Confessions of a Corporate Spy
Google Stalking the World
Competitive-intelligence projects usually have three phases. First, figure out what you want to know. Then, conduct secondary intelligence--also called open-source intelligence--by vacuuming up everything you can find in the public record about your targets in online business reports, court records, old advertisements, job postings, keyword analytics, blog entries, and elsewhere. Finish with primary intelligence, which means talking to actual people. Often the goal of secondary research is nothing more than finding the person with the right job title or the right social connection to talk to, and finding enough information about the key intelligence topic to have a clever conversation.
I'll be honest--a lot of this stuff can be done by anyone with a passing familiarity with the Internet, a talent for conversation, and an inquisitive mind. There are two advantages to using someone from outside, though. I can keep the identity of my client confidential. My clients really can't without lying about their identity. And I'm generally faster than an amateur, because it takes experience to know where to look and how to elicit information from sources who might otherwise be unwilling to talk.
Most competitive-intelligence professionals focus on a single industry, and I've done a lot of work in financial services intelligence. But I'm hesitant to specialize in a sector. I'd rather develop expertise in hard-to-get elicitation. It's a difficult skill to duplicate and impossible to offshore.
Speed matters, because sometimes competitive intelligence is a race. In one unusual case, a small, boutique marketing firm focused on pharmaceuticals had discovered a potential partnership opportunity for a pharmaceutical distribution deal, but it appeared to hinge on being the first to communicate with the holder of a patent in Asia. The firm asked me to find the U.S. contact as quickly as possible--like, immediately. Judicious use of Google Translate and rudimentary understanding of international patent filings led to a name, which led to a phone number for a lawyer in New Hampshire a few minutes later.
Most jobs aren't finished quite this fast. I usually spend some time talking through a company's broad strategy to identify the kind of information that would best serve its needs, then build a list of key intelligence topics and questions to address. From there, we work through the list as budget and urgency allow. Typically, a client will commission a competitive-intelligence report looking for answers to broad problems. For example, a soft-drink start-up found capital to expand but didn't fully understand the market in New York City and Philadelphia. It hired me as a subcontractor through an agency to call around to Whole Foods stores and corner bodegas, eliciting information about how various obscure new brands of soda were selling and at what price, to provide a baseline for comparison.
I've found a big difference in attitude toward these questions when I'm asking a sales clerk about individual brands. Ask about the store's overall sales, and the reaction is incredulous and hostile. Ask how many cases of that overpriced kombucha they sell in a week, and the reaction is effusive. Managers care about protecting their own information. The information of their partners? Not so much.
Marketers use the information to make go/no-go decisions when expanding. Would it be worth it to try for New York first? How much could we sell this for in Brooklyn? How many units could we sell? In how many stores? If you have only enough capital to experiment in a couple of places at once, the value of the data resolves into real focus. Once a start-up sodamaker knows how much product a comparable competitor moves in a week, it's managerial math to compare costs between cities and pick one.
