Hi, welcome back.
In the last video,
we discussed a way to reduce the amount of information necessary to
perform the analysis to help you and your sales force.
However, even after you made sure that
you will only try to locate the information relevant to sales,
the volume of information will still be very large.
You will also need to make sure that you collect the information in
the order that will give you the most effective use of your time and resources.
Over the years, I have learned some basic principles of information gathering.
First, it is easier to gather information when you know precisely what you want.
Second, organizations have far more information than you might think.
Third, most of the information the company needs is already available internally.
Fourth, most information is fragmented, disorganized,
and formatted in the way to serve the needs
of the withholder of the information, not yours.
Fifth, most people are happy to help if they
think the information will be used and it's going to be used for a good cause.
Sixth, people will volunteer information mostly if they like you.
Seventh, the best way to gain
the trust and the goodwill of others is when you don't need it.
Another one, is people like to know what has been done with the information they shared.
People want to feel important.
People prefer to speak in their own language.
For example, a TI person feels more
comfortable when speaking the TI language, lingo, and expression.
Based on this knowledge,
we proposed that the information gathered to look for the information in
stages: from the easiest information to the most difficult ones,
to the least to the most expensive,
from the safest information and move towards the riskiest ones.
The people working in your company are probably your greatest asset.
Your colleagues including people with a lot of
external contacts as well as former employees from various companies,
some of them from your own industry.
As a group, they have far more access to people than you can possibly dream.
And it is your job to harness the power of their networks in order to help
the company to have the necessary information to perform a good analysis.
A very frequent problem I've often find in many companies is
the wrong assumption that
competitive intelligence is the only group responsible for gathering information.
It doesn't make any sense. Think for a moment.
The most important information any company has is the one already contained internally.
This information has been accumulated in years of contact with the external environment.
Another much valid source of information is the external sources,
contacts, the firm's employees have with external organizations.
The people who have the established relationship come from sales,
procurement, customer support, and other areas whose job demanded.
The people from competitive intelligence do not to know
the representative from other companies as well.
Therefore, it will not make sense to expect
competitive intelligence to contact the external world in this matter.
In this sense, the sales function is
far better positioned to learn about the market and its players.
In this video, we talked about
the basic principles of finding information you want and need.
In the next ones,
we will examine the whole intelligence cycle,
one of the most competitive intelligence tools to help
you improving your sales decisions.
We will see you in the next video. Thank you for watching.