Best Practices for Secondary Competitive Intelligence

About the Course:

To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

If you wait until you arrive at the negotiating table to begin negotiations, you will have already lost significant leverage. Negotiations must start with competitive intelligence into the individuals and companies who will sit across the table.

Learning about common denominators in your counterparts' backgrounds may help initiate an amiable discussion. Understanding your counterparts' business strategy will help you formulate your proposal. Determining your counterparts' financial strength and pre-existing partnerships will help you gauge their ability to walk-away from the negotiations.

This session will introduce you to a variety of secondary source competitive intelligence tools that can be obtained at no or very low cost. Insight is provided as to assessing the veracity of such information. This session discusses the nuances of using the following resources to find revealing information:

  • Premium sources
  • Company web sites
  • Legal filings
  • Local news sources
  • Industry groups
  • Social networks
  • Job sites

Additional specific issues addressed during this session include:

  • How to utilize search engine operators to quickly locate the target's competitors, partners, fans, critics, etc.
  • How to use Google filetype operators to find the kinds of media (e.g. PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Word documents) that you are searching for
  • How to tap into collective intelligence through social media
  • How to harness satellite technology (from the likes of Google satellite) to determine the competitive implications of a target's facilities

Course Leader: August Jackson, Co-Founder, Mosi Systems

August Jackson is a competitive intelligence and strategy professional who focuses on the role of information and data as the basis for competitive advantage. He has over 10 years experience in telecommunication, IT and professional service firms applying methods of competitive intelligence to strategic planning and winning sales. He cofounded Mosi Systems to help organizations improve insight and foresight using cutting edge technologies to organize and analyze data and information. He blogs at http://augustjackson.net and also produces the Competitive Intelligence Podcast which can be found at http://www.cipodcast.com. You can follow him on Twitter @8of12. Mosi Systems can be found on the web at http://www.mosisys.com.

Course Length: Approx. 1.5 hours

$295 PER USER

Purchase Now:

Need help purchasing this course? Please contact Neomi Barazani at 609-919-1895 ext. 100 or at registration@bdacademy.com.