Action to result from Intelligence

 

Most importantly though as with any other business process and goal: intelligence needs to be made actionable! In targeting business benefit, intelligence not only needs to arm and equip marketing and sales management but also lead to decisive action on the front or at the back office to extract business value.

Most obvious action resulting from market and competitive intelligence might stem from alerts and obvious trends. Close-to-business market researchers, business development personnel or other marketing and sales staff is to define standard processes on alerts for business areas in impact and for suggestions on actions and measurements.

Tying intelligence into ongoing projects and sales & marketing routines presents opportunities to use established project management tools or sales & marketing systems such as call reports, Customer Relationship Management systems, cascading marketing communications schemes and the likes.

Whenever market and competitive intelligence is delivered in response to direct inquiries, resulting action should be defined when requesting the business intelligence. This might help to gather and provide the most suitable intelligence focus and priorities as well as it would build-in follow-up and success review automatically.

Examples as success stories and learnings could furthermore extracted and communicated into the intelligence community, marketing and sales as well as into any other organizations within the company to raise awareness about intelligence impact and opportunities.

Failed contracts, lost business because of lack of proper intelligence are as important for all sales staffers and marketers as positive business impact.

Extrapolated business value or risk should make obvious that the market and competitive intelligence process is not to be underestimated.