Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence: an essential duo
What's the essential way for your company to stay on top, anticipate changes in its market and discover new opportunities for growth?
The answer is "BI", also known as "Business Intelligence" or, for the purists of the French language, "informatique décisionnelle".
What is BI, and what are the challenges? It's a set of actions enabling us to collect a large amount of data (Big Data) via computer processes (algorithms, machine learning, etc.) and to return it reprocessed in a clear and simple way to help decision-makers implement their corporate strategy.
Innovative start-up : Focus on SMEs and ETIs
"Why focus on this type of company in particular?" will tell us the managers of startups or even the major CAC 40 groups?
Quite simply because start-ups think digital right from the start. They take into account the new challenges of today's world by directly choosing the tools adapted to their operations, which will enable them to grow as fast as possible. What's more, we're well aware that our innovative idea requires us to take a regular, in-depth look at our environment, using tools that are mostly free (low-cost BI). Its best weapon is its people, who each have different sources of information and who do the job of "crawler". And why not focus on the big groups (CAC40)? It's simple: they use batteries of expensive tools and people to stay at the top of their sector's food chain.
Anyway, as you'll have gathered by now, we're going to be talking about SMEs, which are full of preconceived ideas about "BI", what they often call " intelligence " by default.
Intelligence, yes, but "BI" above all!
Let's not forget that intelligence is just one component of a broader field known as " Business Intelligence ", which focuses on analyzing and highlighting the strategic risks and threats facing a company, particularly in the face of competition, whereas "BI" (Business Intelligence) is more focused on controlling and optimizing activities and costs through IT solutions. However, the two fields are not incompatible - quite the contrary, in fact. In the final analysis, business intelligence is a cross-functional function, since it enables us to detect opportunities and threats, and we'll classify it as a predictive process, whereas "BI" is more akin to a reactive process.
If we're focusing more on BI here, it's because we're thinking like an SME manager : his primary obsession is to increase sales, so it's in terms of BI that he's talking, even if business intelligence will be part of the process to get there.
How do you make the most of the web when you're an e-commerce SME?
These days, it's easier and easier to find what you ' re looking for, because almost everything is on the web, and the whole world buys on the internet, so how do you get customers to buy from your website rather than from your competitor's ?
If we take the example of an e-commerce SME, there are millions of them all over the world in every possible sector. In France alone, this sector represented over 180,000 e-commerce sites in 2016, with leaders like "Amazon" or "Cdiscount" achieving record sales and no real competition. Yet this is not the reality of the market, since over 96% of online sales are generated by sites with annual sales of less than one million euros (source FEVAD).
To clear the fog in this competitive jungle, tools exist to help these companies stand out from their rivals. Take data analysis software such as Human Responsive ®, one of the first online platforms to provide a global view of the competitive environment. This "SaaS" (Software as a Service) solution lets you know everything about your competitors' marketing campaigns. It's an indispensable tool for making strategic marketing and sales optimization decisions.
In fact, this software was born from a simple observation: if a company is given clear, relevant information to optimize its sales, such as competitors' price changes, promotional actions, new product releases, etc., all of this can be consulted in real time at any given moment. Will they find it useless? Of course not. All companies are keen to receive quality data, which they can exploit and use to gain market share, discover new opportunities, diversify, and so on.
Thanks to new tools such as Human Responsive®, companies that have understood that a digital revolution is underway will finally have solutions to change the way they work and adapt to tomorrow's world.
Article translated from French