In CI – better answers start with better questions

[Heath Gibson]

Competitive intelligence (CI) is a discipline with the potential to provide organisations with valuable insights in to how to perform better. But like most things, the quality of the output is influenced by the quality of the inputs. In CI, one of the key inputs is the questions that it is expected to answer.

If you’re looking for a phrase to simultaneously sink the spirit of a CI practitioner and cause their blood pressure to rise, try making a request that sounds something like “Can you just tell me about our competitors…”

Requests that begin like this risk turning out to be too vague, too broad or too late to be genuinely useful. Whilst it’s part of the CI practitioner’s role to help clients refine their key intelligence question, having put some thought in to what you really want to know beforehand will impress your CI provider and help improve the insights that are delivered.

So how do you get your CI engagement off to a better start? Here’s three simple suggestions to get you started.

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http://minimalstate.com/2010/04/01/in-ci-better-answers-start-with-...