Good Market Intelligence does not happen overnight. In order to provide value-adding insight, it’s necessary to build data and information baselines first. As much as it’s convenient to buy reports and external data, it brings challenges with a provider bias, provider focus, price, and in any case, a need for a human quality gate. It’s much better to invest the resources into your own intelligence capabilities instead.
A key lesson learnt is to collect the right data & information. But how?
To know what “right” means, you must look beyond your own department and what you think is important. The easy way to figure it out is to establish a sounding board that consists of representatives of the departments you would like to include in your “intelligence network”, such as product development, marketing and sales.
During this establishment process, it’s good to ask your sounding board to tell you what then want to know and what they know.
To structure your work, we can recommend the 5C model and look at the following five factors:
Climate (PESTLE)
Company (you)
Competitors
Collaborators & Partners
Customers
It then gets clear where to look for data and information, and more importantly, you build a buy-in which which your Market Intelligence function cannot bring value to the organization.
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