“I don’t need the exact figure. Just give me the ballpark number.”

This is how I sometimes do business when I am trying to buy a new car. When I am early on in deciding which car to buy, knowing that one of the candidates is about $25,000 and the other one is about $40,000 is enough information for me. The ballpark number is a useful approximation for my initial purpose. (Later I will bargain about the exact car and sales price.)

In competitive intelligence, we are often asked to assign a number to something a competitor is doing.

For instance, our management might want to know how much research and development money has been spent on the latest product from our competitor. This isn’t a number that most companies will report publicly. So what do we do? Give up? No, rather we fall back on the article of competitive intelligence faith that there is always an ethical way to give a good answer.