How Competitive Intelligence Can Drive Innovation in B2B Product Design
The B2B world is high-stakes and competitive, with bigger investments, longer sales cycles, and multiple players in a crowded space. In this case, you’ll want to gain a strategic advantage in whatever way you can. While you can turn inwards and put in effort there, it’s also important to get a little nosey and take a peek at what your competitors are up to.
Competitive intelligence (CI) doesn’t just show you the strategies your competitors are employing, but it also reveals what’s working, what’s not, and opportunities no one has taken advantage of yet. It’s not just about your actual competitors but also staying competitive through data. If you’re looking for a tried-and-true way to get the insights your products need to stand out, here’s how CI can help you lead the way.
Identify market gaps
CI can reveal all those gaps in the market and demand for services and products that businesses don’t have an adequate solution for. It does so by tracking your competitors and spotting weaknesses in their offerings. As well, it’ll help you understand what customers need through product reviews, social listening, and customer feedback.
Perhaps there are obvious pain points that aren’t being addressed, or that just aren’t delivering the type of value customers are looking for. Those are opportunities for your business to swoop in and introduce new features or offerings as a solution. Especially if these market gaps aren’t readily apparent, CI can do some real digging for you.
Track industry trends
Everyone knows that to stay competitive, you need to be proactive and adaptive. After all, the broader market is ever-changing and unpredictable. With CI, you’ll have your finger on the pulse at all times, tracking valuable industry trends for which you’ll want to hop on board.
Competing businesses are often like vultures, circling around those new opportunities and taking advantage of them, so you’ll need to stay ahead. Rather than reacting to new trends once they’re already well-established, you can spot them early and design products that meet those needs. It’s the same concept when consumer behaviors change, or new technologies emerge—you’re more likely to become an early adopter and lead the charge.
Improve product features based on competitor insights
Homing in on your product features and tweaking them based on competitor insights is a top strategy if you want to get more competitive. It’s unrealistic to expect your product to just continue doing well without any product refinement.
Unlike timeless products like QuickBooks and classic welding tools, you don’t necessarily have the evergreen value to stay relevant. Even the best products out there will eventually be outpaced unless you do something about it. But how does competitive intelligence help with that? Competitor insights can reveal a lot more than just a working or failing strategy—it also gives you an idea of what changes and features will resonate with the target audience.
For example, maybe your top competitor, Competitor A, has introduced a new feature in a similar product. Through CI, you find out it hasn’t aligned with the target market. Other than saving yourself from blindly following a competitor, you can find ways to solve a more pressing pain point more effectively.
Promote customer-centric product design
Learning from competitor successes and failures is truly the best way to inform your own strategy. In contrast to B2C, B2B requires a much deeper understanding of what the consumer needs. There’s much less wiggle room for emotional appeal and capitalizing on impulse buys, as these customers want to purchase something that will improve their return on their investment and help them become more efficient.
Every bout of decision-making for your product should be backed by concrete, up-to-date data. And that involves listening to and delivering exactly what customers are looking for. CI can help you do that by showing you what users love and what they’re frustrated with. No more assumptions.
Enhance collaboration across teams
CI isn’t just for product teams alone, either. It’s a resource for teams across your organization that can actually get all stakeholders on the same page. When everyone understands what the customer preferences are, what market trends are on the rise, and how competitors operate, product development becomes less fragmented.
Product teams should never work in isolation, although they oftentimes do. While design matters, these products will also eventually be marketed and sold, which means product, marketing, and sales teams need to interact and collaborate. With CI insights, product teams can incorporate better features, sales teams can position the product more effectively, and marketing can tweak messaging to the product’s advantage.
Making smarter decisions, eliminating the guesswork
In B2B sales, every single product decision should have a rationale behind it. You wouldn’t want to assume that customers want a plethora of features or to add certain ones only to drive them away. To make the process easier, CI can provide the concrete data required to make these smart moves. If you’re debating whether to introduce or remove a new feature, CI will help you figure out if it’s worth investing in.
CI deliverables, such as market reports, detailed competitor profiles, feature comparisons, pricing analysis, customer sentiment analysis, and tons more, will provide useful raw data to work with.
Gain a competitive edge with CI insights from Aqute
Having lots of data is a fantastic asset, but you might as well deem it all useful if you can’t make sense of it. That’s why partnering with a competitive intelligence agency should be your first course of action. Rather than learning the basics of CI from scratch, you can employ a CI agency to scrounge up raw data, interpret it, find patterns, and provide your company with actionable recommendations to meet your goals. While you could go with the DIY approach, a seasoned CI agency will go deeper into your data and give you a play-by-play on what to do and why.
Aqute Intelligence can help you beat your competitors at their game with tailored, competitive intelligence services for your business. Our services span competitor analysis, competitor product research, competitive sales intelligence, and more, so you can choose your preferred intelligence and win at B2B product design.
Ready to gain that edge in the B2B space? Book a call with us to see the difference we can make.
References:
https://www.hotjar.com/blog/market-gaps/
https://www.atlassian.com/fr/agile/product-management/product-operations
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