Using sources of competitive intelligence in B2B to inform your business strategy

Key takeaways: Publicly available secondary research can be a cost-effective and ethical way to access competitive intelligence. Online sources of competitive intelligence include company websites, social media monitoring tools, and independent reports. Other sources include your internal data and insights from primary research projects.

Competitive intelligence is important information for all businesses to have and thankfully, a lot of useful data insights are publicly and freely accessible.

The vast majority of high-growth companies – 92% – see it as important to their overall success, according to the SCIP report State of Competitive Intelligence.

If you don’t understand the similarities and differences in your competitors’ offerings, it’s very difficult to find white space to capitalize on and find growth opportunities. Even if your current product or service is outstanding.

There are both online and offline sources of competitive intelligence that could help. Secondary research – also called desk research – can be a cost-effective, easy, quick, and completely ethical way to access competitive intelligence.

Competitive intelligence in B2B should not involve any unethical practices that could count as corporate espionage. Note that while ‘mystery shopping’ is a common research project in B2C, it is inappropriate in B2B, as we’ll explore in more detail later.

Information gathered through secondary research often helps with the primary research design – for example, to draw up a list of competitors to include in an online survey. However, desk research can also help with some core marketing and sales objectives.

Competitive intelligence in B2B involves analyzing not only your rivals’ performance but the market environment in general. It can involve individual competitor research as well as much broader activities around market sizing and market assessment.

In this guide, we will cover some of the main sources of competitive intelligence you can use, the benefits of which can include:

• Finding new, disruptive challengers
• Evaluating competitor strengths and weaknesses
• Understanding which segments they target
• Benchmarking your performance
• Finding a competitive edge
• Informing your go-to-market strategy
• Identifying threats to your business

Competitor websites

For one of the most useful sources of competitive intelligence, just visit the company websites. Companies share a lot of competitive intelligence about themselves on their site because some of this information helps them sell products and services to customers. 

Details such as product specs, pricing strategy, senior figures in the company, messaging or positioning examples and much more will be on their website, for example.

Review competitors’ websites, marketing collateral, press releases, and investor relations reports to gather intelligence on their strategic plans, revenues, marketing activity, pricing, and product specs. Publicly listed companies share a lot more information about themselves on their website via their investor relations page.

Analyzing competitors’ product information can help you anticipate market changes for a competitive advantage. You may also get some intel by using real-time competitive intelligence tools on their website.

After browsing through the website in general for valuable insights, specific things to look out for include:

• Press releases: Set up alerts for competitors’ press releases – and read through any recent ones you may have missed. These can contain details of product announcements, service information, strategic initiatives, marketing and positioning, financial performance, industry trends, customer or partner relationships, and corporate social responsibility strategy, for publicity purposes.
• Investor relations documents: Investor relations documents often include details around market structure, primary/secondary sources of sales, company strategy, and risks. These documents can also contain information about how the company measures its performance and how well it’s doing against these metrics, to satisfy shareholders.
• Competitor website performance: Consider using real-time competitive intelligence sources and tools. For example, start-ups can analyze competitor websites’ performance metrics around user engagement, as well as on-page and off-page SEO, to improve their own user experience, content, or conversion strategy.

Online search and social media monitoring

There are a range of tools – many with free plans – for competitor research around advertising and social media analysis.

These tools quickly aggregate publicly available data to help inform your marketing strategy while also taking into account competitors’ performance.

For example:

• Keyword research: Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush provide insights into customer search behavior, informing content marketing strategies by revealing popular search terms, emerging trends, and competitor keyword strategies.
• Social influence: Kred and PeerIndex identify key industry influencers, helping you to build targeted outreach lists, understand influencer preferences and attitudes, and tailor marketing approaches to specific decision-makers.
• Social listening: Platforms such as Hootsuite and BrandMentions support marketers with monitoring industry conversations, analyzing trending topics, and understanding audience language or sentiment.

LinkedIn is the most B2B of the social networks. In some industries, it’s possible to find online communities (e.g. LinkedIn groups where decision-makers at competitors express their views or share useful insights.

You may also get some interesting competitor intel by seeing who these decision-makers are following from their LinkedIn accounts. For more detail, find out how to best use social media when conducting B2B market research.

Independent reports

There are many market research companies that focus on a different type of research to Adience. Rather than tailoring bespoke research to different clients’ needs one at a time, they publish reports about industries and issues in general without a client asking, estimating that the need is there.

