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There are endless tips and tricks to help sales executives close more deals. One of those tips not talked about enough is using competitive intelligence to win sales. Leveraging competitive intelligence in your sales process can give you that final push in closing the deal. Let’s take a look at the art and science of using competitive intelligence to win sales.

If human survival is a marriage of two primal verbs, “hunt” and “gather,” then competitive intelligence is a marriage of two modern verbs, “notice” and “know.” Competitive intelligence helps you detect reverberations outside the four walls of your business. If you’re a CI manager, you’ll observe and study. When one business makes a move—acquiring another company, for example—you’ll not only remember the last two moves its competitor made, you’ll watch for what’s about to unfold.

Now, a story of home security, web-connected home thermostats, and an Amazon acquisition.

No matter the size of the organization, every business should have a competitive intelligence strategy. Larger organizations will typically have a well-rounded strategy team to handle their competitive analyses, but a small startup likely doesn't have the resources to build out a whole CI team, especially in the early stages. While it may be difficult to balance competitive intelligence against the many other initiatives of a rapidly growing startup, CI is essential for a startup to disrupt, dominate, or create a market. Let’s take a look at what it takes to integrate competitive intelligence into a startup business strategy.

The following post was written by Julie Carey, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at Akamai Technologies. Julie has a decade of B2B technology marketing experience and has led product marketing teams at startups, mid-sized businesses, and enterprises. When she's not mapping plans to launch new products or campaigns, you might find Julie running along the Charles River in Boston or researching her next great book club read.

If you’re like thousands of marketers across the globe, you want to shake up your headache-inducing competitive intelligence program and create a new approach. Maybe this year you got the coveted headcount for a role completely dedicated to it. Maybe it’s an ‘OKR’ for you or your team among many others. Maybe last year you got some ideas together, but that initial work is sitting in the intern’s Google Drive.

Get your free guide to distributing competitive intelligence to learn how to communicate intel across your organization 

No matter what your situation is, there are some common communications traps and pitfalls you can avoid. Here’s a high-level look at those and some new ways to rethink old school CI techniques.