Both Business Intelligence (BI) and Competitive Intelligence (CI) are critical when it comes to improving a company’s performance and overall success rate. While both strategies are different, if you use them in combination, they result in business success. BI is more about internal strategies, whereas CI allows businesses to focus on the external factors influencing a company.

Both business intelligence and competitive intelligence work by collecting data and then using it to make well-informed strategic planning and operative decisions. These strategies have similar frameworks and processes. Both processes help organizations gather actionable insights.

Companies can create effective business strategies using customer, market, and competitor data. These intelligent solutions ethically gather data and emphasize ethics throughout the processes. Like any other big data analytics solutions, these two solutions can be integrated into a company’s framework to reap unique benefits.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what business intelligence and competitive intelligence are and how they differ from each other. If you’re looking for a big data analytics company offering competitive intelligence for businesses, check out PREDIK Data-Driven today.

What is Business Intelligence?

As we mentioned, Business Intelligence is collecting data and using it to make multiple business decisions. It helps solve complex business issues using big data analytics and make data-driven decisions.

When businesses want to streamline their internal operations, they need to reduce costs and improve efficiency. This is where business intelligence comes in. It combs through volumes of data and allows organizations to create better or improve existing strategies to make business processes more efficient.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

Each level of your organization can benefit from using Business Intelligence. You can acquire valuable data to generate actionable business intelligence insights by partnering with a big data analytics company.

• Helps with product marketing: You can use PM to improve your product launches, marketing, and sales enablement. You target your ideal customers better and analyze previous marketing plans to determine what works now and what doesn’t.
• More informed business management: With Business intelligence, the leaders in your organization can learn more about the day-to-day operations, understand smaller systems, and make informed decisions that bring success to the company.
• Smoother testing and product development: During any product development process, your product teams can benefit from customer analytics which will help them learn more about what customers like and dislike. They can also target a specific demographic and develop better products while testing new features.
• Better sales strategies: Your sales team can also benefit from business intelligence by figuring out the time it takes your company to close sales. This will help you reduce the team and increase sales effectively.
• Better HR functioning: Business intelligence can also help the HR department manage employees better and improve the corporate culture.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligenceis essentially a type of market research. It’s a new business strategy that not many companies are using. However, many businesses from different industries have started adopting competitive intelligence. 94% of businesses are now investing in CI.

Companies can use competitive intelligence if they want to gather valuable data about the market they’re operating in, their costumes, and their main competitors. This process gathers all relevant market data to predict your competition’s next move, understand customers better, and use key information for improving internal initiatives.

Competitive intelligence is an effective and strong strategy that allows companies to gain full insight into their customers and competitors. They can unveil the complete DNA of the market they are operating in and make accurate predictions.

Benefits of Competitive Intelligence

Similar to business intelligence, each team in your organization can benefit from competitive intelligence. The entire organization benefits from this external data-based strategy, from product marketing and sales to administration and human resources.

• Minimizes risk: Competitive intelligence is essential when creating new business strategies or developing new products/ideas. It can help your company avoid risky moves and decisions by helping you learn why something or the other didn’t work out for your competitors and why.
• Improves R&D: When your company is constantly researching and developing new products or ideas, it’s necessary to study your competitors. When you learn about their products and what the customers like or dislike, you can incorporate those elements into your R&D.

• Supports sales: When you’re closing down a deal, your sales team and management can compare the closing time with your competition’s. It can help you convince big clients and compete better with your rivals.
• Improves employee retention and talent acquisition: Your company’s HR team can better understand the competitors’ hiring practices and improve your organization’s corporate culture with better policies and employee recognition strategies.

Although these business strategies can be used separately, using them together can help you ensure success for your business. They will work differently for different industries. You can stay ahead of the competition and become a market leader with the right tools and data science solutions.

Visit PREDIK Data-Driven for advanced competitive intelligence solutions. They are a big data analytics company and research firm using geospatial data for a variety of data science solutions.

They can help you unveil the DNA of a facility and offer services like location intelligence software, site selection analytics, and supply chain mapping. Reach out to them or request a demo today.