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A Complete Guide To Gathering B2B Competitive Intelligence
Get the complete guide to gathering B2B competitive intelligence and gain insights to drive informed business decisions.
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Picture this: your sales team is ready to close a deal with a promising prospect when they realize a competitor has recently swooped in and gained the business's trust. Ouch! This all-too-common scenario shows why B2B competitive intelligence is critical to sales intelligence tools. Competitive sales intelligence empowers sales teams to gather and analyze data on their rivals to uncover actionable insights that help them win deals and stay ahead of the pack. This blog will discuss how to gather competitive intelligence for B2B sales and leverage those insights to boost your revenue and win more deals.
One valuable sales intelligence tool that can help you achieve these goals is Aomni’s sales intelligence software. Our solution helps businesses gather and analyze crucial data on their competitors so they can uncover actionable insights to boost sales and revenue.
What Is B2B Competitive Intelligence?
B2B competitive intelligence (CI) is about gaining an edge in the marketplace by gathering and analyzing key information about your competitors and the broader industry. For CEOs and sales managers, it’s the secret weapon that helps you make smarter decisions that:
- Drive growth
- Enhance your strategies
- Win more business
At its core, CI research involves understanding your competitors':
- Products
- Services
- Market strategies
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
But it goes deeper; it's not just about what your competitors are doing today, but how they're positioning themselves for tomorrow. You collect data from various sources, including:
- Online research
- Customer conversations
- Even insights from ex-employees of competitor companies
Once you have this information, it's synthesized and analyzed to give your business a clear picture of where opportunities lie and where risks might be lurking.
Why Is Competitive Intelligence So Important?
Knowing your competition lets you better position your offerings. Even if you have the best product or service, understanding how your competitors stack up helps you find untapped opportunities to differentiate and stand out.
According to a report from SCIP, 92% of high-growth companies believe competitive intelligence is critical to their success, showing just how impactful it can be. For sales managers, CI allows you to tailor your approach with data-backed insights into what your competitors are offering.
For CEOs, it means more informed decision-making in areas like:
- Product development
- Marketing strategy
- Long-term planning
In a B2B environment, competitive intelligence doesn't just focus on the competition; it looks at:
- Market trends
- Customer behavior
- Shifts in the industry landscape
Ultimately, competitive intelligence ensures your business isn't just keeping up with the competition, it's staying ahead of the game.
Why Competitive Intelligence Is Necessary
Competitive intelligence (CI) is essential for staying ahead in today’s fast-paced business world. On the surface, it helps you close more deals and minimize losses to competitors, but its impact goes deeper. Two main types of CI, tactical and strategic, address short-term challenges and long-term planning.
Tactical Competitive Intelligence
Tactical CI focuses on immediate issues, offering quick, actionable insights to address problems like:
- Competitive pricing
Win More Competitive Deals
If your team has been losing deals to a specific rival, tactical CI will help identify their strengths and weaknesses. With this knowledge, your sales team can better position your product in direct comparison.
Pricing Adjustments
Tactical CI can alert you in real-time if a competitor launches a massive discount campaign. You can respond with a counteroffer or emphasize other advantages, like product quality.
Promotional Tactics
Tactical CI can alert you when a competitor rolls out a new feature. With this information, your team can develop counterarguments and tweak sales strategies accordingly.
Customer Churn
Surveys or interviews can reveal why customers choose competitors,
allowing you to address the problem, whether related to pricing, features, or service quality.
Strategic Competitive Intelligence
Strategic CI is focused on long-term business goals and planning. It gives you a broader view of market trends and competitor activities, helping shape future strategy.
- Market Entry: If you’re considering entering a new market, strategic CI can provide insights into local competition, customer behavior, and regulatory challenges, optimizing your market entry strategy.
- Product Development: In competitive industries like B2B tech, CI helps forecast the market’s future needs, guiding your R&D investments and ensuring you stay ahead in innovation.
