Five Great Places To Scrounge For CI Data
Photo by Artificial Photography on Unsplash.
If your professional life could be summed up by one movie character, what character would it be?
That’s easy for me, in part because it’s my question and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, but also because I have the perfect candidate: Hendley, the James Garner character from the classic WWII movie The Great Escape.
In the movie, all the POWs had a role in planning and executing the escape. Richard Attenborough was the mastermind, Donald Pleasance the forger, David McCallum and Charles Bronson the tunnel rats, Steve McQueen the distraction, and James Garner was the scrounger.
If you asked James Garner to find you an electrical transformer, bank-note paper, and a family-size jar of elderberry jam in Nazi Germany, he could do it, through a little slight-of-hand and some well-placed bribes.
I relate to this character for two huge reasons:
James Garner was a marvelous actor and I so wish I looked more like him; and
When it comes to my professional life, I’ve been a scrounger, too.
You learn to scrounge when you’re thrust into a competitive-intelligence role without a shred of CI training, which happened to me early in my sports-marketing days.
If a big client asks you for the size of the market and how competitive products are selling, how can you get that information?
In the case of the sports-collectibles market, we had two important resources: a large dealer network who would tell us practically anything, and a couple of clients willing to supply data on their own operations.
From those two data points we extrapolated the size of the market, and then as we added more data points we provided an even more granular picture of the market, down to the product, configuration, and channel.
There was no guidebook to doing this stuff; we scrounged, we scrounged some more, and when all else failed, we used our noodle.
Speaking as a scrounger who considers scrounging to be one of the key skills in competitive intelligence, here are some of my favorite places to scrounge for CI data:
Photo by Umberto Cofini on Unsplash.
Your Own Data
You’d be amazed what’s in your own data, particularly the databases that live outside of sales or marketing.
For instance, at one insurance company we created custom Salesforce queries to extract detailed claimant information from their claims database, and then ran it against the buyer profile to identify their best customers – not the customers who buy most often, but the customers that were most profitable for the insurer.
No one had ever done that at that particular insurance company, and the results went against their long-held marketing profile.
They were marketing to people who would buy and claim; we suggested they market to people who buy and not claim.
They didn’t, of course; it was too much of a mind-warp at the wrong time. But even if they come ‘round to that approach eventually – which they probably will – the revelations will still be there for them.
You know a lot more than you realize about your best customers. Accept that, then go in there and get it.
PDFs
When I was doing CI and network analysis for a large dental insurer, I thought it would be helpful to put all insurers’ networks on one big spreadsheet, so everyone could see who really had the most dentists.
The problem was that network data was only available in PDF form via radius-delimited queries from the individual insurers, and on the benefit sites of large institutional customers – state governments and multistate employers.
I came up with ways to quickly turn PDFs of directories into spreadsheets of dentists. It wasn’t glamorous work; it involved a lot of overlapping-radius searches and de-duping Excel files. But ultimately I was able to give recruiters a detailed contact list – and more than that: We found that competitors often had many inactive listings (what we called “dead guys”) in their directories.
We were able to turn dead guys into a marketing advantage – and it’s still a point of differentiation, 10 years on.
PDFs are a pain to work with. But once you learn how, they can contain invaluable data that no one else has, because no one wants to take the time to extract the snail from the shell.
Photo by Moshe Schneider on Unsplash.
10-Ks and 10-Qs
I love financial reports because they tell you things, though they often do it obliquely.
For instance, good luck trying to find results from a given line of insurance in an insurer’s financial report. However, if you have a result that combines multiple lines, you can often find information on the lines other than the one you’re trying to collect information on, and then simply subtract to get to the number you want.
You can also use this approach when data from several countries is lumped together, and you need the data for one.
Just as with your own databases, data extraction is the challenge. A financial report is like an escape room. You’re not going to be handed the key right away; you have to proceed stepwise and use a little cunning to find your way out.
Can you do it? Sure – if you want to.
Scholarly Research
A travel client was looking for data on missed connections. The problem is that while the government tracks cancelled and delayed flights, it doesn’t track and measure missed connections because they occur on an individual level.
However, there’s scholarly research on the number of missed connections that’s as statistically significant as government data.
If you haven’t used Google Scholar yet, start today. If there’s a paywall between you and the data you want, ask your employer for a subscription, or better yet, find a friend in academia – a teacher or student – and use their sign-in.
A big advantage of scholarly research is that it’s often seen as being above reproach. In a business world where some people like to question everything, it’s a relief to have a source accepted at face value.
Common Sense
There’s such an unwillingness to use common sense and connect the dots that are out there, waiting to be connected.
Hey, CI practitioners, I know it’s not your fault. Too many managers want everything cited and quantified to the nth degree before accepting it as fact, when the real fact is that a little logic goes a long way in this business.
Here’s an example: A different travel client was looking for market-share data on sales of an ancillary product via airlines’ purchase path.
Every airline was selling roughly the same product the same way at the same price. Would it not stand to reason that individual airlines’ share of the market for this ancillary product would closely track their overall market share?
While nothing confirms this hypothesis, there is absolutely nothing in any independent research, financials, or scholarly research to contradict it. So can we please be okay with saying this is how it is?
Too often CI practitioners are held to higher standards of proof than even the scholarly community. That’s more than wrong; that shows ignorance of what CI is.
If the movie character that sums up your professional life is the Lady Gaga character from A Star Is Born, good on you. Just don’t forget the scroungers that helped get you there.