Sales / Competitive Intelligence – Know Thy Enemy

Anecdotally, you know who the competitors are around you. You have a pretty good idea of how often you run up against certain vendors. But, unless you actually quantify the landscape, you run the risk of being surprised by up-and-comers.

One of the things that we do at Primary Intelligence is help our clients identify their competition landscape. Over time, we show how the landscape is changing and how competitive situations may evolve into the future.

For example, in the case of a heath insurance provider, we collected data from their recent won and lost sales opportunities. Below, you’ll see a table of data, with all vendors’ names changed to provide confidentiality:


While our client expected to see National Health Coverage most of the time, they were surprised at the prevalence of Squirrels Health Plans. In the previous round of intelligence, we found that Squirrels was encountered in approximately 20% of the sales opportunities. The fact that this percentage had increased to 64% indicated a very big change in the competitive landscape.

Turns out, Squirrels was starting to win a larger percentage of the deals than before, too. The competitive threat level was increasing faster than anecdotal information or analyst recommendations could keep track. Without this type of view into the landscape, our client was destined to miss critical competitive warnings until the situation progressed too far. As it turned out, Primary Intelligence was able to use this intelligence as a jumping-off point and find out:

Why Squirrels was appearing so often

What they were offering to get into the same kind of deals as our client

How to combat their value proposition effectively and maintain existing accounts while selling more productively against them

While I will admit that intuition, experience and gut-feelings are important parts of the sales process, wise companies combined those factors with hard intelligence to apply resources to the most productive markets; no reason to be surprised when reasonable options exist.

If you need an idea of how this would work in your company, leave me a post, call (801-838-9600 x5050) or send an email (cdalley@primary-intel.com).