Businesses need more than just good services and products. They need insights to market their offerings to the right people. This is where competitive intelligence (CI) can help them.
Market disruptions and changes in customer behavior are way more frequent today than ever before. There’s no way you can depend on yesterday’s information anymore. Today’s hypercompetitive environment requires you to invest in competitive intelligence tools. These will provide intelligent insights to rely on and get a competitive edge in this volatile market. As per Gartner, around 74% leaders understand the irreplaceable role of a good market and competitive intelligence software.
This blog will give you all the information about what competitive intelligence is, why you can’t overlook CI today, its benefits, CI framework, types, steps to gather CI, competitive intelligence jobs (with a bonus online course!), which industries are using CI to gain that edge, and much more.
What is Competitive Intelligence? Why Does It Matter Today?
Industries of various domains need to collect data about their overall market, direct competitors, and indirect competitors to stay relevant and competitive. They use competitive intelligence to gather, analyze, and utilize information to get better business results based on customer behavior, current market trends, and competition analysis.
Information about competitors, like their marketing strategies, product launches, market share, and business practices, helps you make long and short-term business decisions. Also, CI can include information about your company, like its market, products/ services, and customers.
Why Does It Matter Today?
There are a vast number of benefits of competitive intelligence, some of which are:
They help business leaders to make strategies based on industry trends, market situation, competitors’ movements, and customer behavior. Executives also make better decisions from CI’s situational awareness.
Go-to-market (GTM) strategies are highly important for businesses today. With CI’s continuous market information, organizations upgrade their GTM strategies for product placements and sell to the right customer segment.
With competitive intelligence’s intel, customer success and sales teams can increase sales win rates. This is one of the immediate benefits of CI.
Product development and R&D teams can use competitive intelligence to understand current and future market needs to develop the right kind of products that people will actually buy.
In 2026, there’s competition everywhere, especially in the B2B market. Business competitive intelligence information clarifies how your competitors are positioning their brands to become successful, so you can get inspiration from it. Also, you can see the white space that other brands haven’t utilized yet. And you can be the first one to take advantage of it.
Related: What Is Android System Intelligence? Features, Privacy & Full Guide
Competitive Intelligence Framework or How To Collect Information?
Organizations can’t just haphazardly collect and analyze information in the name of competitive intelligence. To build a successful competitive intelligence program, you need to first have a structured approach, also known as The Intelligence Cycle.
Let’s shed some light on this,
The Intelligence Cycle involves a few chronological steps:
1. Planning & Direction (what your business needs & how to collect it)
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2. Collection (information gathering from news, articles, data, reports, social media)
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3. Analysis (CI professionals, today, with the help of AI, analyze the information)
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4. Dissemination (Information is passed to the right team at the right time)
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5. Feedback & Action (If the insight was successful and if any changes are required for future CI efforts)
Business needs evolve almost daily; so with the right feedback from stakeholders and analyzing business impact (positive, neutral, or negative), your competitive intelligence can change from time to time.
Types of Competitive Intelligence
Like most intelligence data, information from competitive intelligence can be a lot to manage. But, with the right approach and using the right tools, you can develop an ethical competitive intelligence process that follows best practices and provides accurate information. There are two major types of competitive intelligence, these are:
Strategic Intelligence
Strategic or long-term intelligence delves far into the future, possible risks, and business opportunities. This form of CI takes upcoming trends and technologies into consideration to predict industry trends and enables the company to position itself accordingly.
Tactical Intelligence
The focus of tactical intelligence is the near future. For example, what are the trends, market position, etc., of this quarter or the next one? With this form of CI, you gather information to make quick decisions or generate immediate strategies.
Related: What Is Data Collection? Methods, Challenges, Post-Processes, and Tools
Competitive Intelligence Research & Competitive Intelligence Analysis
By combining research and analysis of competitive intelligence, organizations make successful decisions across various departments, like product, marketing, sales, and cumulative planning.
Let’s look at the overview to understand both terms better.
| Aspects | Competitive Intelligence Research (What & How) | Competitive Intelligence Analysis (Findings & How To Use) |
| Definition | An ethical and organized gathering of publicly available data (PR, social media, news), and also private information like customer testimonials, ex-employee insights about competitors and the general market. | Analysis of the collected information to interpret pros, cons, patterns, potential risks, emerging technologies, and future significance. |
| Focus | Collect data, monitor competitors, customer behavior, and market trends. | Data analysis for actionable insights, to find white spaces, predict competitors, and evaluate future performances. |
| Goal | To have a complete understanding of the surrounding market and competition. | To generate strategies in areas of marketing, product development, sales, and long-term business planning. |
Who Uses Competitive Intelligence Findings? Teams & Competitive Intelligence Job Titles
By now, you must have an idea that competitive intelligence is used in all important departments of an organization. Teams that directly deal with the customers, to teams that are responsible for product/ strategy development, to keep both the stakeholders and customers happy, can benefit from competitive intelligence data.