- Mergers and Acquisitions: CI offers valuable insights before making big moves like acquiring a company. Understanding a potential partner’s long-term viability or market reputation can prevent costly mistakes.
- Long-term Investment: In industries like renewable energy, CI can forecast trends in consumer sentiment, technology advancements, and legislation, helping shape your long-term investment strategy.
Secondary Benefits
CI’s benefits go beyond just decision-making:
- It unites departments across your company regarding sales, marketing, R&D, customer success
- It boosts confidence when selling
- It ensures everyone is aligned with the competitive landscape
In short, competitive intelligence helps you find and prove your competitive advantage. It ensures your business makes informed decisions in the short term while staying competitive and prepared for the future.
Revolutionize B2B Sales with Aomni
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Our solution empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Our key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for streamlined sales processes
- AI-assisted Account Based Sales/Marketing campaign execution tool
AI-Powered Sales Enablement for Better Results
Aomni addresses critical pain points for sales managers whose Account Executives, Account Managers, and Customer Success Managers must perform better and include quotas. By leveraging our advanced AI technology, sales professionals can significantly enhance their preparation for customer conversations, leading to the following:
- Larger deal closures
- Increased promotion opportunities
For individual sales professionals, Aomni provides the tools and insights needed to:
- Elevate their performance
- Close more substantial deals
- Accelerate career progression
Our platform transforms how B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction fully prepared and strategically positioned for success.
Try our sales intelligence software for free today!
Related Reading
Sources of B2B Competitive Intelligence
A competitor’s website is the first source of information. As a business looking to gather CI, this is the first platform to go to for product information, press releases, and partnerships.
Get the Inside Scoop on Your Rivals’ Product Pages
Product pages showcase your competitor’s offerings, enabling you to use that information to analyze where your product stands in comparison and if you are competitive in the market.
Blog Content: A Treasure Trove of Competitive Intelligence
Depending on the nature of the business, a blog could include stories about the competitors:
- Achievements
- Products
- Solutions
- Research and more
Press Releases and Industry News: What Are Your Competitors Celebrating?
These provide valuable insight into your competitors:
- Achievements
- Challenges
- Failures
Understanding success stories and failures is crucial to steer clear of potential pitfalls.
Promotion Pages: Gain Insight Into Your Rivals’ Marketing Strategies
These pages can change often, and it is crucial to review them regularly to gain insights into the competitor’s promotion strategies that are effective and those that are not.
Executive Team Pages: Identify Key Players Behind Your Competitor’s Success
Executive team pages reveal the key figures behind your competitor’s success or failure. A business can gauge high-potential individuals by identifying individuals who drive growth or downfall.
Investor Relations Pages: Understand Your Competitor’s Financial Health
Through their annual performance reports, you can learn where your competitors are raising funds and how they perform. This can help you identify opportunities within your business that you may have missed until now.
Social Media Profile Pages: Get Real-Time Updates On Your Competitors
Depending on the type of business, a company can use multiple social media platforms. Competitors can monitor the customer comments, reviews, posts, and hashtags a business uses to engage with its target audience.
Wikipedia: Get the Complete History of Your Competitor
This is an open-source platform wherein you can find everything from the company’s history to its:
- Founders
- Vision
- Goals
- Achievements
- Litigations
How To Conduct Competitive Intelligence Research/ Competitor Analysis
Strategic Planning for Competitive Intelligence Research
Creating an outline for competitive intelligence research helps you stay organized and focused. You should identify your target audience for competitive intelligence in business and marketing. Next, determine your business goals and objectives. Ensure that the information you gather will align with the success and goals of the business.
Identify your competitors and where you will likely find the data you intend to acquire. Also, consider how you will gather this information.
Conducting Thorough Research on Competitors
Once you have a plan, you can begin upfront research to identify the primary digital competitors to your business. Remember, digital competitors may differ from your direct market competitors. Your direct competitors operate in your industry and offer similar products or services. Digital competitors, on the other hand, fight your brand for real estate and visibility online. You may also hear them referred to as search competitors, and it’s critical to identify them so you can learn how to outrank them in search results.
