This presentation was delivered by Alex McDonnell, Market, and Competitive Intelligence Lead at Airtable at the Competitive Intelligence Summit, 2022. Catch up with a variety of talks with our OnDemand service.
Hey! I’m Alex McDonnell from Airtable, speaking to you from Toronto, Canada.
You’re here because you’re the go-to person at your organization for all things competition, or you soon will be. When a competitor drops some major news about say a new product launch or a major acquisition, that’s your time to shine and help the organization make some sense of it.
But it's not always so easy. Sometimes competitive news can cause panic. Other times it gets dismissed completely. How do we navigate that? How can we help our organizations process competitive news while keeping their cool?
I'm gonna do my best to give you the tools to do just that. You're gonna learn from all the mistakes that I've made running three in-house competitive intel functions over the last nine years.
In this article, I’ll specifically be focusing on:
- When you know you have a problem,
- A few crucial competitive intelligence principles,
- An outline of a solid competitive intelligence action plan,
- Common takeaways,
- Your cool new crispy news briefing, and
- How you can learn more from me!
You know you have a problem when…
… you recognize the chat below. Whether it's on Slack, Teams, or whatever chat channels you use at work, somebody drops a link to some competitor news with a message like, “Have we seen this?” or “Did we catch this?” and you get extreme reactions one way or the other.
You might see competitor-dismissive reactions, where your colleagues aren’t paying enough attention to what the competitor is doing or thinking about how we might be able to learn. That sounds like, “Who cares?! That product’s gonna suck!”
Alternatively, you might see competitor-obsessed reactions, where they panic about every little thing without putting any of it into context. “This is not good news! They're closing in on our differentiators. I'm totally freaking out!”
Just dropping the link to some competitor news, with no context or no takeaways, creates these extreme reactions. This isn’t constructive and doesn’t help anybody. That's why we call it “the link and stink”.
I've been there. It still happens – people post the link to something that they've just seen, and an emotional reaction ensues. It's on us as competitive intelligence pros to help the organization make sense of this news in a more constructive way.
