If you managed things right, people all over the company are beginning to notice the competitive intelligence work that you are doing. Your name is known. Probably they have heard about your website and seen at least one of the analyses that you completed. Things are really bubbling and other senior managers are taking notice. Your initial senior manager sponsor is happy with what you have done and just a little proud of your work and their role in getting it started. Now you will expand your effort to go for the value (to the larger organization).

The next step is very important and sensitive.

Simply put, you have to move beyond your initial sponsor to deliver value to other senior managers. Why? Because effective competitive intelligence (CI) generally moves “up and over” in an organization (rather than remaining isolated in one group). This reflects the simple truth that long term CI value is needed by multiple senior strategy managers. Significantly, most are not getting such information that is researched, interpreted and delivered as needed.

Your goal is to get your initial sponsor’s help to facilitate a competitive intelligence discussion among their peers.

If you haven’t lived with senior managers up to now, it’s time for you to move into their neighborhood. Assuming that you don’t get promoted, the most likely way to accomplish this is to be invited and the best person to issue the invitation is the manager that you have already helped prosper. Once you are invited the goal is to establish relationships that can endure. In other words, you want a recurring invitation that goes beyond formal meetings (and that can be issued by more than one senior manager). Ideally, you will nurture relationships that result in unguarded discussions over time. It is through the informal discussions that you will discover the true pain points (or opportunities, if you wish) that present openings for CI to make a strategic impact.

There are some initial steps that are useful.

1. Create and present a short summary of the CI function that has been developed.
2. Give an overview of the CI processes and techniques that are new to the company.
3. Present summaries of key competitors and their strategies.

Your challenge is to create a public backlog of CI projects.

Here is how you do it in 5 steps.

1. Develop a template for key intelligence topics. There is much information about this on the web. If you prefer, call it a one page statement of work (SOW).  The SOW format is used by you and senior managers to define a competitive intelligence project. Work with your initial sponsor to design the format that works best in your organization among senior managers.
2. Still working with your initial sponsor, brainstorm a list of potential projects. This has the advantage of ensuring that the initial sponsor’s projects are included and that the positioning and phrasing is correct for the audience. This list will be a starting point for the next step.
3. Meet individually with each senior manager. Respond to any general questions that they have about your work to date. Explain how their organization has been or could be involved with competitive intelligence. Show them the list that you started with your initial senior management sponsor and ask if there are important projects that they would like to add.
4. Assuming that projects are added by other managers, request a follow up meeting to go over the SOW for the projects that they added. Importantly, get a deadline for each project. That is, have each senior manager tell you when the answer is needed. A non-obvious hint is that your SOW draft should be good but not too good. The senior manager should make their imprint in an obvious way so that they can feel ownership.
5. Finally, pull the complete list together and request a meeting of all contributors to review the priorities for the projects. Now you really need your senior manager sponsor because they will help you manage this discussion. It is likely that there will be differences of opinion about the most critical projects. The goal is to finish with a list of 3-5 projects for the next six months. Your role is to be an honest broker in determining what is most important for the overall company. Be careful.

Actively publicize the value that you are working toward delivering.

This is a contrast to the initial project that you did when you intentionally kept it low key. As mentioned in Expand the Brand, the time for temerity is passed. You have to accept that you are responsible for serious answers to important questions posed by multiple senior managers. Accordingly, you will want to get help from the organization to get these answers and there is no productive way to do this without proclaiming your intentions.

The publicity should include a web page for each project on your CI website, explicit descriptions of status and plans for each project and repeated presentations to interested groups about the project goals. Undoubtedly there are more possibilities that may be appropriate for your organization.

How do you get help to complete these projects? That is the next topic in The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence series.

Next topic is “Recruit a Staff”.

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