Optimize Your Competitive Intelligence Research
Identifying competitors is one thing, but finding the correct data to accurately compare you against the competition is even more critical. Filter out unimportant information and find the data that reveals insights about the competitors:
- Customer engagement
- Marketing strategy
- And more
Primary vs. Secondary Marketing Data: A Strategic Guide
Marketing data is classified as primary and secondary according to its relevance to your business. To navigate and gain a competitive advantage, you must make decisions informed by secondary data and targeted primary research. You must also compare this research data against your marketing goals and objectives.
You will learn more about optimizing your research by unifying primary and secondary research to support better business decisions and gain actionable insights.
Conduct an Analysis of Your Findings
Data analysis is the next important step in the competitive intelligence process. Derive information that can help:
- Better target
- Communicate
- Sell to the target audience
Competitive analytics helps organizations with the process of:
- Defining
- Gathering
- Cleaning
- Analyzing
- Interpreting
- Visualizing their competitors' data
To make the data easier to understand and act upon, create easy-to-navigate graphs, infographics, and reports so that information is easy to digest. This enables all stakeholders and decision-makers supporting the marketing team to be more actively involved and invested in strategic decisions.
Create a SWOT Analysis of Each Competitor
Based on the information gathered, determine where there are strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to winning digital real estate and gaining the attention of your target audience. A SWOT analysis of each competitor is critical to forming a digital marketing strategy that positions your brand to win on multiple fronts and channels.
Integrate Your Findings Into the Marketing Strategy
You are now better equipped to create goals and strategies for an achievable marketing plan based on the following:
- Research
- Refined information
- SWOT analysis
Significantly, you should periodically update your plans with more competitive research. Streamlining all the information gathered during your competitive intelligence gathering into your marketing roadmap is tremendously valuable.
The best B2B companies have a well-articulated competitive advantage or a unique selling proposition (USP). What makes your company stand out from the crowd can be identified, as can the need for it. A well-informed marketing plan can help you:
- Develop your market segmentation and customer personas
- Identify all possible opportunities
- Set priorities for your marketing campaigns and digital strategies.
Goals of B2B Competitor Analysis
Build a Short-Term Strategy With Competitor Analysis
One of the primary goals of competitor analysis is to develop a short-term strategy that delivers quick wins. By examining your competitors' tactics, from their blog content to how they structure their newsletters, you can gather valuable intelligence on areas where you can adjust your own efforts for fast results.
Short-term insights include:
- Keyword Gap Analysis: Discover which keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not. This can help you optimize your content and improve your search engine visibility.
- Content Focus: Analyzing your competitors' topics and keyword clusters can help you identify content gaps and refine your editorial calendar.
- Paid Search Tactics: Uncover your competitors' paid search strategies to fine-tune my own campaigns.
- Landing Page Performance: Analyze your competitors' top-performing landing pages to improve your site conversion rates.
- Traffic Seasonality: Understand traffic trends over time to plan promotions that align with peak traffic periods.
- Content Frequency: Track how often your competitors release new content to ensure your output keeps up. This kind of intelligence lets you compare your strengths and weaknesses with your competitors in real time, allowing you to make immediate, impactful changes.
Develop a Long-Term Business Strategy With Competitive Intelligence
Competitor analysis isn’t just about the here and now. One of the main goals is to inform long-term business strategy. It helps with predictive decision-making by giving you insights into:
- Market trends
- Competitor behavior
- How your business can stay ahead
Long-term insights include:
- Content Budget Allocation: By understanding how much my competitors spend on content, I can allocate my own budget more effectively.
- Paid Search Investment: Analyze how much competitors spend on paid search to inform my future investment.
- PR and Social Media Spend: Examine how competitors manage public relations and social media, including their crisis management strategies, so I can differentiate my brand.
