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The
Marketplace MasterTM
is a monthly email publication on professional service
marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.
Blogging
Big Time
I jumped into the blogosphere last month with the launch
of my new blog, Expertise
Marketplace. It’s a way to share more of my
own intellectual capital and perspectives about professional
services marketing – and encourage your participation
and feedback.
Since
the blog went “live,” we’ve already
had some thoughtful replies to my observations, including
some remarks from David
Maister. I hope you will join in the discussions
and suggest new topics.
In
last month’s article Competitive
Intelligence at Professional Firms: The Blind Leading
the Blind?, I discussed some of the challenges firms
face as they attempt to embark on competitive intelligence
initiatives, and the reasons why competitive intelligence
is still so underutilized.
Despite
this, though, more and more firms are expressing an
interest in it. Why is this?
Suzanne
Lowe
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service
Firms Compete to Win
President, Expertise Marketing, LLC
What's Fueling the Competitive Intelligence Fire?
When
I surveyed professional service firms for my book Marketplace
Masters, 39% told me that they planned to increase
their investments in competitive intelligence. Let’s
take a look at what is driving professional firms to
pursue competitive intelligence:
Becoming
Accountable
Regardless
of whether a firm is public or private, or sells products
or services, accountability is expected more these days.
In professional service firms, managing partners, executive
committees and CEOs know that they are being held accountable
for their decisions. They know they need more and better
business information to fully understand their industry,
customers, competitors, and even their own businesses.
With the increased scrutiny and raised expectations
that surround them, professional firm leaders are increasingly
unwilling to “shoot from the hip” on important
business decisions like they did in the past. Competitive
intelligence data helps them obtain critical facts upon
which to make astute decisions.
Gaining
Control
A
firm either works to manage its marketplace (e.g., marketplace
mastery!TM) or
is controlled by it (e.g., caught unprepared by a recession).
Because no firm really wants to be at the mercy of its
marketplace, learning how to navigate its ups and downs
is crucial. A steady stream of valid intelligence analysis
helps give firms the power to take advantage of the
marketplace, not be victimized by it. And, in turn,
it gives them more confidence in their accountability.
New
Ways to Support the Will
Each
year we see new and improved knowledge management systems
and relationship intelligence systems that make competitive
intelligence efforts that much more accessible and meaningful.
Where cost, complexity, or inadequacy may have been
barriers to using these tools in the past, they are
getting better and easier to use, putting competitive
intelligence initiatives within reach of a wider range
of firms. What’s more, the arena of “knowledge
management” (with systems devoted to cataloguing
massive amounts of past knowledge) is undergoing a welcome
evolution: technology-enabled, real-time, flexible and
dynamic exchanges of “intelligence.”
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"Competitive intelligence helps firms anticipate
where even the most unexpected rivals might show
up next." |
Chameleon
Competitors
Competitors
don’t look like what they used to look like. Not
only are they not what they used to be, but they’re
coming from previously unknown places. It used to be
that accounting firms competed with other accounting
firms, law firms competed with other law firms, and
so on. But now, for instance, a law firm has to worry
about the bulked-up legal and litigation departments
in accounting firms or the merger and acquisition practices
of strategy consulting firms. Architecture firms used
to own the market for building design, but now construction
management firms have dramatically altered the design
picture, offering clients a complete design-to-build
package. Competitive intelligence helps firms understand
who their competitors are and where they are, why they’ve
cropped up where they have, and begin to anticipate
where they might show up next.
Nowhere
to Go But Up – But Watch Where You’re Going!
Because
many professional service firms haven’t yet fully
embraced competitive intelligence, even baby steps are
progress for them. Achieving an exponential increase
in their competitive intelligence efforts doesn’t
require a huge investment. With little to lose, and
much to gain, it’s no surprise that more firms
are considering competitive intelligence to be a worthy
effort.
So
now you’ve embraced the competitive intelligence
gospel. You’re ready to charge forward (of course,
with fire in your eyes!) on an incredibly powerful competitive
intelligence assignment. But whoa, there, partner! Sure,
competitive intelligence sounds exciting, and certainly
could offer a hefty strategic punch. Before you take
the plunge, ask yourself a few important questions:
- Will this competitive intelligence endeavor go beyond
simply answering a few interesting questions? Instead,
will you be able to make key decisions to move forward
in your marketplace? Who cares if you can list your
seventeen toughest competitors, if you are unprepared
to make an appropriate adjustment to address their
moves? Too many competitive intelligence projects
– especially if a firm is new at this game –
end up being nothing more than intellectual compilations
of data that won’t support a critical decision.
- Okay, you’ve agreed you will undertake a competitive
intelligence project. Have you REALLY thought about
how to best deploy it? With the increasing enthusiasm
for competitive intelligence, too many firms plunge
ahead -- in a narrowly-focused, siloed way -- without
being mindful of the deeper applicability of the endeavor.
It makes sense to ask questions: “besides our
practice area, who else can use the data we gather,
and analysis we develop? Who else should be included
in the initiative we’re planning?” This
is the time to ensure that your efforts will be relevant!
- It’s tempting to feel smug that you’ve
decided to undertake competitive intelligence at all.
But are you really committed to it? Is it a one shot
deal? Think about the implications of this step –and
be intentional about it. If you undertake competitive
intelligence as a pilot, make sure you communicated
it as such. Once the initiative is completed, go back
and review, and make a deliberate decision to repeat
it, make changes to it, or not to do it again.
Your
feedback is important to us. Please contact
us with your comments and questions.
©
2006 Expertise
Marketing, LLC All Rights Reserved |
