No sports team would walk onto the field without knowing who they were playing, what style the opponent prefers, which key players must be neutralized, which are injured, what weaknesses can be exploited at key moments, and what high percentage strategy makes them most vulnerable. But businesses do it all the time...

The objective of good competitive intelligence is to understand your industry, and your competition, so well that you can predict their next moves, exploit their weaknesses, counter their strengths and gain control of new opportunities before they are widely recognized.

It is not enough to track competitors’ press releases (though sometimes this would be a good start). Real competitive intelligence is both a data-gathering and an analytic program. It must identify and understand established vendors and emerging sources of competition. But to gain a competitive edge requires tracking many other elements of the competitive landscape, including emerging technologies, new substitute products, leading executives, sales and R&D talent, potential legal & regulatory changes, new buying trends, M&A activity among competitors and suppliers, and so on. Out of this information, it must systematically generate actionable information -- information that can be used to improve your company's sales, profits and performance.

Competitive Intelligence at Ignyt

Ignyt's team has developed techniques used by world's leading news and information services companies, as well as national intelligence services. Our approach identifies all sources of potential information, systematizes intelligence acquisition and simplifies its dissemination and use in management operations It will help you, for example, to:

• Identify best practices at your competitors - How do they develop product? How do they sell it? What types of assets to they allocate to the sales, marketing, administrative, manufacturing and product development processes? What does their sales cycle look like? How do they compensate their employees? How do they train their staff? We help you acquire the objective information and convert it into a set of hard metrics to let you see how you stack up compared to the competition. We can also provide an objective analysis of your own current practices (see our Reflective Analysis) and an action plan for becoming a more formidable competitor.
• Identify competitive strengths and weaknesses - How can your competition be beaten in the market? What do their customers, business partners and other competitors say about them? Are any critical employees looking for another opportunity? Are they having trouble with regulators or their stock holders? Are analysts and the business press identifying specific weaknesses? We help to determine where your competition is vulnerable, and how you can most efficiently position yourself to win.
• Identify target customers - What lines of business does the company appear to be abandoning? Who among their customer base isn't being serviced adequately? We will help identify the customers you can win most easily and which ought to be your focus of attention.

Specific Competitive Intelligence Services

• Buying services - Have your competitors tell you what they do best. See their sales people in action. See how their products work for yourself.
• Automated data collection - Our staff have built some of the world's most sophisticated systems for collecting and automatically organizing competitive data.
• Customer and analyst focus groups - What do you customers think of you? What do their customers think of them? We'll tell you.
• Performance benchmarking - We'll help organize competitive information in a way that can be used to improve your performance, and your bottom line.