Competitive Intelligence Software
Competitive Intelligence Software
The internet is a great resource for gathering and analyzing competitive intelligence, and there’s also a great range of competitive intelligence software. Online mapping tools mean that you don’t even have to visit your competitors websites to get the lowdown on what’s going on.
The phenomenal internet explosion over the last few years really has opened up the market for competitive intelligence. It’s easy to visit the website of your nearest competitor anonymously, for a start, and see just what goodies they have to offer. A much better option than visiting their store in disguise and writing down the prices! You can learn lots more than that too, especially if they have a stats counter in plain view. But hey, that’s all kids stuff, these days the sophisicated competitive intelligence software can let you know exactly what’s going on in your competitors business, legally (industrial espionage is still a crime you know – this is something different).
Competitive Intelligence Software
Let’s take a look at some types of competitive intelligence software available today. The internet is literally full of information which can help you to ward off competitive threats, but it can be so time consuming and let’s face it, we’re all busy people, so that the quicker and easier that this task can be done, however important it is, the better. What we really need is info at our fingertips! That’s alright then.
Competitive intelligence data collection can draw on literally thousands of qualified sources, and can often be customized to extract only the specific information you need to know. Advanced algorithms can be utilized such as language detection, clustering and event analysis. By drawing information from so many sources (much more than would be possible to work by human) the scope of information really is much greater. Much of this software is easy to use and very often you can even get a free trial, if you play your cards right.
Collaborating the information collected by competitive intelligence can be a mammoth task. Some competitive intelligence departments spend weeks just sifting out the important stuff from the rest, and by the time the information is considered to be in a useful state, it’s often out of date! Competitive intelligence software which offers an information management module allows the organization of data many times faster, so that you know that the information you’re basing your decisions on is right up to date.
The analysis of the data is the next important stage. Why not use competitive intelligence software which utilizes real time graphs, then you can have all of the facts and figures right there in front of your eyes, as they are happening. Visual charts can quickly help you to identify trends, which competitors have gained an advantage and which ones haven’t. If you use the software with all of the latest techniques it can visualize and map over thousands of items and put the whole thing quickly into context, identifying the next hot topic and emerging trends.