• Have you been surprised by your competition?

• Disruptive technology?

• New players in your market?

• Missed business opportunities?

Reduce the elements of surprise in your business.

We will help you develop a thorough and sustainable competitive intelligence (CI) program, which includes an early warning process.  Let us help you be a more proactive player in your industry and seize those new business opportunities before the competition. Whether your CI program is new or being revived after umpteen company reorganizations, we will empower you with our experience and skill from 25 years in competitive intelligence, both as a practitioner and as a consultant.

We are the only CI consulting firm that incorporates people skills into our practice.  We call this Cooperative Intelligence™, the attitude and practice of Giving that encourages openness and trust through Leadership, Connection and Communication.  You can be the most skilled CI professional, but if you fail to connect and communicate effectively, your CI operation and initiatives will stumble.  This is true in all professions!

• Would your product developers benefit from an ongoing connection with your customers?

• Do your product managers feel distant from marketing and sales?

We help companies develop the right products with confidence that customers will buy.

We incorporate intelligence and insight from the right places in your company, usually product development, marketing and sales; and external sources, especially your customers.  Using our competitive intelligence skills we train sales to gather valuable market intelligence from customers.  They relish this power, and now with every sales call, your sales force obtains valuable data to help your company develop better products.  Just imagine the ongoing and dynamic competitive advantage you gain at no additional cost!

• Do marketing and sales feel threatened by each other?

• Is it difficult to capture competitive intelligence and market insight from Sales?

Of course, marketing and sales feel threatened by each other!

Sales is compensated based on quarterly quotas so is geared to deliver and think quarterly.  Marketing is paid a base salary and is rewarded for strategic thinking, which does nothing to close more deals this quarter, right? 

I have worked in Marketing and Sales my whole career, and I have learned how to connect these islands through instilling Cooperative Intelligence™ practices throughout both organizations.  You must give to get in order to capture competitive data from Sales. 

However, it goes deeper than that.  As a CI or marketing professional, you need to solicit Sales’ expertise in developing marketing strategy.  Sales needs to clearly know what you are looking for and WHY!  Invite them to help develop your company’s products and services.  Train them on how to collect competitor data.  They love this expertise, and it also helps them close more business!

At The Business Intelligence Source, we are committed to helping companies improve their competitiveness through our process development, training programs and opportunity analysis.  Our market analysis, competitive intelligence (CI) and brainstorming sessions have helped companies make pivotal decisions to move forward with key initiatives, while in other instances we have saved them millions of dollars with “no-go” recommendations.

Examples of our Deliverables

CI process consulting

Early warning development

Integration of sales and marketing operations

Capture CI from sales

Customer insight

Customer intelligence

Win loss analysis

Trade show intelligence

War gaming

Product opportunity analysis

Electronic communication: CI software development and social networking

Competitive intelligence workshops

Competitive intelligence sales and marketing workshops

Cooperative intelligence consulting

Cooperative intelligence workshops

Ethics

In all our projects, we observe the ethical standards established by our clients, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and the Association of Independent Information Professionals.

Confidentiality

All our work is held in strictest confidence.  Hence, we do not share the names of our clients on this website.