ADSC Ethical Competitive Intelligence Services

What Are The ADSC Enhanced Competitive Intelligence Services?

By Allen Borts, ADSC

(Please Note: This white paper is provided for information purposes only. And the information contained within this white paper depends on the reader to derive any benefits from the information provided.)

Background.

Applied Direct Services Corporation (ADSC) has utilized the SwiftSel Methodologies for Ethical Competitive Intelligence throughout our over 19-year history.

For more than the last six years, we have included our Ethical Competitive Intelligence Services as a standard part of our main ADSC Vortex Services (a combination of High-Level Brokered Decision Maker Live Introductions, ADSC Ethical Market (Competitive) Intelligence Services, CRM & Marketing Automation) for our clients. It was six years ago after years of running such programs internally for many years that we began to include this for external clients.

We are now making available for new participants a new SwiftSel Ethical Competitive Intelligence Course which supports this kind of process. This course can support both front-line personnel & also administrative/analytic personnel. There are different modules involved. This course will be a standard offering alongside our other courses for:

  1. Enterprise Grade Lead Generation
  2. Enterprise Grade Field Sales
  3. Customer Service
  4. Project Management

    We will deal with in this course:

    1. Process Setup Or Enhancement.
    2. Information Acquisition Targeting.
    3. Privacy Issues.
    4. Ethics Issues – How To Efficiently And Practically Enhance The Relevant Knowledge In Your Dataflows In Ethical Ways.
    5. Knowledge Distributions – Experience-Based Understanding.
    6. Non-Verbal Clues – Enhanced Ways To Get Better Understanding Of What People Might Mean By Recognizing Voice Patterns Or Body Movements.
    7. OSI – Open Source Intelligence.
    8. Using Operational Data For Analysis.
    9. Using Lite Data Science Techniques To Ascertain Facts.
    10. Generative AI – Competitive Intelligence Specific Prompt Engineering – How To.
    11. Using Private Generative AI Servers & Integrating That With The Data Relevant To You.
    12. Attribution

    This course is delivered in an intense immersive type of setting (whether live in our Toronto Head Office or via Zoom) to better focus participants on the detailed materials delivered.

    It is entirely the responsibility of course participants to apply the materials presented in this course to create value for their own purposes. Course participants understand as a condition to being accepted to this course that this course is delivered for information purposes only.

    Part of our capabilities beyond the course is to be able to organize either enhancing an existing Ethical Competitive Intelligence Program for clients or to organize to start such a program from scratch if one does not yet already exist in any jurisdiction where this is legislatively compliant.

    Competitive Intelligence – Definition

    Competitive Intelligence is defined by some as the tracking of a business’ competitors.

    We would instead define Competitive Intelligence as the organized study of all factors that might affect a business. This would be including factors involving competitors, customers, prospects & external forces. The resulting distribution of such information in a meaningful way within a business would be to enable the mitigation of risks as far in advance as possible.

    If knowledge is power, insight (derived meaning) is true knowledge.

    Gaining insight not simply information is the point. The problem is with generating such insight/meaning.

    Tools can give some great information that’s very useful. They can be a really useful adjunct and starting point. Certainly, they can provide a beginning. However, they don’t always provide enough insight. It depends on the people using them, & how much they know & understand.

    Insight or meaning is something that should be the goal of any intelligence effort, competitive or otherwise we would believe.

    And add to this the need to make this an ethical undertaking both privacy & compliance into account. Therefore, there are some complexities that can benefit from the knowledge & experience of others.

    Meaning

    We all need to somehow use rubber-hits-the-road real-world understanding of what’s going on right now.

    Unfortunately, the prospects & clients you speak to might not necessarily always be as forth coming as you might wish.

    And competitors will want to be cagey around you to protect their interests.

    And nothing else that can affect your business is usually just simple. Everything in a complex market is complicated. Finding meaning in that kind of environment can be quite challenging.

    Add to this the growing trend by governments worldwide to increase privacy and now things have gotten more complicated.

    You can use the Internet. However, there have been lawsuits written about publicly for those that trespassed on competitor’s websites.

