Making Competitive Intelligence Actionable with Competitor Profiles and Battlecards

If Competitive Intelligence is about properly understanding the external environment in order to make better decisions that will help companies compete and grow, then intelligence should be as actionable as possible. There's no better way to achieve this than to work with competitor profiles and battlecards.

M-Brain has interviewed several customers to understand how they currently work with competitor profiles, assessing what works and what could be done better. The easy conclusion is that all interviewed companies consider this a priority, regardless of how they use them.

Understand, Compete and Grow

M-Brain has identified three common threads regarding how most companies view competitor profiles:

1. As a way that all stakeholders in the organization are informed of the competitive environment – UNDERSTAND
2. That the most critical user groups for competitor profiles are sales, marketing, and strategy teams – COMPETE
3. The emerging importance of benchmarking capabilities to turn profiles into battlecards and win business – GROW

One company, in the technology space, makes sure that their customer facing teams are exposed to a central landing place with insights on their top competitors so that they can think critically regarding the alternatives out there that threaten to replace their current solutions.

Another company, in the automotive space, makes sure that they have battlecards that are focused beyond static intelligence on competitor capabilities, but that are also capturing daily developments and news via dashboards, feeds and embeddables.

A third company, in the healthcare space, makes sure that they are customizing their competitor profiles and battlecards to stakeholders in different regions and also making full use of field intelligence so that they can share their own knowledge within the organization real time.

In order to make the best of the benchmarking functionalities, companies should also create/include profiles of their own organization.  It is important to create these profiles in a uniform fashion so that when the benchmarking function is enabled it compares apples to apples.  Battlecards work best when comparing apples to apples, increasing objectivity, and decreasing subjectivity.

Intelligence Plaza helps create useful feedback loops for market and competitive intelligence

The perfect scenario from a sales perspective is for users to leverage the battlecards from their mobile devices prior to stepping into a customer meeting (hey, why not even during the meeting?) so that they can capitalize on their strengths and understand how they differentiate from competition at the negotiation table. Still within this perfect scenario, users will share their learnings back to their organization by utilizing a Field Intelligence functionality. This function would feed directly into the competitor profile module, circling back to the product development, marketing, and strategy teams, who can leverage this intelligence to improve their products and messaging.

Does this scenario also seem perfect to you? Well, it is perfectly tangible with M-Brain’s Intelligence Plaza 10*. In fact, a particular customer in the financial services sector closed a deal on the spot by providing factual comparative information on their organization vs. competition directly off the device, thanks to the benchmarking function that is available in Intelligence Plaza’s competitor profile module.

It is worth noting that although battle cards are hot for most sales functions, we often see that strategy functions are content with in-depth profiles containing insight on topics related to strategy, performance, trends, etc.

Understand M-Brain’s Competitor Profile Module within the Intelligence Plaza 10:

• Prepare your sales and strategy teams with powerful profiles of your competitors​
• All dashboard features available, like embedding external content and showing latest Plaza items​
• Key figures section enables visualization of financial figures, market trends or any numerical data​
• Benchmarking feature will enable end users to easily benchmark the companies or products​
• Leverage the profile module to also create customer, product, market or country profiles​
• Leverage M-Brain’s AI generated abstracts to feed into the profile module daily from sources translated and summarized from + 100 languages worldwide

Image: UX Indonesia

Keep your battlecards updated with automation for effortless benchmarking

Some other helpful tips from the M-Brain team:

• Keep the competitive set of battlecards up to date.  Make sure that new competitor profiles are added to the Intelligence Plaza*on a regular basis.
• Field Intelligence (along with continuous market monitoring) are excellent sources of intel to trigger insights on emerging competitors
• Consider adding battlecards that focus on new competitors to keep the competitive profiles relevant and up to date
• Create all profiles with uniformity so that the battlecards are relevant and impactful
• Use automation to help keep these profiles updated.  Use embeddables such as competitive event calendars, PowerBI / Tableau, stock tickers, automated news feeds with AI generated abstracts with global coverage and capabilities to interpret multiple languages
• Use the profile module beyond competitor profiles.  Create Product profiles, supplier profiles, and customer profiles.  Benchmark them all

*Intelligence Plaza 10 is M-Brain’s world class intelligence platform. Intelligence Plaza has been helping customers for more than 20 years and its latest version, Plaza 10 was relaunched in 2021 with unparalleled features, benefits, and scheduled updates/upgrades.

Read more about Plaza and order a demo for your organization!