Competitive Intelligence Software Selection Guide

With limited budgets and processes and staff handling large volumes of external data, organizations may fail to make informed decisions, leading to missed opportunities.

Insufficient funds for competitive intelligence staff, tools, and automation.
Dealing with large volumes of external data that may be outdated or inaccurate.
Lack of processes for storing and sharing CI insights across the organization.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Most leading vendors in this space offer similar core features, so focus on data sources, output, usability, price, and differences in key features most relevant to your requirements.

Impact and Result

Learn which software can compare your product, brand, or company ranking against top competitors using industry benchmarks and best practices.
Gain insights into competitor performance at a level of depth that can benefit sales and other departments, such as product development and customer support.

Competitive Intelligence Software Selection Guide Research & Tools

1. Competitive Intelligence Software Selection Guide: Competitive intelligence software and related digital marketing tool vendors can be categorized by their primary focus areas: SEO, market intelligence, and competitive analysis.

Learn CI software capabilities and trends, define your requirements and use cases, and discover CI software vendors.

2. CI Vendor Evaluation Workbook – Use this workbook to select a CI vendor. List high-value use cases, technical requirements, qualifications, implementation deliverables, and total cost of ownership to make an informed decision.

Use this workbook to direct your CI vendor selection. List high-value use cases and whether they are must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, or won’t-haves. Note other functional requirements, such as integrations and security, as well as other qualifications that vendors must include. Describe deliverables required from the vendor to support implementation and use of the product, and add specifications for requesting vendor pricing.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

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Guided Implementation 1: CI Research Requirements

Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
Call 2: Review your documented scope and objectives against your internal interview questions, answers on resources, and budget.
Call 3: Assess your company’s CI capabilities and budget. Modify or add any requirements as needed.

Guided Implementation 2: CI Research & Vendor Selection

Call 1: Develop a CI research framework and best practices for competitive analysis of sales.
Call 2: Review competitive win/loss analysis results and prioritize research.
Call 3: Review CI vendor analysis for testing CI results.
Call 4: Review findings from the software testing to make a selection.
Call 5: Identify the vendor relationship between current capabilities and automation.