- Marketing Team Structure: By understanding how competitors staff their marketing teams, I can ensure my team is structured for success. Strategically, this analysis helps predict how the market will evolve and how competitors will react to changes. Armed with these insights, my business can plan proactively rather than reactively.
Improve Market Position with B2B Competitive Intelligence
One of the ultimate goals of B2B competitor analysis is to improve my business’s market position. A strong market position makes it easier for my sales team to convince potential clients that my product or service is the best choice.
Simplifying Sales Through Effective Positioning
Harvard Business Review suggests that better positioning simplifies sales by making my offering more attractive than alternatives. One example is creating alternative pages on my website that compare my product directly with competitors (e.g., Your Product vs. Competitor X).
Leveraging Competitor Analysis for Effective Positioning
These pages help generate organic leads by guiding prospects to understand why my solution is superior. Competitor analysis helps uncover these positioning opportunities, allowing my marketing team to tailor the right messaging and content that highlights the unique advantages of my product or service.
5 Popular B2B Competitive Intelligence Research Methods
Michael Porter’s Five Forces framework is a foundational tool for competitive intelligence. It helps companies assess the competitive dynamics of their industry by focusing on five key forces:
- Competitive Rivalry: How many brands compete, and how capable can they of undercutting your business?
- Threat of New Entrants: Are there potential new players that could disrupt the market?
- Supplier Power: Do suppliers have strong bargaining power that could influence the cost of inputs?
- Threat of Substitutes: Is it manageable for customers to switch to alternatives, making your product replaceable?
- Buyer Power: Do a few customers hold significant power over pricing and demand?
Understanding these forces enables businesses to make strategic decisions, from pricing to market entry, and anticipate changes in the competitive landscape.
1. Analyzing Competitor Content: Tracking Gaps, Changes, and Updates
Monitoring your competitors’ content strategy is another essential method. You can identify potential shifts in their target audience or messaging by regularly tracking updates on their:
- Website
- Blog
- Marketing materials
For instance, if a competitor is suddenly focusing on new buyer personas, this could signal a shift in the market that your business should be aware of.
Key insights include:
- Identifying content gaps where your business can outperform competitors.
- Analyzing new audience targeting that might reveal overlooked customer segments.
This method helps you stay agile and respond to real-time competitive moves.
2. Predicting Future Behavior: Porter’s Four Corners
This competitor intelligence method involves analyzing your competitors' motivations and actions to predict how they’ll behave in the future.
Motivations
Two critical factors are your competitor’s “drivers” and “management assumptions.” These factors refer to your competitors’ goals, strategies, leadership background, corporate culture, or values. They power decision-making and the overall structure of the organization.
Actions
Here, the two main things to look at are the “strategies” and “capabilities” of your competitor. The strategy refers to aligning your competitors’ goals and actions within the industry. Capabilities refer to the:
- Strengths
- Resources
- Partnerships that improve the effectiveness of their strategy execution.
Identifying gaps in this area may provide possible areas for your companies to explore to gain a competitive advantage.
3. SWOT/TOWS Analysis: Identifying Strategic Opportunities
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is one of the most widely used frameworks for competitive intelligence. By comparing your business’s strengths and weaknesses to your competitors, you can uncover strategic opportunities and threats.
Strategic Decision-Making
Suppose you’re the market leader in a specific product category (strength) but see a potential weakness in distribution channels. In that case, a SWOT analysis can help you weigh the risks and decide whether to expand.
A Complementary Tool for Strategic Evaluation
SWOT also has a variant called TOWS, which emphasizes how external threats and opportunities influence internal strengths and weaknesses. Together, these tools offer a comprehensive view of your position compared to your rivals.
4. PEST Analysis: Understanding External Factors for Competitive Success
PEST analysis examines external factors that impact a company’s competitive advantage. It looks at:
- Political: Regulatory changes or political instability.
- Economic: Market conditions, inflation, and interest rates.
- Social: Consumer behavior, demographics, and cultural shifts.
- Technological: Innovations and technological advancements.
