Competitive intelligence in B2B research: why it matters and how to use it

Key takeaways: Competitive intelligence supports business strategy by providing an external perspective, anticipating market changes, and mitigating risk. Competitive intelligence research methods include primary research, secondary research, and digital tools. It’s crucial to consider key ethical considerations and be wary of using generative AI for B2B competitive intelligence.

What is competitive intelligence?

With the right insights, competitive intelligence influences business strategy by improving a company’s market positioning.

As you would expect, more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use competitive intelligence, according to Emerald Publishing. But interestingly, Emerald also argues that their approach is too narrow. Why?

They argue that many companies’ competitive intelligence strategy is limited to one aspect: competitor watching. Undeniably, it’s an essential part of competitive intelligence, but there’s much more to it than that.

There are many benefits to researching known competitors, including:

• Understanding which audience segments they are targeting
• Identifying their strengths and weaknesses
• Seeing what competitors say about themselves – and you
• Benchmarking your performance

Technically speaking, this is competitor intelligence. The broader term competitive intelligence encompasses several other aspects, too.

It includes individual competitor research and sector-specific trend analysis, as well as market sizing and assessment activities. Competitive intelligence is a crucial part of broader business intelligence – data collection, analysis, and interpretation to inform a company’s decision-making.

It supports business strategy by:

• Providing an external perspective. By understanding competitor strategies, market trends, and customer preferences, businesses can identify opportunities and threats.
• Helping businesses anticipate market changes for a competitive advantage. For example, if a rival business is reportedly launching a new product, the company can adjust its strategy accordingly to respond proactively.
• Identifying emerging trends – potentially leading to new product ideas, market opportunities, or cost-saving measures.
• Mitigating risk – identifying potential threats and challenges. For example, a company can avoid investing in a market that is saturated or dominated by a strong competitor.
• Supporting strategic decision-making. It informs business strategy around product development, market entry, pricing, and resource allocation based on competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Methodologies for competitive intelligence research

The methods you can use for different types of competitive intelligence market research include:

• Primary research
• Secondary research
• Digital tools

Taking each of these in turn…

#1 Primary research

Most projects require primary research – speaking to a target audience and asking nuanced questions to get answers for very specific research objectives. 

Researchers either use quantitative or qualitative research and sometimes, both are required for accurate, actionable results.

But when speaking about competitors in a B2B target market, there are limits on what information you can realistically expect to uncover.

Many prospects will be unwilling to reveal too much detail about what competitors do that isn’t already public knowledge, especially if they work with that competitor.

However, some of your competitors’ customers may be guarded but could still share useful information if you ask the questions delicately.

One way to do this is to conduct a win-loss analysis interview. Prospects are often more willing to help if you frame the questions as part of a wider discussion about their purchase decision, rather than just narrowly focusing on the competitor.

This is particularly useful for research into the buying process. But it’s often worth recruiting other audiences if you need primary research for competitive intelligence, such as:

• Competitors’ former employees e.g. salespeople
• Industry experts e.g., analysts, journalists, trade association members
• Customers who have left the product category
• Channel partners (who may have experience of you as well as competitors)

Your current customers may be open to sharing information about competitors, but are less likely to have as much intel.

Primary research including competitive intelligence is an important part of perception tracking, providing benchmarks for your brand on an ongoing basis.

#2 Secondary research

Secondary research is usually the way to go for publicly available competitive intelligence, particularly for market segmentation analysis.

It’s usually the most efficient method for collecting online information. It’s also cheaper than recruiting and incentivizing decision-makers (unless you pay for premium, gated reports).

There’s much more to secondary research than a few Google Searches or relying on generative AI such as Gemini or ChatGPT – more on this later.

In our experience, these are the ten most useful secondary research data sources to focus on for market intelligence:

1. Government data: e.g. Census.gov, Bureau of Labor Statistics
2. Government reports: e.g. FTC rulings
3. Company directories and databases: e.g. Zoominfo, Crunchbase, or D&B
4. Research reports: e.g. Statista or Marketresearch.com
5. Online communities: e.g. LinkedIn groups
6. Academia: e.g. Google Scholar
7. Company websites: In particular, annual reports on the Investor Relations pages of public companies
8. Trade associations
9. General, business, and trade press
10. Social and search tools

For international market research involving competitors based in different countries, it helps to have local language analysts available to analyze these sources.

