Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the field dedicated to capturing, analyzing, and driving action related to a company’s competitive landscape. Competitive Intelligence data includes anything and everything about a company’s competitors – their businesses, their movements, and their strategies. This field can go by many names, from competitive intelligence to market research to business strategy. At the end of the day, when we discuss competitive intelligence, we are referring to leveraging information from a business’s market and competitors to help a business gain a competitive advantage.
Crayon launched The State of Competitive Intelligence Report with the goal of surfacing the best practices, the challenges, and the trends in the competitive intelligence field for all of the businesses trying to tackle this today. This second annual report, the largest study on the field of competitive intelligence, brings together responses from more than 1,000 competitive intelligence professionals. They shared their goals, their processes, and their challenges related to helping their organizations gain and keep a competitive advantage. By sharing their responses, we hope new and experienced competitive intelligence peers alike can grow in their roles and better enable their teams to succeed.
Key findings from the 2019 report include:
- 80% of businesses have at least a part-time employee working on CI, up from 76% last year.
- 40% plan to increase their CI spending next year.
- 87% said that their market has become more competitive in the last three years and 49% said that it has been much more competitive.
- 79% share intel by email and 62% share intel live, in meetings.
- 91% report they have seen quantitative benefits, and 95% say they’ve seen qualitiative benefits.
- Those who share intel daily are 84% more likely to see a revenue increase than those who share intel on an ad-hoc basis.
The State of Competitive Intelligence 2019 focuses on trends in CI investment, goals and metrics, the CI process itself, and results experienced as a result of CI practices.