This method allows businesses to plan for external risks and opportunities. For instance, technological shifts could disrupt your industry, but by staying ahead of these trends, you can prepare for changes before your competitors.
5. Customer Reviews: Gleaning Insights from Unfiltered Feedback
Customer reviews on third-party sites offer an unfiltered view of what customers think of your competitors. These include:
- G2
- Capterra
- Trustpilot
This qualitative data reveals:
- What customers love about a competitor’s product.
- What frustrates them and leads to dissatisfaction.
By understanding your competitors' strengths and weaknesses from the customers' perspective, you can adjust your product offerings and marketing strategy to address pain points and attract more users.
7 B2B Competitive Intelligence Tools To Fast Track & Enhance Your Research
1. Aomni: The Future of Sales Intelligence Software
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Our solution empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness.
Key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for streamlined sales processes
- AI-assisted Account Based Sales/Marketing campaign execution tool
Aomni addresses critical pain points for sales managers whose account executives, account managers, and customer success managers must perform better and include quotas. By leveraging our advanced AI technology, sales professionals can significantly enhance their preparation for customer conversations, leading to larger deal closures and increased promotion opportunities.
For individual sales professionals, Aomni provides the tools and insights needed to elevate their:
- Performance
- Close more substantial deals
- Accelerate career progression
Our platform transforms how B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction fully prepared and strategically positioned for success.
Try our sales intelligence software for free today!
2. Buzzsumo: Get the Inside Scoop on Your Competitors’ Content Strategies
This competitive intelligence software provides brands with the necessary content marketing data and insights that help you gain a better understanding of how your competitors are leveraging high-performing content to grow their business.
Your Competitive Intelligence Tool
Buzzsumo also provides tools to monitor your competition and performance in real time. It helps you answer important questions about your competitor’s content strategy, including:
- What types of content work best for them
- What channels are the most effective, and who is engaging with their content
Leveraging Buzzsumo for Brand Monitoring and Collaboration Opportunities
With Buzzsumo, you can create alerts that track when your brand name or specific keywords related to your brand or industry are mentioned. It is also an efficient tool for monitoring influencers within your industry and identifying collaboration opportunities.
3. Kompyte: Automated Competitive Analysis
Kompyte is an AI-powered tool for automating competitor analysis and information gathering. The platform offers various features to help you track your competitor’s activities on their:
- Website
- Social media
- Search engines
Your Automated Competitor Tracking Solution
You also automate key aspects of competitor intelligence analysis, such as competitor reporting and research. Kompyte has a web-tracking tool that automatically tracks and captures changes made to competitor websites. This is a convenient way to monitor:
- New features
- Product updates
- Pricing changes
- Promotions
Kompyte also has search marketing and social monitoring features to optimize your campaigns. In addition to setting up instant alerts to track these changes, Kompyte provides an intuitive dashboard to:
- Bring all your data together
- Organize it effectively
- Analyze it for quick actionable insights
4. Semrush: A Suite of Tools for SEO and Competitor Research
Semrush is an SEO power suite for:
- Researching rivals
- Gathering keywords
- Running site audits
- Auditing content and rank tracking
Level Up Your SEO with Semrush
Should you get it right, you can also use Semrush to perform detailed keyword research and track your competitors’ keyword strategies. This tool has features to help supercharge your SEO efforts by auditing your pages, blog and docs center compared to your competitors. With Semrush, you can also monitor your competitors’ metrics for their websites and landing pages.
5. Talkwalker: Monitor Your Competitors’ Digital Activities
Like Google Alerts, Talkwalker helps you monitor and track your competitors' activities and compare what people say about your brand against theirs. This tool allows you to discover conversations about your brand and that of your competitors.
Talkwalker offers AI-powered trends detection and analysis, social listening, and social content rating features. As a social listening tool, Talkwalker can help you track your competitor’s activities and gather data across 10 social networks and up to 150 million websites.
Talkwalker allows you to monitor their:
- Keywords
- Mentions
- People they are addressing with those keywords
Talkwalker’s alert features can help you stay on top of your competitor’s digital activities. You can also set up alerts on trendy topics to stay updated with various customizable triggers.
