Why Is Competitive Intelligence Important?

July 14, 2021

Some people in decision-making positions might think of competitive intelligence as a nice-to-have but not an essential part of their business strategies. This is a huge mistake. Competitive intelligence should be the starting point of any business strategy if you want that strategy to be effective and successful.

Competitive intelligence is defined as the engagements that focus on assembling actionable information on a firm's external environment through primary and secondary research. The information uncovered by competitive intelligence engagements addresses important aspects of your competitors, market, customer profiles, pricing, etc., and must be collected in an efficient and ethical manner.

Advantages of Competitive Intelligence

The actionable information gathered from competitive intelligence engagements can translate into innumerable advantages for your business. Some of them are:

• With accurate and up-to-date data and analysis on hand, you will be able to stay ahead of industry trends.


• Competitive intelligence analysis will help you improve your time to market, making sure your products are successful.


• Your company will have an edge and will beat your competitors to the punch every time by having the insights needed to predict their behavior.


• Understand your customers better and consistently deliver products and services tailored to their needs, at the right moment, for the right price, with on-point marketing campaigns.



• Give your product managers the information they need for constructing roadmaps that deliver unique features and benefits.


• Differentiate yourself from your competition.


• Your RFP teams will receive objective insight concerning potential vendors.


• Your executive teams will gain the input to execute productive war gaming sessions.


• Competitive intelligence will allow your sales teams to anticipate competitor attacks and be able to defend and counterattack.

What Our Competitive Intelligence Engagements Can Do for Your Company

Peak Innovation's approach to competitive intelligence entails the use of secondary research first, followed by primary research, and finally, the use of a variety of analytic frameworks to refine and distill gathered data into actionable intelligence for use by our clients. This approach to competitive intelligence guarantees reliable, up-to-date data and analysis that surpasses that of other competitive intelligence companies that promote a secondary research software-as-a-service model or license their proprietary secondary research software to clients for the clients to operate themselves.


We believe that despite advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, no software is capable of connecting the dots and developing the story that comes from primary research and the resultant analyses. Our expertise in primary research is our big differentiator, and it's what our customers value most from our competitive intelligence services.

We provide an extensive list of competitive intelligence engagements tailored to your needs and designed to provide the best actionable insights. Our competitive intelligence engagements are:

• Competitor Profiling: Obtain a comprehensive analysis of your competitor—ranging from recent significant developments to future expected behavior, along with an assessment of key functional areas, resources, and capabilities.


• Product or Service Deep Dives: Obtain valuable insight into your customers' interaction with your products or services across different touchpoints.


• Competitor Monitoring & Tracking: Plan ahead to stay abreast of your competitors by having prior knowledge of their upcoming developments and strategies.



• Competitive Landscape Assessment: Learn where you fit in the competitive landscape and find out information on specific topics like capabilities and actions among your competitors and how those companies are differentiating from one another.


• Competitive Benchmarking: Gain actionable insights through a comparative analysis of your competitors based on specific metrics.


• Competitive Pricing Analysis: Find the balance between a profitable price, competitor behavior, and the buyer's perceived value of a product or service. Position your product or service as the market choice that provides the greatest overall value.


• Outsourced Competitive Intelligence Function: Our flexible business model allows you to hire our services as the entire competitive intelligence function for a client permanently or temporarily due to high activity or extended employee absence.


• Set Up or Process Improvement of In-House Competitive Intelligence Function: Hire our assistance to set up your own competitive intelligence function or improve your existing one.


• Industry Analysis: Assess the landscape of a particular industry—including economic trends, policy effects, the complexity of the industry, and more.



• Market Sizing & Segmentation: Define and obtain a deep analysis of the market size and identify groups of customers with similar needs, interests, and priorities.


• Patent and Intellectual Property Search & Analysis: Ensure the intellectual property you are interested in is sound.


• Strategic Vendor Selection: Obtain independent and objective assessments of potential solutions and make the best decision about future acquisitions.


• Win-Loss Analysis Programs: Identify defining aspects in competitive buying scenarios to understand the reasons why your company wins or loses.


• Battle Cards: Give your sales team the information they need to differentiate your products and services and avoid land mines.


• Voice-of-Customer Interviews: Gain deep insights into the experiences and expectations of your customers.


• Qualitative Research: We will define, develop, and execute customized research plans of a qualitative nature for your company and then provide an actionable summary assessment of the findings.

To build a successful business it is essential to have the tools, the information, and also the analysts that can help you make sense of it all to make the best executive decisions. Our competitive intelligence engagements will help your business succeed. Besides competitive intelligence engagements, Peak Innovation also offers marketing data analytics, product and service innovation, and M&A pipeline development services. All you need to make sure you are making the right decisions is one phone call away. Call us at (844) 485-8070 or fill out the form on this website for questions about our services or to schedule a time to speak.