Because of their daily presence in the field and favored relationships with their customers, salespeople are the eyes and ears of their companies. In the new economic war, managers cannot take the chance of not being fully aware of the way they could be threatened by the competition. Yet, organizations face great difficulties to stimulate salespeople's collection and dissemination of competitive intelligence, and to manage market-based intelligence efficiently. This book aims to assist sales and marketing managers in facing such challenges while providing them with action-oriented answers to the following key questions: What kind of information salespeople should collect from the field and how to transform such information into intelligence? How to improve salespeople's competitive intelligence collection and exploitation skills? How to enhance the sales force's commitment to competitive intelligence activities? How to manage and distill market-based intelligence throughout the organization and maintain market leadership? And, how to approach the ethical aspects of competitive intelligence and remain protected against competitors' competitive intelligence activities? By leveraging the latest research, practitioners' interviews, companies' best practices, along with practical tools and guidelines, this book help organizations achieve their market-orientation strategy and maintain a sustainable competitive edge.

If your company is struggling, losing its visibility or failing in growth projections, you need Win/Loss Analysis. Woven throughout are steps to gather competitive intelligence and customer insight. With the guidance of this book, you will remove the guesswork and gain more business through Win/Loss Analysis.

Win is the council assassins’ handler, and that means he has to keep them safe. That’s not an easy thing to do when there’s a group of people trying to kill them, but Win has done his best, and now they’re down to only six people to eliminate before he can take care of his family. But his obsession with their safety means he doesn’t have time for anything else, and that includes Graham, the assassins’ cook—and his mate. Graham has suspected there was a bond between him and Win ever since he arrived at the warehouse, but since he’s human, he can’t be sure. He won’t get any answers from Win, who spends more time in his office working than he should. If Graham wasn’t there to make sure he ate and slept, he probably would have collapsed, and that’s the last thing Graham wants. Graham’s opportunity to find out if that bond is really present comes when the council puts Win on a forced vacation. It so happens that Graham is headed home to his parents for two weeks, and somehow, Win ends up going with him. Will that interlude be enough for Graham to get through to Win? Or will Win be unable to forget about the work waiting for him back home and ignore Graham? Will the assassins finally find out what’s really happening with the people trying to kill them?

Tested-in-the-trenches competitive intelligence techniques used at today's top companies This book brings together the best thinking and practices in competitive intelligence (CI) currently being used at many of today's most successful companies. Featuring contributions from leading industry executives, it covers CI strategies across a wide range of business functions, including marketing and sales, market research and forecasting, product development, and teams. The only book on the subject offering a comprehensive view of CI, from the CEO down to the tactical CI team Numerous case studies vividly illustrating cutting-edge CI techniques in action

In the fast-paced world of international business, competitive intelligence is necessary for the daily survival of small firms and national economies alike. In Competitive Intelligence and Senior Management, veteran consultant Joseph H. A. M. Rodenberg argues that business leaders should devote more of their time and attention to seeking out and interpreting information about competitors. This instructive volume offers tools that will help senior managers to increase their firms' competitiveness, carry out successful mergers and acquisitions, and avoid surprise attacks from corporate raiders and private equity firms.

An effective framework for strengthening competitiveness by learning from past deals and applying insights derived from them. Every sales opportunity, whether won or lost, has useful nuggets of information that can be harvested and used to improve performance. When those pieces of information are aggregated, analyzed and made available for all to use, the organization’s competitive position is greatly enhanced. Reveals how to turn field sales teams, a mostly underutilized resource, into net producers of competitive intelligence Exposes new and unconventional approaches for gathering and democratizing sales insights for a broad stakeholder audience Presents a proven knowledge sharing model that is being adopted by major companies worldwide Win/Loss Reviews shows how every company can improve top and bottom line performance by systematically capturing the key insights from deals that have been won, lost or delayed. While the book talks to decision makers and business strategists, the principles and disciplines explored are aimed at bridging the flow of competitive intelligence between sales and marketing, simultaneously providing insights and line-of-site to the dynamics affecting business performance.

For specialists and nonspecialists alike, this perceptive selection of the newest and up and coming tools and techniques of competitive intelligence, offering a well balanced combination of theory and practice. It shows how advances in computers and technology have accelerated progress in CI management, and the ways in which CI has affected (and been affected by) all major business functions and processes. It explores applications to organizations of various sizes and types, in both the public and private sectors. Editors Fleisher and Blenkhorn link leading-edge research in CI to advances in current practice, and balance pragmatic against conceptual concerns. Analysts, strategists and organizational decision makers at higher levels will find the book especially valuable, as they seek to make sense of the business environment and assess their organizations' evolving, dynamic places in it. The pace of change in today's global, competitive economy is greater than at any time in recorded history. Thus, as never before, companies need better tools for business and competitive analysis. The book surveys applications of CI that are critical to business processes, such as mergers and acquisitions, and to evolving industries, such as biotechnology. They focus on how push and pull Internet technologies affect data gathering and analysis and how CI can be managerially assessed using multiple evaluative approaches, unavailable until now in the public domain. They then turn to the future, and lay out some startling yet plausible viewpoints on what the next frontiers of competitive intelligence will be and how organizations can and must ready themselves for them.

There is very little material available that provides practical, hands-on assistance for the CI professional who is providing CI to one client—his or her employer—and who constitutes the largest single group of CI practitioners in existence. This book meets that need by serving as a desk reference for CI managers to help them understand their own circumstances and determine what works best for them. Competitive intelligence (CI) is now becoming a mature profession. With that maturation comes the need to develop and understand the how's and why's of managing CI, as distinguished from understanding how CI works. There is very little material available that provides practical, hands-on assistance for the CI professional who is providing CI to one client—his or her employer—and who constitutes the largest single group of CI practitioners in existence. This book meets that need by serving as a desk reference for CI managers to help them understand their own circumstances and determine what works best for them. In addition to providing hints on diagnosing individual situations, many forms and checklists that the manager can use immediately are included.

Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.

In the first book designed for businesses of all sizes and managers at every level, Larry Kahaner explains the increasingly vital practice of competitive intelligence and how American companies can use it for success. With a wealth of case studies, Kahaner shows How to profile your competitors' executives to unmask their decision-making processes The line between legal and illegal or unethical activities How to protect your own company against your competitors' intelligence operations COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE is a practical guide to turning raw information into priceless knowledge and winning business strategy.