These reports typically include data around:

• Competitive landscape
• Their market share
• Key trends and challenges
• Industry structure and size
• Performance so far
• Forecasts for the future

Prominent providers of such reports include IBISWorld, First Research, Business Monitor Online, Mintel, Forrester, Gartner, Euromonitor, MarketLine, ICD Research, and World Market Intelligence.

Meanwhile, sites like Marketresearch.com are aggregators for many of these reports, while subscription-based services like Statista and marketingcharts.com offer bite-sized data points.

Some analysts focus on specific industries, producing more detailed and tailored market assessment reports. These specialists may operate as consultancies or analyst houses, but their output remains similar to traditional market research firms.

Checking with these providers can be worthwhile to find relevant data. Although often expensive, syndicated reports can sometimes be more cost-effective than commissioning custom research.

Just note that while they may be comprehensive and detailed in their focus, these reports may not always align precisely with a company’s specific needs, being either too broad or too narrow in scope. Some may also contain outdated information.

Customer research

For many types of B2B customer research projects – exploring their satisfaction or purchase journey, for example – you can also gain some intel on competitors at the same time.

These sources of competitive intelligence are an exception in that they are from primary research, not secondary research:

Customer journey market research 

After the initial trigger, typical stages in the journey include evaluating solutions, provider awareness, and provider consideration. At each of these customer journey stages, your company is potentially up against competitors.

If prospects choose a competitor at the provider consideration stage, they will interact with that company at these stages too: finalizing the purchase, post-purchase experience, upselling, renewal, and so on.

Interviewing customers or prospects to map out their typical journeys can shed light on how they perceive and engage with competitors.

Customer satisfaction market research

B2B customer satisfaction market research studies can show you how to keep customers, win new ones. improve loyalty, better understand their needs, and where you have areas for improvement.

But these projects can also reveal how you perform against competitor benchmarks, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Too many customer satisfaction surveys don’t collect comparative scores for competitor intelligence. You need to know whether competitors in your space are receiving higher scores for similar services and if so, why.

Internal data

Building on from the above, analysing competitive intelligence does not exclusively involve analyzing what’s happening in the market. Understanding why prospects aren’t choosing you, and are looking for competitors instead, is also part of competitor intelligence.

Use internal sales data among your sources of competitive intelligence to identify common reasons for customer churn and develop targeted retention strategies.

You can gain valuable insights into their own weaknesses and areas for improvement by analyzing lost deals and customer feedback. This internal analysis is part of studying competitors’ strengths

For instance, if prospects consistently cite a specific feature lacking in your product, it signals a gap in your offering that competitors may be exploiting.

Furthermore, examining why customers leave or choose competitors can reveal broader market trends and shifting customer preferences. This information can be used to refine product development, adjust pricing strategies, and improve overall customer experience.

Exit surveys and doing a win-loss analysis are useful methods for gathering competitive intelligence. They provide direct feedback on why prospects chose a competitor, allowing companies to address these issues proactively.

B2B companies can create a more comprehensive competitive intelligence strategy by combining this internal data with external competitor analysis. The insights should not only help you retain existing customers but also attract new ones by addressing the root causes of customer churn and lost opportunities.

Best practices for using sources of competitive intelligence

#1 Update your competitive intelligence proactively

Over time, your competitive landscape will change. Set up alerts for your competitors’ public-facing activities to monitor any new threats.

The most efficient competitive intelligence research is a baseline to keep building on in the future. You don’t want to start all over again in a couple of years’ time to see how the competitive landscape may have changed.

A brand tracking program is a great way to monitor competitor performance over a lengthy period and spot any changing trends that need your attention.

#2 Avoid any unethical competitive intelligence practices

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

One of the most common tactical competitive intelligence techniques in B2C research is mystery shopping. Often, that’s not appropriate in B2B, because these high-value products or services tend to take providers much longer to sell.

Theoretically, 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. Our view is that it is highly unethical to waste the time of a highly skilled B2B sales team in this way.

#3 Plan ahead to make the competitive intelligence actionable

Further data from SCIP suggests that competitive intelligence professionals can spend three times as long collecting and analyzing data than acting on the insights. This imbalance can lead to wasted effort and low return on investment.

Insights from competitive intelligence analysis can be relevant to several different teams in the business, whether customer-facing or not. It’s important to maximize the value of competitive intelligence by putting plans in place to a) collect data efficiently and b) ensure the right people in your business can benefit from the insights.

At the end of our research projects, we offer to help our clients act on the insights. That looks different for everyone and needs to be tailored to the objectives.

It could involve creating separate bite-sized deliverables for ease of sharing with the sales team, for example, or holding follow-up virtual workshops with separate stakeholders to collaborate on action plans.