    And even knowing what to look at that might be relevant can for many groups starting from scratch or even enhancing an existing Competitive Intelligence program be a real issue.

    So, there are a number of challenges including those above & others. Next let’s take a look at solutions.

    Solutions That Can Make A Holistic Difference

    There is a deep & rich & very powerful way of knowing what’s going on that might affect your business.

    There are three things that we can teach about & also alternatively support on that might make a serious knowledge acquisition difference:

    1. OSI – Open-Source Intelligence. The use of publicly available information to provide points of information that when taken together might yield some insight.
    2. The Use of Front-Line Personnel. Using front-line personnel can yield information that otherwise might be missed & can be extremely valuable to the whole insight process.
    3. Advanced Analysis Techniques. If a business is small enough sophisticated manual analysis techniques might suffice. For any company of size, the use of analytics (automated means of analysis) from easy-to-use Data Science platforms to Generative AI can make a difference. And we can suggest how to use such technologies whether from costly commercial offerings or free open-source software.

    You might be wondering how that all these might fit together?

    The Hidden Numbers Between The Words People Use Can Make All The Difference.

    What numbers might we be referring to?

    Not everything is obvious. But when you experience things in the right way it might be obvious as to its meaning.

    We take a statistical, approach to this.

    When there are different words or phrases, or events within a sales or marketing/customer success/support cycle that occur that repeat, these can be used as forensic clues as to what the meaning in the moment actually is.

    So, when we hear repeating words or phrases or experience from some kind of significant event, we can quickly record this. And it can be quite useful.

    A good example is that when we hear from a client or prospect that their budgets are frozen for a 60day period what they are usually saying without saying overtly (about 90% or more of the time), is that they are being acquired, we can then use tools & OSI to discover who might be acquiring them & sell into their bosses’ bosses.

    This kind of scenario becomes a pattern, which is a kind of niche KPI. Essentially, we find an obstacle & by the recognition of this obstruction & by the recognition of it’s existence we gain a path to mitigate risk & over come it.

    There are many other patterns & anti-patterns that we’ve discovered over the years. So, life quite often functions in a patterned or in other words relatively discernable organized repeating way. The repetitions might be different & connected to other repeating patterns. But the essentials are there. We can discern some meaning from something significant occurring.

    The patterns may be too big or too small for us to easily see & understand.

    So, that’s where using analytics of different sorts can be extremely useful.

    Preparing For Analysis – Training, Enabling & Using Front Line Personnel

    First you have to know what is significant. This is both art & science.

    Both in our SwiftSel Competitive Intelligence Course & also in our actual support we can help companies to discern this. And to build a model of what to look for.

    We can also create sites that are accessible from all devices PC, Tablet or Phone for your Front-Line Personnel (Salespeople, Customer Success & Support & Field Support People & others) to record when they hear an event that sounds significant without taking much time. Just a point & click & something becomes part of your data lake.

    Training these & other personnel to be your front-line sensor arrays is part of what we do. And this can be relevant to knowing what’s going on continuously. For situational awareness you need people that might become aware.

    So, this solves the problem of acquiring data. Now we look at how to turn it into meaning.

    Meaning – The Elusive But Valuable Resource

    Deriving meaning would need to be an orderly process to make sense.

    Your inputs may be from both structured & highly unstructured data. However, your process of understanding & deriving meaning from all that data needs to be orderly & coherent enough so that we can help you to make sense of real-world risks to mitigate for your business.

    There are five factors that can be extremely important:

    1. Acquiring Relevant Information Ethically.

    We can help to both train your front-line & analytic personnel to know what might be significant & how to record it. This can be rendered accessible with our SwiftSel Ethical Competitive Intelligence Course depending on how your personnel apply this knowledge.

    1. Means of Recording Operational Data That Wasn’t Previously Recorded.

    Commonly most businesses are good at keeping financial data. But operational data, the data about things involved in business processes do not always get the same level of support.

    Do you have the right data to support an Ethical Competitive Intelligence knowledge acquisition process?

    For many groups, the answer is simply no.

