Did you feel that? That’s the squeeze of budgets and belts tightening across every company, industry, and team.
In a tricky economic climate, one of the best ways to be indispensable to your company is to be the one driving initiatives that cut costs and boost productivity.
Fortunately for us, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken a huge step towards helping us all do our jobs better and faster. When used well, AI can function as your assistant, your data analyst, and your brainstorming partner.
Have you heard this one? “You’re not going to lose your job to AI. You’re going to lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI.”
This is not hyperbole, so embrace the challenge and enjoy the ride. Let’s put AI to work.
In times of economic uncertainty, pulling down the blinds and waiting for a turnaround is never a good move. Your competitors are sending challenges and opportunities your way, whether you’re watching or not - and your company’s quick response to those could mean the difference between a stellar year of growth or not making it to the other side.
Be the one who spots these opportunities and enables smart decisions, and you are the hero!
You may have noticed your sales team struggling, too. All the demo decks in the world aren’t going to help them hit quotas if they’re not aware of what competitors are saying and doing. Competitive intelligence can help them overcome objections and counter the messaging competitors are using against you.
Competitive intelligence can help you identify areas where your company can cut costs, improve efficiency, and invest in initiatives and products that provide the highest return on investment. For example, you might find gaps in a competitor’s product or messaging, or notice that a strategy is working particularly well for them and choose to implement something similar.
Finally, by adopting or improving your competitive intelligence program, you're contributing to the resilience of your company during challenging times. Providing value in this way can help enhance your job security and may even open up new opportunities for you.
AI can improve and speed up the process of collecting, analyzing, and filtering information related to your competitors, your market, and industry trends.
Putting AI to work for your business will save you time on manual data collection, analysis, and curation. And of course, time is money.
It can also surface vital competitor insights in real time, allowing you to anticipate new threats and react quickly. And the insights collected empower your sales teams to sell more. In fact, we’ve noticed that when our customers start using Battlecards to distribute competitor intel, win rates increase up to an average of 30%.
If you’re keeping track, we’re saving money when AI:
So, exactly WHICH parts of competitive intelligence is AI best suited to improve for a cost-saving boost?
Traditional competitive intelligence programs often begin as an ad-hoc effort to “keep an eye on the competition.” You may have a list of website pages, social profiles, and review sites you check when you have time.
But this is beyond tedious, so it often falls to the bottom of the priority list before you’ve had time to realize the benefits. And in the meantime you’re missing out on valuable intelligence and important money-making or saving opportunities.
Powerful competitive intelligence AI (like Kompyte’s!) scans over 500 million data points every day - just like a human would.
Only, a human with a super-speedy computer could barely open that many website tabs in a day, let alone scan each one and determine if it had changed compared to the day before. If you imagine the cost of several full-time employees doing nothing but opening and comparing websites for changes, it’s obvious how AI saves money!
Even if somehow you could see a side-by-side comparison of every competitor web page, social profile, review site, job postings, etc. etc., how many of those differences would you spot? And once you did, how long would it take you to decide if it’s important and if so, how to classify and then share the insight?
This kind of “Where’s Waldo” approach is not sustainable. You’re going to miss something, you’re going to tire of it, and your team will miss out.
Competitive intelligence AI does all that analysis and filtering for you. Kompyte, for example, spots the changes, filters out the noise, and categorizes the important insights in real time.
Some competitive intelligence tools use AI that is considerably assisted by a human workforce of “analysts.” While some users like this approach, it also opens up opportunities for missed and inaccurate data.
Only AI can continually monitor the entire competitive landscape, providing in-the-moment information, enabling you and your team to react quickly, making data-driven decisions that save time and money.
When choosing a competitive intelligence AI solution, it’s important to find out how “real time” you should expect the insights to be.
As your company grows, new competitors enter the market, and the demand for more and more insights increases, only a true AI-powered competitive intelligence program can scale with you.
Example: You start offering several distinct types of products, which requires several distinct sales teams, all needing competitive enablement assets, like Battlecards. A team of human analysts can’t just work harder and double their output. You’ll need to hire more people, train them, and set up scalable processes.
With AI-powered competitive intelligence automation, you just add another competitor, fill in some details on a new Battlecards to distribute the insights it collects, and you’re ready to go! With Kompyte, you can even set up distinct teams of users, limiting access to only the feeds, Reports, and Battlecards they need.
Some AI-powered competitive intelligence tools can even help you detect new competitors. In Kompyte, for example, you can discover other brands who compete for the same keywords in SEO and in advertising.
I’ve recently shared how ChatGPT can help you create Battlecards in a flash and speed up sales call prep immensely. Its superpower is the ability to analyze large amounts of data to identify trends and patterns that would be difficult for humans to see.
While it’s important to fact check the results, and you won’t be able to spot changes to competitor web pages and other properties, ChatGPT and the like can save you a tremendous amount of time with a first draft of sales enablement and marketing assets such as Battlecards and competitor overviews for call prep.
Incorporating AI into your competitive intelligence strategy can lead to significant cost savings while providing accurate, real-time insights that drive better decision-making.
By leveraging AI-powered tools, your company can stay ahead of the competition, respond quickly to threats, take advantage of opportunities, and thrive, even in tough economic times.
If you’d like to see how AI-powered competitive intelligence can save YOUR company money, request your custom demo now.