How to Leverage Expert Networks for Competitive Intelligence

The old days of being able to sit back and relax because there were so few competitors in your local or regional market sector are long gone.

Today, businesses on the other side of the planet can compete with you for market share, and a thousand new enterprises are created every day with the goal in mind of providing goods and services faster and cheaper than you can. This fiercely gladiatorial and ever-changing business landscape is why competitive intelligence (CI) is so vital.

Even more important is how fast you can get your hands on the bits of information that can make you a winner. In today's article, we’ll learn how you can leverage expert networks for competitive intelligence.

What is competitive intelligence?

The term competitive intelligence refers to the process of gathering, analyzing, and then deploying information about your business competitors as well as industry developments and market trends.

Today, businesses simply cannot survive without a comprehensive CI strategy because it keeps them nimble, allows them to anticipate shifts in demand and market conditions, and is the only way to stay abreast of both opportunities and threats.

At a glance, expert networks are third-party companies that can connect you to highly professional individual consultants on a freelance basis.

These experts are people with the right experience, expertise, and industry knowledge to give you crucial advice on market trends, emerging dynamics in your industry, and first-hand experience with your competitors.

Understanding Expert Networks

Until about thirty years ago, it was primarily investors who relied on consultations with expert professionals to inform their business decisions.

Whether it was a bank, an insurance company, or a venture capital fund, these investors had a business need to reach out to well-placed individuals with the right experience and knowledge to give them advice before any large-scale investments would be made.

Today, however, the use of expert networks has been greatly expanded to a wide variety of business use cases, including market research, regulatory compliance, forming consortia, and even legal consultation.

These days, there are many different kinds of expert networks. Some take a more generalist approach and offer a wide range of freelance professionals to consult with, while others are focused more on specific industries or geographical regions.

Therefore, any business interested in leveraging expert networks to improve their competitive intelligence needs to choose an expert network that best meets their needs.

However, beyond just their main scope, expert networks are now competing on which ancillary services they can provide for their customers:

1. Support for budget tracking
2. Expense reports
3. Provide written transcripts of phone calls.

A good expert network will provide you with tools for making data-driven decisions on which experts to select for your given needs, how to incorporate the received advice into your business strategy, and monitoring expenses, previous contacts, and the individual’s personal track record.

Leveraging Expert Networks for Competitive Intelligence

It may sound obvious, but before your business can begin the process of leveraging expert networks for competitive intelligence, you’ll need to know exactly the type of expert professional with whom you want to consult.

Although the expert network you use can provide you with the individual’s resume/CV and professional background, you must weigh the pros and cons of what that expert can bring to the table. Here is some advice on this topic from Expert Network Calls.

1. It is important to get a well-rounded balance of views from experts, taking into account their cultural values, points of view, and contribution to the bigger picture.

2. Properly balance the amount of internal and external expertise that you seek out from these experts.

Individual professionals with experience working in your sector or with inside knowledge of a given industry can certainly provide invaluable advice.

However, you’ll always need to triangulate the data by speaking to someone who can give you a broader overview of market trends, customer demands and expectations, and cultural specificities for any given industry sector, territory, or regulatory landscape.

3. Once your business has a well-informed strategy for choosing which experts to consult with, the next step in the process is to develop best practices for interaction and communication. These include practical steps such as:

1. Where and how you will store the data and other information you receive from speaking with individual experts
2. How to remain compliant with privacy laws and regulations.

4. It is critical that your best practices also address confidentiality and other ethical considerations.

Likewise, it is important to also protect the confidentiality of both the identity and the information received when speaking to an individual professional, including not mentioning that you have spoken to them when consulting with other people in that industry sector.

5. Once your business has a comprehensive plan for selecting the right experts, balancing internal and external expertise, and establishing best practices for handling confidentiality and ethical considerations, the next step is to create a strategy for integrating the insights you gain from experts into your competitive intelligence process.

For example, if you speak to ten experts to learn more about a competing business in your market sector, you should be prepared to analyze the obtained data. Your business needs a strategy for how to weigh and validate (or invalidate) the information that you gleaned from those experts.

And then you also need a plan for how your business is going to leverage these insights for your strategic planning and business forecasting needs.

Future trends

You certainly don’t need us to tell you about the impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are already having on the business landscape. But more advanced software tools are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to technological tools and their increasing importance in our hyper-competitive, ever-changing, and globalized economy.

The future of expert networks and competitive intelligence is going to rely on sophisticated online platforms that identify, analyze, and vet experts while also assessing their suitability for your business needs.

In addition, these online platforms are increasingly applying data analytics to better incorporate, weigh, and parse the information provided by experts, as well as help integrate the insights that they provide with your overall business strategy.

Final word:

Every business in the world is moving towards a strategy of integrating consultations with ideally placed professional individuals to remain competitive in an ever more complex and dynamic global world economy.

If you’d like to find out how your business can take advantage of the benefits that an advanced expert network platform can offer for your competitive intelligence strategies, do not hesitate to contact expert network calls today.