Confessions of a Corporate Spy
Playing Offense
Competitive intelligence works best as part of a broader marketing and operations strategy, with a team probing for specific weaknesses to match against its company's core competitive advantages. The trick to finding good answers is asking clever questions.
Build a competitive landscape.
Basics first. Create a list of all the companies that provide a product or service that can get between you and your customers. The best way to start may be to simply ask your customers from whom else they have considered purchasing. Be up front--tell them you're trying to improve your services.
The tough part here is identifying indirect competitive threats, the sort of products and services that lie outside of the marketing-defined idea of competing products. (The classic example from business school: Coke competes with Pepsi. It also competes with water.) Examine the capabilities of potential competitors as much as the actual products in play.
Know thyself.
You want to target your intelligence gathering to expose competitors' weaknesses against your strengths. But what is your company supposed to be good at? Do you know your core competitive advantage? What's your strategy? The questions you will want to answer stem directly from the strategy you are pursuing and the strategies competitors are pursuing.
Exploit the lousy job market.
A job posting will result in a flood of resumés. Take note of how many of the resumés you receive come from current or former employees of your competitors. The hiring process can be an opportunity to conduct some competitive research. This is an ugly and callous sentiment, but it's up to the job candidate to protect most kinds of competitive information. However, do not mess with a nondisclosure agreement. Google "tortious interference."
While you're at it, Google "industrial espionage." Don't do that.
Quietly "friend" your enemies.
I find some value in watching the comings and goings of a company's personnel through LinkedIn. It's imperfect intelligence, of course--not everyone is on LinkedIn. People usually take their time updating LinkedIn when they get canned, but when they quit--especially when they quit for a new job--they want people to know right now.
Don't just eat your own dog food. Eat cat food and bird food and chicken feed.
The best kind of competitive product intelligence comes from intimate familiarity with your competitors' products and services. If you own a salon, get a haircut from someone else. If you run a restaurant, order from neighboring places. Don't rely on secondhand impressions if firsthand information isn't hard to get.
Playing Defense
The good news is that small and medium-size businesses rarely serve as competitive-intelligence targets of serious professionals. So you probably won't be defending yourself against people like me, but rather people like you--amateurs who just want to see what some probing will get them. The bad news is that this probing, if well directed, works. Here's how to guard against it.
Work on your corporate culture.
Competitive-intelligence defense starts with the relationship between your company and its employees. Human factors are always the weakest link in a security system--and that's not true only of computer security. People who feel mistreated by their employer tend to be more willing to discuss that employer's shortcomings, both on the phone and online. Nondisclosure agreements can help--I recommend boilerplate NDA language in every employment contract--but they're difficult to enforce on the rank-and-file employee or former employee. And there's this little irony: A corporate culture designed to promote openness of communication may create resistance to practices that improve information security.
Beware the invisible phone number and the un-Google-able identity.
When I'm cold calling a company's executives, I'll generally use the *67 function on my phone, which blocks caller ID. Although I will always identify myself by name and company to the folks I'm talking to, I generally ID myself as a business researcher--which is true--and try to move on deftly to another phase of conversation. Though I have a corporate e-mail address, I also use a Gmail address and other personal e-mail that is substantially less Google-able.
Clean up your own house.
Please tell me your own website is not a source of competitive-intelligence leaks. Look deep into your site. Clean it up. Then consider having your Webmaster add a file called robots.txt at the top level of your domain, so that Archive.org will wipe out the archived version of the site.
A word about LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
You may want to ask your current employees to keep confidential data out of their profiles. I find financial and operational detail in people's LinkedIn profiles--and in resumés on Monster or other job boards--that should make anyone playing intelligence defense a little uncomfortable.
