Best Practices for Purchasing Competitive Intelligence Tools and Services

Competitive intelligence strategists know that over the past few years, global socioeconomic turbulence has completely upheaved virtually every industry and organization across the planet. With the onset of remote work, the wave of new technologies and their ever-changing risks and regulations, and unpredictable markets, there’s been a massive paradigm shift across the business spectrum. 

The pressure has never been greater for a competitive intelligence analyst to find the most up-to-date and comprehensive company data to help their stakeholders remain agile in their business decisions and stay ahead of the competition. Not only must those managing competitive and market intelligence provide robust, accurate reporting, they must do it faster than ever before. 

So, what’s a savvy, ambitious competitive intelligence researcher to do? What they’re already good at—researching all the competitive tools at their disposal. We’re here to help make that decision easier.

Evaluate the current competitive intelligence landscape

Let’s start with your current competitive intelligence. Maybe you have too many blind spots in your data sets, resulting in competitor profiles that are incomplete at best or completely inaccurate at worst. Maybe your existing platform is too complex and cumbersome to use and navigate, with too many “features” and buttons that are more gimmicky than beneficial to your competitor research. Or maybe your competitive intelligence as a whole is far too tedious and labor-intensive with little to show in return for your time and energy. You know your stakeholders are holding you to a standard that will require far more reporting, but you worry about the effort it might take to keep up.

Eventually, you decide to look at alternative competitive intelligence tools and services. Research executives, strategists, and others in charge of their company’s competitive intelligence analytics switch from one competitor research tool to another for a variety of reasons. Some tools and services offer specific features and capabilities that are well-suited for unique needs that a company might not find elsewhere. But speaking holistically, the simple fact of the matter is not all competitive intelligence is created equal.

There are four key factors you should consider before purchasing any competitive intelligence solution. And whatever unique needs you may have, try evaluating any potential tool or service using each of these factors as your guide. If you do, you may just find yourself with improved competitor research that puts you ahead of the rest.

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Four factors to consider when adopting a new competitive intelligence solution

Factor 1: Does it give you access to the data your competitive intelligence needs?

Accurate, insightful competitive intelligence demands a diverse range of data. Does the competitive intelligence solution you’re considering offer the content you require for an in-depth understanding of your competitors? For example, does it access all the latest company data, news, filings, and media mentions?

Factor 2: Does it streamline your competitor research—or make it more complicated?

Tagging on another process, tool, or service to an already convoluted workflow probably isn’t going to make your research any easier or more efficient. Instead of searching for something that adds to existing complexities—or, even worse, merely replaces one complicated workflow with another—ask yourself if the competitive intelligence solution you’re considering streamlines your intelligence to enhance what works while repairing what doesn’t.

Factor 3: Is it reliable, credible, and trustworthy?

Competitive intelligence professionals know the importance of keeping company data safe, and with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and new language learning models (LLMs), it’s crucial to ensure your competitive intelligence services are both credible and private to you. You must be cautious using generative AI because you can’t afford to give bad information to stakeholders, so must use only credible sources. Source transparency is a must when evaluating any new solution. In addition, you need to make sure the documents you’re uploading, the reports you’re generating, and the intelligence you’re filtering won’t be saved and used by anyone else but you. 

Factor 4: Does it enhance the data you’re using?

Think about whether or not a potential competitive intelligence tool or service makes data wrangling an efficient process. With it, how much time will you spend tracking down data versus actually strategizing? Sure, collecting information together and then data cleaning it is part of competitive intelligence. But what if there was a solution out there that did the heavy lifting for you when it comes to data wrangling?

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Nexis+ AI^TM for Competitive Intelligence

Consider Nexis+ AI when answering the four factors we just outlined. As a decision intelligence platform using generative AI to transform company research, Nexis+ AI gives you access to a diverse range of data sets, streamlines research, improves collaboration, and enhances your data. It combines trusted content sources with an experience that simplifies and complements your competitor research workflow in ways that save you time. Here’s how it measures up.

Global breadth and depth of data

No other service or tool has LexisNexis’ collection of company, news, legal, and patent data. With Nexis+ AI, you can search into company and news data for more than a million businesses, reducing the need to bounce between tools or manually pull information from a vast array of sources. With company profiles with a view of the latest company reports, media, and filings, all from a single screen. Plus, Nexis+ AI tools help you gain insight from news and long documents faster using AI-powered insight generation.

A more efficient and effective intel research workflow

Nexis+ AI streamlines and simplifies your existing workflow—so you can organize, analyze, and share your findings all within a single data workspace.

Optimize your workflow quickly, efficiently, and comprehensively by being able to:

• Collect important findings and critical information in one place
• Quickly determine if an article is worth reading by using AI-generated news article summaries 
• Gain insight from long documents faster using AI-powered analysis to reveal insight
• Store quotes, insight and sources in seconds, to make it easier to craft the narrative of your analysis
• Generate reports using the research you’ve curated, and even include automatic citations for easy referencing
• Use custom outlines to tailor the generated report according to the sources and findings you want highlighted, making your generated first draft more relevant to the story you want to tell

If you’re ready to transform your competitive intelligence capabilities, learn more about how Nexis+ AI can empower your team to get smart fast on businesses that matter to you—from sources you can trust.