Why Does Your Sales Team Need Competitive Intelligence?

by Octopus Intelligence Octopus Competitive Intelligence

Why Does Your Sales Team Need Competitive Intelligence?

All businesses aim to become successful in their fields. Hence, an intelligent strategy is helpful in this pursuit. Competitive intelligence lends that helping hand to enterprises, allowing them to sail through the sales journey efficiently. It is referred to the engagements that focus on gathering information about a company’s external environment via research. The data collected covers vital aspects of the competitor, customer profiles, and cost, among others. This intelligence is then analysed by the sales team to make informed business decisions, overcome objections, and close deals quickly and efficiently.

Competitive intelligence only has value if it is put in the right hands, i.e., the sales and marketing professionals. These professionals use competitive intelligence to help gain vital information about the competitors and monitor them from time to time. This intelligence may cover competitors’ financial performance, customer service rating, strengths, weaknesses, plans, product features and shortcomings.

Here Are A Few Advantages That Competitive Intelligence Brings To Businesses:

Predicting Competitors’ Plans

Competitive intelligence can help a sales team to predict what the competitors are up to based on the information collected from the competitors’ websites, social media updates, announcements, review sites, and so on. For instance, a competitor might be planning to launch a new product or service. Gathering this information helps the sales team to stay ahead of their competitors by getting a picture of what the competitors have planned and the moves they are taking in the future.

Staying Abreast Of Industry Trends

Competitive intelligence helps sales teams to stay informed about the latest industry trends, expectations, technology, innovators, and other factors, which can help them seize new opportunities for sales. For instance, by gathering information about a competitor’s new product, a business can identify customer demands and plan strategies to meet them. They can also inform the product team about the latest product offering so that they can analyse it for development.

Making Better Decisions

By knowing the activities of competitors, sales professionals can better plan their company’s next move and make decisions based on that. Competitive intelligence can help them stay competitive by gauging the competitors’ plans and ensuring that the current direction will keep them competitive.

Identifying Gaps

Competitive intelligence helps a business identify gaps in the market by gaining insights into the activities of its competitors. It helps them constantly watch how the competitors are changing or growing and the market areas they are concentrating on. This information allows a business to stay apart from their competitor and keep changing as the market demands change.

Boosting Speed To Market

Competitive intelligence can help the sales team gain insights into the competitors’ speed to market output. Speed to market is the time it takes for a product/service to go from its nascent stage to final sale. To remain competitive, a business must enhance its speed to market performance while maintaining quality.

Better Engaging With Customers

Competitive intelligence helps businesses engage their customers more efficiently. It lets them know how competitors deal with their customers and determine how to keep them engaged and interested to win and maintain customer trust. Various tools are available to help businesses stay informed about any activity on their social media platforms so they can engage their followers regularly.

Internal Information

Apart from getting information about the competitors, competitive intelligence can help sales professionals gain knowledge about their own company regularly. This assessment lets them know the company’s overall performance, where it excels, and where it needs to focus. This way, businesses can make wise decisions.