promotion to find out who’s mailing what and through which channels. Great resource for getting ideas, seeing what’s going on in the industry and checking out competitor campaigns. It’s a valuable addition to the … [ Read more ]

A FAROUT© Way to Manage the CI Analysis Process

Future-oriented, Accurate, Resource-efficient, Objective, Useful, Timely – a framework for competitive analysis.

We Can Work It Out: The 2002 Working Capital Survey

The 2002 Working Capital Survey (sixth annual conducted jointly with REL Consultancy Group) reveals ways to reduce working capital without punishing customers or suppliers. But the alternatives aren’t totally pain-free.

Editor’s Note: I find the 2002 Working Capital Survey Charts (last page) a very useful benchmark/CI tool.

CI For the Non-financial Analyst – Part 1

Efficient capital markets require that companies that have raised money in the capital markets must file detailed, timely and sometimes intimate information with regulators. These filings are open for everyone – not only investors in the company. Prior to the www, these filings were available to the public, but the means for everyone to access this information easily was not available. The free flow of … [ Read more ]

How to Calculate Market Shares

Have you ever been in a situation where your competitor claimed a market share that was not even close to the calculations you gave to your senior management? Or where annual reports claimed market shares you could not retrace in your calculations? Understanding how you can calculate – and use – market shares can be extremely useful.

Tips for Benchmarking Against Your Peers

“How does your company stack up against the competition? You better know the answer to that question on a number of fronts. Our new column on business research debuts with a look at sources available to help you get started in your quest to benchmark against your peers.”

Associations Unlimited

Associations Unlimited combines data from the entire Encyclopedia of Associations series and includes additional IRS information on nonprofit organizations, for a total of nearly 457,000 organizations. The database also contains association materials — brochures, logos and membership applications. Public and academic librarians, library users, business people and staff of nonprofit associations find Associations Unlimited an indispensable source for: locating national, international and local associations; monitoring … [ Read more ]