What you don’t know can hurt you, and what a business doesn’t know about the competition can crush it faster than you can say “Chapter 11.” Which probably explains why competitive intelligence (CI) is the hottest offshoot of marketing as a career.
For instance, membership in the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP, headquartered in Alexandria, Va.) is growing by 40 percent yearly, and is now up to about 6,000. Its Web site recently listed 60 job openings, eight in the Chicago area.
A survey by The Futures Group, a consulting firm in Glastonbury, Conn., found that 82 percent of firms with more than $10 billion in revenues now have some sort of business intelligence system. (And 17 percent proved to be babes in the woods, saying they did not think CI had ever been used against them.) Four out of five CI professionals work for corporations, the rest for research firms.
And in case you were wondering, you can indeed leave your cloak and dagger at home–although not your brain. Only about 7 percent of CI professionals have ever worked for a government intelligence agency, surveys show. Instead, most have backgrounds in the industries they cover.
“What we see most often is a marketing background or sales,” said Wade Hanson, vice president of the CI consulting firm of Kirk Tyson International in suburban Lisle. “Most people with a technical background may understand the industry very well, but they have a difficult time gathering the information. A marketing background better adapts you to pulling facts into actionable information.”
And no, there is no university program that teaches CI, which is why the question of background is paramount. The pay is at least as good as you’d expect in a traditional marketing position. SCIP’s own survey shows that average CI salaries had risen from $57,000 in 1995 to $69,000 in 1997. Results for the Midwest for 1997 showed a range from $90,000 as the average for vice presidents down to $42,000 for lowly analysts.
What do CI people do? Basically, they ask intelligent questions. The questions can be very specific, but Leonard Fuld, a CI pioneer and head of the 20-year-old Fuld & Co. in Cambridge, Mass., identifies common themes that cut across industries. These including running down new product rumors, comparing products, sizing up a new rival, evaluating the competitor’s production processes, comparing your productivity or effectiveness with theirs; and figuring out why your best people keep defecting. Plus ongoing market-watching.
And there’s what Fuld calls the “dark side myth” that keeps recurring in various forms.
” `They can’t be operating at a lower cost than us–they must be doing something illegal, they must be laundering money for the Mafia,’ they’ll say,” said Fuld. “So we do a financial analysis of the competitor and piece together their cost of operations. And this is not a quick and dirty search you can do on the Internet–it may take hundreds of hours and a couple hundred interviews.”
The invariable result: The opposition is a collection of unsung heroes who watch every dime.
“I am sure the Mafia is out there somewhere, but I have never run across them,” Fuld said.
Then there’s the chore of acquiring the information. Forget 007. Forget Dumpster diving. The trick is that there is no trick.
“We don’t want people to even attempt to get proprietary information,” said Steven Miller, SCIP’s head of media relations. “It’s not worth and it you don’t need it–90 percent of what you need is available through open sources, and the rest can be deduced. Our code of ethics says you always say who you are and what you are doing.”
“It’s a combination of surfing databases and talking to people,” said Hanson. “It’s a matter of talking to anyone in the industry who has knowledge of what is going on–those active in the market, those entering the market, customers, suppliers, analysts, government agencies and regulatory bodies. Some people talk about CI as if it were a very glamorous thing, but in reality it’s a game of persistence and of knowing where the information is. A large-scale project may involve talking to hundreds of people,” Hanson said.
“So you need people who can talk to total strangers, which makes a sales and marketing background advantageous,” Hanson explained. “Like a sales rep, we deal with a lot of rejection. Since there is no money it in for them, people may say they don’t have time to talk to you. You may have to call three or four people to talk to one.
“But the job can be like a continuing education program–you are always diving into new things and learning new things as you go along, but you get paid for it,” he said.
As a career path, “It can be a very rewarding route to the top,” said Fuld. Most CI analysts move on after a few years, usually to another interesting job, he said.
His own surveys show that nearly 40 percent go on (or back) to marketing positions, but almost 20 percent go on to strategic planning positions, and about 8 percent move directly to upper management.
Either way, “It’s a very energizing job,” he said. “In how many middle management jobs do you get to meet the president, and sit down to argue a point?”
