Competitive Intelligence Frameworks

Map the channel: who sells the competitor's product, what margin do they earn, what's their satisfaction, and what alternative products are they pushing harder. Channel partners speak more candidly about competitors than competitors' own customers do. Operates on quarterly cadence with 5-8 partner interviews per quarter. Best for: B2B categories with material indirect-channel share.

Independent third-party interviews with buyers who chose the competitor over you. Goal: surface the actual decision criterion and where the alternative won, not the polite reason the buyer told your sales team. Operates on continuous cadence (every lost deal in the segment). Best for: categories where your sales team's loss reasons feel suspiciously uniform.

Annual or semi-annual interviews with a sample of the competitor's known customers. Goal: track retention sentiment, identify customers actively shopping, surface emerging dissatisfaction. Operates on annual cadence with 10-20 customer touches. Best for: long-cycle B2B where switching costs are high but real.

Interview recent ex-employees of the competitor (with appropriate cooling-off enforcement) about how the company actually operates. Goal: identify operational stress, strategic shifts not yet public, key-person risk. Operates on continuous cadence (every relevant departure). Best for: tracking competitors that are larger or earlier-stage than yours.

Continuous channel and customer interviews focused specifically on actual transacted prices, discount behaviour and contract terms. Public pricing is meaningless in B2B; this surfaces real prices. Operates on quarterly cadence. Best for: categories with opaque pricing and material discount discretion at the sales-rep level.

Structured comparison interviews with users of both your product and the competitor's. Goal: surface specific feature gaps that drive switching or evaluation outcomes. Operates on quarterly cadence with 8-15 user interviews. Best for: product-led growth categories where feature differentiation is the buying criterion.

Quarterly synthesis of the competitor's public narrative (earnings calls, conference talks, leadership podcasts, hiring patterns) cross-referenced with operator-interview signal. Goal: identify when the public narrative diverges from operating reality. Operates on quarterly cadence. Best for: tracking publicly-traded competitors where the public narrative is heavily managed.

A real CI programme runs 2-3 frameworks continuously, not all seven. Pick by competitor importance and buying motion. A typical mid-market B2B CI programme might run Channel-side reality + Lost-deal post-mortems + Pricing telemetry. A consumer-products CI programme might run Customer-base health + Product comparison + Strategic-narrative tracking. Choose based on where your blind spots actually are.

Monthly executive briefing (1-2 pages, 4-5 specific findings + recommendations). Quarterly deep-dive on one priority competitor. Annual programme review identifying which frameworks produced highest-value insight and which to drop. Live battle cards refreshed every 90 days — never quarterly-but-six-months-late.