Policies and Standards for Market & Competitive Intelleligence
There is a fundamental difference in behavior of marketing managers and sales staff. Marketers are commonly used to be guided by programs, projects and processes that support their planning and strategic tasks. Sales staffers on the other hand, and rightfully so, tend to avoid tight structures and guidelines in order to remain flexible and creative in service of their customers.
Still, professional and successful intelligence programs and systems owe their success to simple but strict rules and policies plus easy to follow guidelines to enforce them. Starting with evaluating the identified intelligence user’s intelligence requirements there needs to be order to approach marketers and sales staff without major interruption of their routines.
Interacting, interfacing and exchanging with intelligence users can only be smooth and successful if there are simple processes and responsibilities for the various tasks like acquiring market studies and industry reports, managing and cascading trade journal subscriptions or feeding intelligence into market intelligence depositories or data bases.
Legal, ethical and economic concerns are additional measures that need to be ensured by firm standards such as compliance to license agreements, disclosure policies and intelligence acquisition policies.
Non-compliance can result in significant fines and law suits that might damage the company’s reputation and have massive impact on the bottom line results.
Counter intelligence is another area that needs to be ensured through clear policies. Avoiding internal knowledge and expertise to be used as competitive intelligence by others can protect and save the organizations assets in pretty significant dimensions as all.
In summary: any market and competitive intelligence effort that is not following firm and easy to follow guidelines and policies is doomed to fail.
