It’s breakout time. Time to go public with all of the competitive intelligence work that you have done in the first 10 steps of The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence.

There are at least five important things to do at this stage. Before listing them, let’s review everything in the important prior steps. (Remember that the people and your relationships with them will contribute most to your success.)

1. You spotted a competitive intelligence problem of interest to a senior manager and you delivered a useful answer.
2. Even though you started small, you intentionally began to show the outlines of a compelling vision for competitive intelligence.
3. You established a foundation for the effort and made the first introduction (in a limited way) of your CI brand. A few people began to notice what you were doing.
4. With confidence, you approached your senior manager sponsor with a larger vision for competitive intelligence. Behind the scenes you established some standards to guide you and began acquiring the basic tools. As part of this, you also identified the critical people and groups to help you.
5. All of the prior steps made it possible for you to request a budget, albeit a small one, to begin establishing an infrastructure. With the infrastructure slowly coming online, you began the more overt announcements of what you were doing and how it was important to the organization.

Here we go with five ways to expand the awareness and scope of your competitive intelligence brand.

1. Increase the depth and breadth of information of competitive intelligence information. The key here will be working with functional organizations that have their information silos. Interfacing to their systems will be crucial and you will want to minimize their pain. The alliances with IT will facilitate the interfaces and the sponsorship of senior management will encourage cooperation. Even so, your goal is to elicit cooperation by delivering value back to the same organizations,
2. Publish in other forms within the company. For large organizations it is common for many groups to publish information. Marketing, communications, sales, business development and other groups seek to inform their people about relevant market news. Though each group has its own interests all are united in their interest about competition. You can become very prominent (and appreciated) by volunteering content. Do it. And remember to always include your visible branding elements with each article.
3. Formalize your relationships with external analysts. If your company already subscribes to a set of particular services, call the analysts and introduce yourself. They will be quite interested in knowing you since you will be their customer and, perhaps, you will provide useful information to them over time. From an internal viewpoint, external analysts will be one good primary source for information and perspectives. Becoming known to management as someone that has good industry contacts will be quite valuable to you.
4. Define and deliver custom information for functional groups. For example, by now the financial team knows what you are about and you should have a similar understanding of their activities. Since they focus on numbers, there is much about competitors that they are missing but would find useful. Build them a tool or report. You can do the same thing for business development, sales, marketing and legal teams. In fact, if you are intentional about it, you can begin to be the honest broker of all kinds of information within the company.
5. Create alliances with other business divisions. This recommendation holds for large companies that have many businesses. You will likely find that the competitive intelligence efforts in other divisions are not as advanced as what you have put in place. If that is so, good! That will give you an opportunity to make your sponsor look especially smart as you share with the other division what you have learned and implemented. Of course, you will carefully and rightly acknowledge the important role of the sponsor.

Undoubtedly there are other things that you might do to expand your brand. The key is that the time for cautious modesty is passing and the time for overt promotion has arrived. Without apology and with great confidence you can declare that a professional, impactful competitive intelligence function is in place and operating. Congratulations.

Time to be even bolder. Let’s talk about going beyond the sponsor next.

Next topic is “Go For The Value”.

Here are the 15 steps that we are walking through. Which ones do you think are especially important?

The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence

1. Find The Pain
2. Get The Job
3. Tease The Vision
4. Frame The Foundation
5. Setting Some Standards
6. Introduce The Brand
7. Accumulate The Tools
8. Back To The Vision
9. Secure The Budget
10. Build The Presence
11. Expand the Brand
12. Go For the Value
13. Recruit A Staff
14. Go On The Offense
15. Evangelize The Mission