The goal of your market and competitive intelligence efforts should be to achieve strategic alignment throughout your company.
We’ve all seen it before. Your team, consultants or even analyst firms are brought in to perform some market research to kickoff the next phase of growth at your company. A document is produced. You review, meet, make a couple decisions and then go back to work.
To truly get your broader team aligned with these decisions and your new vision, it requires a different approach that makes market research part of your daily life.
In this post we’ll cover how to achieve strategic alignment by using market research data and why it’s so important.
3 Steps to Achieving Alignment
Making market research part of your team’s daily workflow and culture will help to achieve strategic alignment over time. It will also help keep you closer to evolutions and disruptions in your market.
Here are three ways to market research part of your team’s daily life:
Accessibility
A lot of your company may not have the time to fully understand the ins and outs of a larger piece of market research. By giving them small bits of information every day, instead of dropping a large report on them every few months, it makes it easier for them to follow along.
Create a shared list of competitors, partners and even key customers. Making sure your employees know who is who will pay dividends in their daily motions.
I’ve also used visual market maps that group comparators into bubbles that are easy to visualize. This was the first slide I’d bring up any time I’d encounter a sales rep trying to sell against a non-competitor, or an engineer suggesting a feature that wasn’t in our vision.
Continuous
Our teams at Dyn, Oracle and now York IE have always used Slack channels for market news. Team members post articles from competitors or other companies in similar industries, sometimes with a quick note about what they find interesting, so we all can stay in the know.
I’ve always been amazed at how active these market news channels are. You’ll see various team members with interests and skills related to various articles speak up, share thoughts, agree/disagree, etc. And best of all, they’ll use these market insights in their daily work.
Digestible
Smaller, more memorable anecdotes about the market tend to be more successful at aligning teams. When I led product management for Dyn’s email delivery, for example, I’d toss out industry acquisitions and funding announcements to get the sales reps and engineers excited about their involvement.
There are still times when bigger, more strategic research is needed, but daily market research is just as important.
Help Employees Embrace Market Research
At York IE, we developed our Fuel platform to help companies do market research differently and to make strategic alignment easier to achieve. We do so by making market research more accessible, continuous and digestible — and at a lower cost — than traditional methods.
People like market and competitive intelligence and want to embrace it more in their jobs. To truly achieve strategic alignment, companies should make it easier for them!
Sign up for Fuel and start making market research part of your daily workflow.
