Confessions of a Corporate Spy
Right; Now, Pay Attention, 007
I don't own a spy camera. Yet.
Competitive-intelligence tools are usually a bit more mundane. Access to Dun & Bradstreet reports, court records, and incorporation records serves as a starter. Most of the background secondary research can be conducted with nothing more than an Internet connection and solid research skills.
Unless the target business is small and keeps a low profile. Businesses without a long track record, significant revenue, or many employees will be relatively opaque, even with the most expensive research tools.
A host of crowdsourcing tools has emerged to fill the gap, with wide variations in reliability. Glassdoor, for example, tends to overrepresent disgruntled employees in its commentary. Yelp can give a very broad sense of a company's strengths and weaknesses, but I find it's rare to see entries that aren't either obvious fluffery written by the company's employees and their friends or hit pieces of dubious credibility likely written by competitors. Yelp began filtering its reviews a few years ago, and I find its reasons for hiding reviews to be opaque enough to raise questions about how much influence a business has on what is to be seen.
Sites such as RipoffReport.com and PissedConsumer.com generally refuse to take down a negative posting. Still, the postings on complaint boards themselves are of questionable intelligence value because of the obvious biases. I get more out of making direct contact with people who have posted negative reviews.
I am fond of pulling phone numbers and email addresses from Jigsaw. Jigsaw--recently purchased by Salesforce--allows its members to trade contact information for corporate contacts. Give Jigsaw some business card data, and you will be able to get some for a different contact in return. The more people who use contact data you have entered, the more site credit you receive to access more contacts. It's primarily a sales tool, of course, with sales reps looking for more purchasing managers, but the intelligence value is obvious.
I'm waiting to see what happens with a start-up called InfoArmy, which is attempting to build a team of contributors to write competitive-intelligence reports on small and medium-size businesses. The contributors are paid a little bit to create a report, then get a piece of the revenue any time InfoArmy sells a download of it. So will these folks, whoever they might be, write high-quality reports--or will they write lots of reports? If it's the latter, I don't intend to pay $99 per report, which is the going price.
At any rate, I'm cheap. I always start with Facebook.
In one case, a relatively small information-security-auditing firm with a particularly Web-savvy sales manager asked me to identify as many of a competitor's customers as I could. He had an inkling that the competitor might be screwing up audits under a new standard. Happily enough, I discovered that the target company had liked a bunch of otherwise unrelated companies on its Facebook page. This simplified the research down to calling a representative sample of the companies linked through the Facebook fan page to confirm my hypothesis--that the social-media manager had friended all the company's clients--and weaseling more data from each.
