They are looking to leapfrog over your competitive advantages. What are you doing? You can gather competitive intelligence. This doesn’t have to be industrial espionage.

Companies must reset priorities to reflect new business demands and practices.

This means devoting time to gathering intelligence, listening to the conversations of the marketplace, and creating and maintaining strategic business relationships with vendors and suppliers.

Monitoring the changing landscape is a value-producing activity.

Think about competitors’ businesses from their points of view. The following conversation points serve as a place to start, for you and a team of good thinkers from your company:

• What’s their business idea?

• What does it say about them?

• What market/business assumptions are they making?

• How good are they at shifting gears and changing course?

• What are their brand promises?

• What do their customers say about doing business with them?

• What are the skills and weaknesses of their people?

• Where are they overextended in terms of capability, and what does it tell you about their tendencies and inclinations? (For example, do they have unused warehouse space, sitting idle and costing them money? You can anticipate they will develop strategies to fill this space, turning a cost into a benefit that may also give them a leg up on you in some way.)

• What does it tell you about their potential blind spots? (Use the same example of costly, unused warehouse space; if they aren’t turning it into an opportunity, you may be able to take advantage this blind spot in some way.)

• What is their assessment of you?

• What do they appear to misjudge about you and your capabilities?

• How well do they execute their game plan?

Once you’ve considered the competition, consider implications for your game plan and brand promise.

What opportunities are embedded in your assessments? Are there any unappreciated threats to you and your company?

In addition to considering your competition, you should monitor developments up and down the value chain for events that may have potential implications for you (use the discussion points above as a guide for assessing this information).

You can form formal or informal alliances with suppliers, using them as sources of intelligence as well as goods and services.

Companies need to educate their employees about their business strategies as well as their goals. They need to share the company’s view of the world and their business perspective with their employees as well.

To be as competitive as possible, companies need to improve the capabilities of their entire workforces to read signs and signals, pick up clues, and recognize how to gather information that relates to the company’s daily struggles in a competitive world.

Tomorrow’s companies cannot afford to waste the eyes and ears of so many of their workers.

31. Scoping Out The Competition

Tool Preview: Helps you and a group of good thinkers to drill down on what you know about competitors. Identify gaps in your knowledge; develop strategies based on a comprehensive consideration of their capabilities and weaknesses or blind spots. [Read Now]

32. Red Team – Blue Team Exercises

Tool Preview: Use the Red Team - Blue Team exercise as a technique for increasing the mental agility of your company. Lets you explore a number of options and initiatives, and helps the organization shift out of outmoded points of view. [Read Now]

Knowing How To Score Points:

Successful companies know how to score points with their execution. Execution is carried out in the pursuit of fulfilling the value proposition. Scoring means a successful interaction with customers in the marketplace.

In order to build on their current success, companies have to continue to get better at establishing an ongoing dialogue, with their markets in general and their customers in particular, that’s designed to create competitive advantage. There are two topics where you want to have great communication.

1. How are we doing at executing our game plan for you?

2. What is happening with your business idea, or your aspirations, which can hold implications for our partnership around the value proposition?

Conversations around these two topics are critical for keeping the customers you have and creating new, loyal ones.

The term 'conversation' is used here in the broadest sense of the word.

Yes it involves dialogue, but it also means reading the subtle cues and nuances of your interactions. It also requires the intention to share information.

You invite their input. You listen with openness and curiosity. You generate opportunities for information to be exchanged and you invite others to do the same with you.

How Are We Doing At Meeting Your Expectations?

Too often, customer conversations only occur at the level of the foot soldiers in the field. There is little conversation between people who can discuss the business perspectives of their respective organizations.

Too often, that kind of contact only comes when a customer is so irate that they’re calling headquarters to give someone a piece of their mind, seek relief in a crisis, or when a big sale is on the line.

This sort of limited contact isn’t sufficient to generate the intimacy required for lasting partnerships.

While it doesn’t imply a negative relationship, it does work against a deep, meaningful one.

Even today, many companies don’t ask their customers directly for feedback about how they’re doing.

Instead, the sales rep might be asked to explain a dip in sales, or a customer defection.

Often, the response is a defensive one in which the rep explains it away with one of a number of stock responses, without there ever being a serious effort to gain vital intelligence from whatever happened.

Indeed, the potential intelligence that is ignored might be worth more to your company than the lost sales dollars from that customer.

On the other hand, no one likes to hear only bad news. Ensure against that by opening sincere dialogues with customers.

Communicate that you are invested in their success, and that you want to become more valuable to them as time goes on, rather than just telling them you want to sell them more product/services over time.

(Follow this up by acting to support these claims; if you don’t mean it, don’t even think about saying it.)

Working with them communicates an interest in them; talking only about your sales volume communicates your interest in you. The information you gain from true dialogue will have a high intelligence value.

The Blair Candy Company Story: A successful company that took it upon themselves to look beyond business-as-usual as they moved into the 21st century. Even though we don’t have access to the discussions and planning sessions the company used to adapt its focus, we can see the outlines of their thinking and appreciate their end results by looking at their story. [Read Now]