    Therefore, ADSC utilizes a full-stack Web & corporate database development platform known as Scriptcase. This is an environment that with our understanding can produce easy to use applications that can run securely on all devices, including PC, Tablet or Phones.

    Acquisition can be only an easy to use click away, with our Operational Acquisition Support Applications.

    These can be designed to fit your exact sales, marketing, support & other relevant business processes.

    1. Analytics – Manual & Automated.

    ADSC has an overall capability within our prevue known as MEM – Market Evolutionary Management.

    Essentially, we use our RAD techniques (Recognize, Analyze & Deploy – We provide both training & support for this) to acquire insight from the combination of ethical OSI & front-line personnel, analyze it & deploy the resulting determinant business rules.

    Commonly, a large effort to record significant events can yield after organized analysis just a few relevant business rules that potentially can be quite valuable.

    What this means is that ordinary people on your front lines can be ready to know that if a certain thing happens at a certain stage of either sell cycle or customer success or support cycle that it might likely mean they should either do or recognize something or both.

    As an example, if a client or prospect says or does something at a specific common point of cycle that they should recognize what it means & do something accordingly. Classically, if a prospect says something significant enough at a stage of sell cycle, this might be relevant. If for instance it’s not helpful enough to the sales process at hand you might want to decrement your forecast to 30%. If it’s positive enough to warrant so, you might want to increment to 75% on your forecast. Obviously, movements in either direction can significantly alter your strategy. And knowing their relevance based on past experience can be really helpful. It depends on what you know & how you judge how relevant it might be.

    The analysis of these kinds of things to provide for a better level of insight & meaning is what we both train & support on. Again this can include manual techniques if a business is small enough or more likely Data Science platforms (commonly open source ones) that we recommend, & Generative AI.

    We can help your team both with manual means to do these things, (if your organization is still sized right for this), & the use of automated analytics for this process.

    ADSC can help your team to select & use free open-source analytics to support this process.

    1. Assembling Information Into A Coherent Picture Of Reality.

    This obviously takes some knowledge & experience as with any complex process. However, we can help both your analysis personnel & your front-line personnel to better achieve this. It will depend on their capabilities & how they apply themselves obviously.

    If you want to do this in-house, we can provide training.

    If instead you want this organized externally by highly experienced personnel, we can support with your & your team to better make this happen.

    1. Attribution

    Competitive Intelligence professionals are usually looking to see how they can gain attribution with Executives for their efforts. The point is to justify their work.

    ADSC can assist in the placement of these Ethical Competitive Intelligence efforts within your relevant processes so that Executives can’t help but notice your value.

    Depending on the level of significance such Ethical Competitive Intelligence knowledge can go beyond the tactical into the strategic for your company executives. The tactical can quickly become strategic. It depends on the clean efficiencies of your overall Ethical Competitive Intelligence process. With the right organizational structure information can bubble up to the higher levels of your team very quickly.

    This is the fifth area where we can provide training & support.

    Summation.

    ADSC can be a valuable partner to your Ethical Competitive Intelligence efforts.

    We can support your creation of an Ethical Competitive Intelligence program from scratch.

    Throughout your Ethical Competitive Intelligence processes, we can both train and/or support your team to better enable:

    1. Data Acquisition.
    2. Secure Online Recording of Such Information.
    3. Analysis Of Information.
    4. Assembling Of The Big Picture Meaning Of Such Information
    5. Attribution

    We can train your team to better deal with these five business processes. Alternatively, we can also organize your team on how to orchestrate these kinds of business processes.

    In this way we can help you & your team to better know on an ongoing basis, the factors relevant to your business involving:

    1. Customers
    2. Prospects
    3. Competitors
    4. External Forces.

    Therefore, we can provide a means for you to either ethically enhance your existing Competitive Intelligence Program or to start such a program from scratch.

    Please contact us as shown below:

    Applied Direct Services Corporation (ADSC) sales@applieddirectservicescorp.com www.applieddirectservicescorp.com

    (416) 362-1963 (Office)

    1-(888) 776-7757 (Toll Free Throughout North American)