Teams
- Sales team
- Marketing team
- Product marketing team
- Product innovation & R&D teams
- Customer success & account management teams
Competitive Intelligence Jobs (Online Course Recommendation)
Strategic planning analyst
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, this job profile is projected to grow by 11% from 2022 to 2032. You can look forward to collaborating with stakeholders to define goals, manage competitive intelligence research, and generate and implement strategies to achieve the company’s long-term goals.
Expected average annual salary: Approximately $92,000.
Competitive intelligence analyst
You need to be a graduate or a postgraduate in business and marketing to pursue this career. You will be solely responsible for the competitive intelligence research, helping organizations make strategic decisions. According to your company’s future benchmarks, you will be monitoring market trends and competitors.
Expected average annual salary: Approximately $91,000.
Business research manager
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that this profession is expected to grow by 8% from 2022 to 2032. In a managerial position, a master’s degree can be your friend in fields like business, marketing, computer science, and even psychology! Your job description will include developing, conducting, and overseeing research projects. You will either collect data directly or guide a team of executives to do the same.
Expected average annual salary: Approximately $120,000.
You can find the Strategising: Management for Global Competitive Advantage Specialization course on Coursera, conducted by the prestigious Macquarie University. This course is designed to teach you strategic management, global supply chain management, sustainability, and disruptive innovations.
Competitive Intelligence Tools (With Gartner Reviews)
Competitive intelligence software or tools enable organizations to perform CI research and analysis with ease and accuracy. These tools are centralized platforms that support businesses in conducting competitive and market intelligence for developing short and long-term strategies in corporate, product, sales, and many others.
Valona Intelligence
Reviews: 4.6 out of 5 stars
“Very good in general. Some bugs here and there, but they are usually fast at fixing them.”
- The main focus is on market and competitive intelligence.
- Combines AI and analyst expertise to offer valuable insights.
- Delivers over 200,000 news alerts to almost 350,000 users daily.
Visualping
Reviews: 4.6 out of 5 stars
“It’s so easy to have Visualping keep an eye on our competitors’ and our allies’ websites, to let us know by email of changes that might impact us. I like that it allows the option of looking for visual/graphic changes as well as text changes.”
- Monitors any webpages and alerts users about any updates or changes.
- Sends alerts through mail, text messages, MS Teams, Slack, etc.
- The AI helps to categorize the changes, important or unimportant.
AlphaSense
Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars
“The Alphasense platform is extremely useful and has enhanced my productivity. It’s also improved our team’s dexterity with regard to decision-making.”
- It is a market intelligence and search platform.
- Uses AI and Gen-AI to get insights from both public and private sources to enable decision-making.
- It gathers information from trade journals, equity research, call transcripts, news, event transcripts, etc.
Competitive Intelligence Examples in Different Global Industries
Industries of various sectors are using competitive intelligence to stay ahead of competition, build business plans for the immediate and prolonged future, develop products and services as per evolving consumer needs, take cue of emerging technologies and how they can be helpful, study market trends, and the list goes on and on.
Let’s learn about some of the industries in which competitive intelligence has become irreplaceable.
- Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI): To check market shifts, monitor mergers and acquisitions, and understand upcoming trend changes.
- Marketing and Digital: To monitor competitors’ digital scenarios, website changes, social media activities, customer feedback, and product marketing. By monitoring these, companies can design and implement digital and content marketing strategies.
- Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals: This industry uses CI to monitor competitors’ movements, from new drug introductions, updates on clinical trials, to R&D, patent, and regulatory filings.
Some other industries are:
- Manufacturing
- Legal & business strategy
- E-commerce & retail
- Supply chain & logistics
- IT/ITes & technology
Competitor Intelligence is Your Only Solution to Sustainable Success
Business competitive intelligence helps organizations understand and monitor how technologies and market trends can affect them. It is a multidimensional discipline that, when combined with the latest market assessment, becomes a powerful asset that every organization needs to use.
At this point, you need to foster a competitive intelligence culture within your organization to empower decision-making and drive agility. Use CI to the fullest, not just to beat your competitors in their own ballpark, but by filling market gaps that nobody thought of filling with sustainable innovations.
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