Measurements of Market Intelligence Impact
There is no action as useless as not being followed through, measured against and results yielded, including communicated and celebrated and/or learned from (especially if unsuccessful). Measuring actions supported by market and competitive intelligence is an absolute must for any proper and acceptable life cycle of activities in any given business environment.
As many other non-transactional business activities, market & competitive intelligence is challenging to be measured in terms of impact and hard results. One of the most common mistakes of intelligence professionals is to setup improper or insufficient measurements or non at all.
If results from intelligence gathering and delivery can not be measured, management might be bound to misjudge the impact of professional market intelligence efforts. Chances are that acceptance and support for the intelligence initiatives might suffer.
Therefore it is of material importance to take measurement, follow-up and proof of impact extremely seriously and spend some serious capacity to set up standards and tools to support result measurements for business intelligence.
Market & competitive intelligence units struggle between too soft of a measurement scale and avoiding accountability for results that are in fact owned by others such as marketers and sales staff. While simply counting recipients of market intelligence products like competition reports, business and industry studies or market analysis can not serve as hard evidence for effective intelligence utilization, measuring sales impact is equally misleading or meaningless for measuring real business value of market intelligence.
For example, competitive intelligence might be a firm part of research prior to bidding participation at a larger customer account. Documenting the utilization of the learnings from competitive intelligence in such a business process needs to be tied into the outcome of the bidding including drawing conclusions of success or failure. Asking the question how the outcome would have looked like with more or less meaningful intelligence should visualize intelligence impact and importance.
With such a standard process intelligence impact could be measured by either how often (quantitative measure) or even how effective (qualitative measure) market intelligence was used there. At times it might even be possible to attach a clear success ratio (or failure for that matter) behind the intelligence impact, for example if an account or contract was won or lost through to the availability of intelligence.
Another example for measurement of intelligence impact could be to tie the intelligence utilization into other defined statistics such as reports on project data. If project steps are visualized by numbers to obtain knowledge of successfully concluded projects and utilization of intelligence was a firm element of the project work, this number could be easily communicated along with success rate value for those projects.
Full-blown statistics tools for intelligence portals could also be used for proper measurement. Simple counting of hits wouldn’t work wonders convincing management of the intelligence impact, but if it could be stated that for example 30% more sales managers used intelligence resources on an Intranet or internal intelligence portal in a given time frame and they stayed at the site 140% longer, went in 3 levels deeper and at the same time requested 120% more in-depth analysis that is generally used for advanced business transactions steps, that would be a business language easily understood.
