While business intelligence is a term for the tools, software, and processes that help a firm make better business choices, competitive intelligence refers to the process of gaining knowledge of a company's industry and its competitors.

As a form of market research, competitive intelligence (CI) is a type of business intelligence. Competitive intelligence uses the same techniques as market research, but the focus is on answering more specific questions rather than analyzing broad market patterns. Knowledge of a competitor's activities or business partners, as well as a deeper grasp of the industry in which a firm works, are all examples of competitive intelligence.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is an inward-looking discipline with a long history of application. Gathering data from various sources and storing it in a single location so that you can evaluate it and make decisions that will help your company's growth is known as business intelligence.

By analyzing data and making informed decisions, business intelligence may help you adopt new or improved initiatives and plans to help your company run more smoothly and efficiently.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence may help your entire firm. For each of your departments, your company likely has access to various data sources. Every team may use Business Intelligence data in your firm in various ways.

• It is possible to improve many aspects of product marketing by using business intelligence. For this, product marketing must assess prior campaigns, product launches, and win/loss analyses to create future initiatives that are more successful.
• Your marketing team can make better decisions about where to focus their efforts, which campaigns to keep running, and which content to push more aggressively if they have a better grasp of key marketing data.
• Business intelligence may have a significant impact on sales operations. To understand which transactions close fastest, average sales cycle durations, and which sales agents are performing the best, you need to dive into sales metrics. Your sales staff can close more transactions if you use this information to teach them.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is an outward-facing technique that has become more popular recently. Competitive intelligence is the process of obtaining information about your rivals, analyzing it, and applying it to predict what your competitors will do in the future. Using CI, you may gain a deeper grasp of your industry's landscape and enhance your internal efforts. With the right competitive intelligence approach in place, you should be able to obtain complete insight into your competitors' activities and forecast where they will go next.

Competitive Intelligence's Advantages

In the same way that Business Intelligence can assist every department in your company, competitive intelligence may also. Competitive intelligence (CI) is often misunderstood as benefiting your sales staff. In addition to the obvious advantages for sales, product marketing, marketing, and product development, management and human resources departments may reap the rewards.

• Competitive intelligence has several advantages for product marketers. Product marketers may strengthen messaging and positioning and fulfill the market's demands by looking at what their competitors are doing and researching their target audience.
• Competitive intelligence findings may have a significant impact on marketing efforts. Competitors' content strategy, marketing, social media posts as well as SEO rankings may be studied by marketers. If you look at what your rivals are doing in marketing, you can learn a lot that you can apply to your own business.
• Competitive intelligence is critical to sales success since, without it, they would be unable to get the high-value contracts they want. With CI tools like battle cards or SWOT assessments, sales teams may better position themselves against rivals and win more competitive negotiations.

Two Pieces to the Puzzle

Although "business intelligence" and "competitive intelligence" are used differently in the industry, they are conceptually quite similar. Some consider competitive intelligence a subset of business intelligence since the information acquired for competitive analysis is critical for decision-making and may contribute useful insights to data collected as part of the BI process.

For example, a business can turn to competition intelligence for guidance if sales drop. For executives, a recent competition product launch or significant marketing effort might explain the drop in sales, and they now know where to begin devising solutions to boost sales.

Conclusion

Convenient internet access and computing gadgets are helping the world become more digital. It's becoming increasingly difficult to stay in business due to the quick pace of change.

It is possible to preserve your market share by utilizing BI and CI, two distinct business phenomena. The CI offers you all the information you need about your direct and indirect rivals. The BI, on the other hand, favors using these facts to make future divisions.