A playbook for Executives in small & fast growth B2B organisations, to establish Market Intelligence processes and/or build a Market Intelligence Team.

This guide is Chapter 2, focusing on building a simple set of frameworks to divide the task of market intelligence into Sectors, Competitors, and Customers.

Want to Read Chapter 1 first? Click here.

A Framework for B2B Market Intel

Summary & Key Takeaways

• This guide is designed as a primer for executives in smaller or fast-growing organisations interested in better informing their MI approach. This section focuses on building a simple set of frameworks to divide the task of market intelligence into Sectors, Competitors, and Customers.
• Each section covers a specific area of market intelligence, providing a high-level overview, how you can measure the impact, a simple starting template and clear examples based on AMPLYFI
• Throughout this process, we advise on a collaborative, iterative and prioritised approach – ask for help, don’t expect to be right first time and focus on a few things done well.

Covered in this Framework

In this part of the Playbook, we dive into Sector, Customer & Competitor Intelligence, for small and fast growth organisations. Each section includes:

• Definition – a high-level overview
• Impact – how you can measure the impact
• Template – a simple starting point for your work
• Examples – an example of the template based on our own work

After reading this piece, you will be primed to set up your Market Intelligence clearly and efficiently.

Defining Your Sector Intelligence Areas

You are likely working in more than one sector, you should consider:

1. The sector(s) you operate in – this is your “home sector”
2. The sector(s) you sell to – this would be your customers “home sector”

This means that you will likely be analysing at least two sectors simultaneously. However, this could be a multitude if you segment them more granularly by Geography or Industry to gain deeper insights. For each sector you choose, we recommend thinking about specific terms that can be used to find information relating to your sector. These terms belong to three areas:

The Impact of Sector Intelligence

Sector Intelligence can impact a range of decisions positively, most obvious are:

Creating a Sector Intelligence Card

Now that you have the framework and key terms, you can define each Sector.

SECTOR INTELLIGENCE CARD TEMPLATE

SECTOR INTELLIGENCE CARD EXAMPLE

Competitor Intelligence

What is Competitor Intelligence?

Competitor Intelligence focuses on understanding the direct and indirect solutions that customers can choose as alternatives to your own. We categorise these into Major, Minor, and Emerging groups:

• Major competitors are often huge companies. Sometimes the sector you operate in will be a footnote on their annual report, or your entire solution, a feature of theirs. This makes analysing them tricky, as you will need to use tools that filter aggressively through lots of content to find the right signals.
• Minor competitors are likely smaller, though particularly interesting if they start to become Major competitors. Smaller organisations are harder to analyse as there is often less content around them, and checking for updates is harder. Tools that find deeper content with ongoing monitoring are useful here.
• Unknown competitors are usually startups or spin outs, but they can also be larger organisations launching new services or pivoting into your sector by, for example, entering a new geographic area with an existing solution. Identifying them early is the key challenge and requires a topical approach – monitoring your sector for new organisations who emerge.

The Impact of Competitor Intelligence

On average, B2B organisations lose around 20-40% of sales to direct competitors. This presents a significant revenue opportunity. Competitor intelligence is a way to close this gap in two ways:

Creating a Competitor Intelligence Card

Competitor Intelligence Cards, sometimes called “Battle Cards” summarise a single Competitor so that various stakeholders can leverage the knowledge to make better decisions. A good card covers three areas:

• Information – facts about the organisation, usually taken from official channels
• Opinion – taken from their customers and other stakeholders, generally providing objective opinions on their strengths and weaknesses
• Analysis – your assessment of the organisation in terms of the Opportunities & Threats they present to you, based on your own assessment of your organisation

COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE CARD TEMPLATE

COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE CARD EXAMPLE

Customer Intelligence

What is Customer Intelligence?

Customer Intelligence is a form of B2B Market Intelligence that focuses on organisations that could, or do, buy from your organisation. We break them into three groups:

Ultimately, your goal is to move organisations from one group to the next as quickly and effectively as possible.

The Impact of Customer Intelligence

Customer Intelligence is all about alignment between your solutions and market needs. With the benefits predominantly felt through cost of sale and customer lifetime value. This can be seen clearly in three areas:

• ICP Driven Scouting – finding the right organisations to target, as early, easily and accurately as possible
• Account Based Marketing (ABM) – improving progression rates in the sales funnel by tailoring engagements to the right message to the right people at the right time
• Key Account Management – Reduced churn/increased upsell from existing customers by aligning with changing needs, expanding relationships (via ABM) and recognising and adapting to threats to revenue

Market Intelligence can have a huge impact here. AMPLYFI research indicates that  81% of buyers are more likely to complete a purchase if the seller demonstrates an understanding of them and their business.

Creating an Ideal Customer Profile

• If this is your first time defining a Go To Market strategy based on Market Intelligence it’s likely you do not have a well defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP helps to translate who you are between your different teams. It should tell you who:
• You are building your product for and what their primary business needs are (not to be confused with a user profile, or jobs to be done frameworks)
• You are looking for in the market, helping to guide marketing campaigns and messaging to align with pain points, channels and interests of buyers
• You are selling to, helping sales to prioritise efforts in the funnel to the opportunities that are most likely to succeed and grow

An ICP template is ideally simple – as it is likely to be shared around a wide stakeholder group, with lots of differing views.

IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE TEMPLATE

IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE EXAMPLE

Customer Intelligence to Support Better Account Planning

So, now you have your Ideal Customer Profile defined, you can focus on specific customers. Account Planning is the practice of understanding specific customers (or even potential customers) so as to better align your solutions with their needs and increase revenue with them.

Account Plans are generally the realm of Account Managers or Account Executives, but Customer Intelligence is key to their success. Expect this to be a collaborative effort though, Account Managers will tend to hold huge amounts of valuable insider information, but will also require an external view, particularly when dealing with large, complex organisations. We propose another simple template for Customer Intelligence Profiles – as you will likely need to create several of them, long documents will be a burden to create and update. Our template includes three sections:

• Information – Facts about the organisation, usually from their own channels
• Organisation Strategy – the top level thoughts, generally from their Annual Report, or leadership statements
• Group Strategy (per buying group) – sometimes mentioned in Annual Reports, gathered by Account Managers or found in group leadership statements or hiring channels e.g. Linkedin Posts

Ideally, this template should take no longer than 2 hours to complete, with the right information and can be updated in less time, depending on how important and/or dynamic the customer is.

CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE PROFILE TEMPLATE

CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE PROFILE EXAMPLE

Conclusion

Your Knowledge is Growing!

You have the templates and information you need to start building Market Intelligence in your organisation. Try not to “boil the ocean” and do everything at once. Regular incremental updates, while persistence with stakeholders will likely see more impact than a rushing to finish – Market Intelligence is never done!

Actions Checklist

To make it simpler to action the advice here, we have created a simple checklist and framework that you can download to develop your business case. It forms the first section of our B2B Market Intelligence Playbook.

Suggested Actions

Further Reading

• The Cost of Information Overload Report
• Inbox Overload Report
• Chapter 1 of the MI Playbook
• The Next Chapter in the Playbook (coming soon)

Sign up to our newsletter, get exclusive content, cutting-edge tech news, research reports and actionable insights.