#3 Digital tools

You can use competitive intelligence tools to collect information about rivals’ marketing activity in particular. In turn, insights from competitive intelligence tools can inform your own brand development:

• Search ad strategy: For example SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, et al let you see which keywords your competitors are targeting. You can benchmark your brand’s organic ranking against them and even estimate how much they are spending on paid search.
• Content marketing strategy: For starters, you can review competitors’ blog page and social media channel outputs, but tools like BuzzSumo let you go further. You can explore which content channels and topics perform best for competitors.
• Customer/prospect behavior: Similarweb provides data analytics around the traffic and behavior of website and app users. Such tools help you analyze how effective competitors’ marketing strategy is.

For more examples, there is a useful list of competitive intelligence tools, reviews, and ratings on G2.

Of course, many digital tools – for example, Evalueserve – make use of AI and machine learning to automate data processing for competitive analysis or do predictive modelling.

Impact of competitive intelligence on product development

So far we have covered some of the uses for a B2B competitive intelligence strategy on market segmentation, brand development, buying process, and perception tracking studies.

But one of the most important uses of strategic competitive intelligence is to inform your product development process – in particular, opportunity analysis.

Before investing significant resources into any new product development process, it’s important to understand the scale of the opportunity. To find and analyze opportunities thoroughly, there are several steps worth considering:

• Internal knowledge sharing across the business – gathering existing market and customer intelligence, summarizing it, and sharing key insights with stakeholders
• Carrying out secondary research to fill gaps in internal knowledge
• Speaking to customers and prospects to explore unmet needs and build hypotheses
• Gathering competitive intelligence research to reframe your competitor set, identify threats and – hopefully – find some white space in the market

The ‘Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework is a good guide for this stage. It focuses on the ‘job’ your customers and prospects need you to do, rather than on what specific product they might need.

Including competitive analysis at this stage ensures you don’t overlook any rival products already capitalizing on any market intelligence opportunities you identify.

Alternatively, you may find that rivals’ solutions are not meeting customers’ needs very well, giving you an opportunity to develop and provide a better solution for a competitive edge.

Best practices for competitive intelligence research in B2B

#1 Keep in mind key ethical considerations for B2B competitive intelligence

No competitive intelligence research in B2B should involve unethical practices, trying to get any confidential or insider information. That includes anything that could count as corporate espionage or spying. 

One of the most common tactical competitive intelligence techniques in B2C research is mystery shopping, but that’s often inappropriate in B2B. Products or services in B2B tend to be higher value and take providers much longer to sell.

Mystery shopping in B2B would often involve playing the role of an interested buyer during a long sales process, then declining to buy at the very end after seeing the full journey. We believe it’s unethical to waste the time of highly skilled B2B sales teams in this way.

#2 Plan ahead to overcome the challenge of information overload

There’s usually a lot of publicly available market intelligence out there, if you know where to look for it. But with so much information available, there’s a common trap to fall into.

It’s easy to start ‘data dumping’ information into documents and folders without a clear process or analysis structure in place. Ultimately, the information will be too long and confusing for anyone to analyze without spending significant time refining the data.

Competitive intelligence professionals need a clear fieldwork structure. It may seem counterintuitive for qualitative insights, but spreadsheets are one of the best ways to make the findings easy to scan and digest.

For example, you can put the competitors in rows and the criteria you’re researching in columns. Then, fill in the cells with a succinct summary of the information you find and include hyperlinks to the full source for wider reading.

It’s one of the most effective ways of conducting competitor research in B2B. You can expand on this too if you need – for example, use one spreadsheet per competitor or market.

Also be prepared to adjust and iterate your structure mid-fieldwork, in case you find some key criteria you’re missing, or some you’re focusing on too much that won’t provide any competitive advantage.

#3 Be wary of using generative AI for competitive intelligence

Lastly, while there are potential efficiency and time-saving benefits to using generative AI for secondary research, be aware of the pitfalls.

It’s very common for generative AI to hallucinate. AI hallucinations are misleading or outright incorrect results from large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. 

These are often difficult to detect without independent fact-checking. Often, the extensive fact-checking takes so long, it defeats the purpose of using the LLM in the first place.

Commercial decisions based on strategic competitive intelligence are too valuable to allow for such inaccurate data. However, there are some potential use cases for generative AI in competitive intelligence.

Generative AI tends to perform better when you provide the data source yourself, rather than asking it to find consistently correct answers online. For example, you could use an LLM to summarize the results of competitor research your analysts have already captured.

With the right prompt engineering, this could save a lot of time – particularly if your granular, tactical competitive intelligence is hundreds of pages long.