6. Similarweb: Analyze Competitors’ Website Performance
Similarweb is a digital intelligence platform that:
- Provides a comprehensive view of competitors' online presence
- Analyzes website traffic, engagement metrics, and marketing channels
- Tracks competitors' keyword rankings and paid search campaigns
- Benchmarks your performance against industry peers
- Identifies emerging market trends and opportunities.
Similarweb stands out for its ability to paint a holistic picture of competitor's digital footprint and industry dynamics.
7. Crayon: Competitive Intelligence for B2B Sales and Marketing
Crayon is a comprehensive competitive intelligence platform designed specifically for B2B enterprises. It offers features like:
- Automated monitoring of competitors' websites, social media, and marketing campaigns
- Detailed analysis of competitors' product roadmaps, pricing, and sales strategies
- Customizable dashboards and reports to track key metrics.
- Integration with CRM and sales enablement tools
Crayon is praised for its ability to deliver real-time, actionable insights to sales and marketing teams
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3 Best Practices For B2B Competitive Intelligence Research
1. Expand Your Definition of Competitors
Your most significant competitor probably isn’t what you think. It’s easy to focus on other companies offering similar products or services. But disruption often comes from businesses outside your sector, bringing innovative approaches that redefine industries.
For instance, Amazon, initially an online bookstore, became a significant competitor of companies like Microsoft when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched, dominating the cloud market. This example highlights the importance of considering non-traditional competitors. The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework can be beneficial in identifying these threats early.
2. Put Your Research to Work
Research is only valuable if it’s effectively implemented. According to a report by Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), competitive intelligence professionals spend 76% of their time gathering and analyzing insights, but only 24% put them into action. This gap can reduce the impact of your hard work.
To maximize the ROI of your research, ensure that the results and recommendations are integrated into ongoing projects, whether it’s:
- Sales
- Marketing strategies
- Product development
3. Keep Your Research Fresh with Regular Updates
The competitive environment is constantly changing. Make it a point to update your research at set intervals. Instead of restarting from scratch, setting up a brand tracking program can help monitor competitor performance over time. This allows you to spot emerging threats or opportunities and adjust your strategy accordingly, ensuring your competitive intelligence remains relevant as market conditions change.
Related Reading
Try Our Sales Intelligence Software for Free Today
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Our solution empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness.
Aomni's Features and Benefits
Aomni offers many features that help sales teams improve performance and meet goals. Here are the main capabilities of Aomni and how they benefit sales teams
AI-Powered Prospect and Account Research
Aomni's AI capabilities quickly gather and analyze data on sales prospects and target accounts to uncover critical insights that improve outreach and ensure sales reps have the information they need to connect with buyers.
Comprehensive Account Mapping and Planning
Aomni helps sales teams plan their approach to target accounts with comprehensive account mapping features that facilitate the identification of key stakeholders, their roles, and relationships to uncover opportunities and inform strategic sales initiatives.
Data-Driven Sales Strategy Development
With Aomni, sales organizations can leverage AI to develop insights and actionable strategies for account-based sales that improve the chances of success.
Automated Call Preparation
Aomni streamlines preparing for sales calls and meetings with AI-enhanced automation, saving time and helping sales reps organize before important conversations.
Personalized AI Agents for Sales Optimization
Aomni creates customizable AI agents that learn individual sales team members' unique preferences and selling styles, helping optimize performance and improve sales outcomes.
AI Chat Interface for Streamlined Sales Processes
Aomni utilizes an intuitive chat interface to help sales reps quickly get the information they need to improve performance and close more deals.
An AI-Assisted Account Based Sales/Marketing Campaign Execution Tool
Aomni's capabilities include features that help sales and marketing teams execute ABM campaigns more efficiently. By leveraging AI, Aomni can uncover insights that improve target account profiles and help sales and marketing align their efforts for better results.
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