Confessions of a Corporate Spy

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And I'm generally faster than an amateur, because it takes experience to know where to look and how to elicit information from sources who might otherwise be unwilling to talk. Most competitive-intelligence professionals focus on a single industry, and I've done a lot of work in financial services intelligence. But I'm hesitant to specialize in a sector. I'd rather develop expertise in hard-to-get elicitation.

It's a difficult skill to duplicate and impossible to offshore. Speed matters, because sometimes competitive intelligence is a race. In one unusual case, a small, boutique marketing firm focused on pharmaceuticals had discovered a potential partnership opportunity for a pharmaceutical distribution deal, but it appeared to hinge on being the first to communicate with the holder of a patent in Asia.

The firm asked me to find the U. Judicious use of Google Translate and rudimentary understanding of international patent filings led to a name, which led to a phone number for a lawyer in New Hampshire a few minutes later. Most jobs aren't finished quite this fast. I usually spend some time talking through a company's broad strategy to identify the kind of information that would best serve its needs, then build a list of key intelligence topics and questions to address.

From there, we work through the list as budget and urgency allow. Typically, a client will commission a competitive-intelligence report looking for answers to broad problems.

For example, a soft-drink start-up found capital to expand but didn't fully understand the market in New York City and Philadelphia. It hired me as a subcontractor through an agency to call around to Whole Foods stores and corner bodegas, eliciting information about how various obscure new brands of soda were selling and at what price, to provide a baseline for comparison. I've found a big difference in attitude toward these questions when I'm asking a sales clerk about individual brands.

Ask about the store's overall sales, and the reaction is incredulous and hostile. Ask how many cases of that overpriced kombucha they sell in a week, and the reaction is effusive.

Managers care about protecting their own information. The information of their partners? Would it be worth it to try for New York first? How much could we sell this for in Brooklyn? How many units could we sell? In how many stores? If you have only enough capital to experiment in a couple of places at once, the value of the data resolves into real focus.

Once a start-up sodamaker knows how much product a comparable competitor moves in a week, it's managerial math to compare costs between cities and pick one.

Competitive-intelligence tools are usually a bit more mundane. Most of the background secondary research can be conducted with nothing more than an Internet connection and solid research skills. Unless the target business is small and keeps a low profile. Businesses without a long track record, significant revenue, or many employees will be relatively opaque, even with the most expensive research tools. A host of crowdsourcing tools has emerged to fill the gap, with wide variations in reliability.

Confessions of a Corporate Spy – Got Ethics?

Glassdoor, for example, tends to overrepresent disgruntled employees in its commentary. Yelp can give a very broad sense of a company's strengths and weaknesses, but I find it's rare to see entries that aren't either obvious fluffery written by the company's employees and their friends or hit pieces of dubious credibility likely written by competitors. Yelp began filtering its reviews a few years ago, and I find its reasons for hiding reviews to be opaque enough to raise questions about how much influence a business has on what is to be seen.

Sites such as RipoffReport. Still, the postings on complaint boards themselves are of questionable intelligence value because of the obvious biases. I get more out of making direct contact with people who have posted negative reviews. I am fond of pulling phone numbers and email addresses from Jigsaw. Jigsaw--recently purchased by Salesforce--allows its members to trade contact information for corporate contacts.

Give Jigsaw some business card data, and you will be able to get some for a different contact in return. The more people who use contact data you have entered, the more site credit you receive to access more contacts. It's primarily a sales tool, of course, with sales reps looking for more purchasing managers, but the intelligence value is obvious.

I'm waiting to see what happens with a start-up called InfoArmy, which is attempting to build a team of contributors to write competitive-intelligence reports on small and medium-size businesses. The contributors are paid a little bit to create a report, then get a piece of the revenue any time InfoArmy sells a download of it. So will these folks, whoever they might be, write high-quality reports--or will they write lots of reports?

In one case, a relatively small information-security-auditing firm with a particularly Web-savvy sales manager asked me to identify as many of a competitor's customers as I could. He had an inkling that the competitor might be screwing up audits under a new standard. Happily enough, I discovered that the target company had liked a bunch of otherwise unrelated companies on its Facebook page.

This simplified the research down to calling a representative sample of the companies linked through the Facebook fan page to confirm my hypothesis--that the social-media manager had friended all the company's clients--and weaseling more data from each. The job isn't complete until a client has the information necessary to make a decision.

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I like to produce a report heavy on direct quotes. It's more than color; it's boardroom ammunition. One of the quintessential problems with competitive intelligence is getting anyone to act on the data. A good journalist understands that it takes some emotional resonance to sell a story. But format can vary greatly, depending on the urgency of the need for the data and the intended audience.

When I'm conducting research for a company's internal team, as often as not, it just wants results, raw. When the ultimate audience is corporate investors and analysts, I know I will be contributing to a PowerPoint presentation. I hate PowerPoints; they tend to strip the intelligence of both its emotional impact and the depth of quantitative data needed for informed decision making.

The grand goal of good intelligence gathering has to be more than a pretty deck. There has to be a focus on actionable intelligence, the kind of information that lets you make decisions. Clients reach out for help with a competitive-intelligence problem because they're confused and, perhaps, afraid of making the wrong strategic decision. The idea of sending someone to quietly ask questions at a Talbots or to trawl through Facebook postings looking for the person trashing your business online has a mildly theatrical element to it.

That speaks to the emotion underlying the industry--fear. The goal of competitive intelligence, ultimately, is to reduce anxiety about making decisions under uncertainty and with limited information. I suppose that's why I can feel like a con artist at times, even when I'm asking polite, honest, upfront questions. At the end of the day, that's what I'm selling--confidence. What the author will seek to do or learn on your behalf, the likelihood he will get what he's after, and the time it will take.

Stake out your competitor's booth at a trade show to see what people are saying about your product: Identify which of your competitor's former executives are most likely to come to work for you: Competitive intelligence works best as part of a broader marketing and operations strategy, with a team probing for specific weaknesses to match against its company's core competitive advantages. The trick to finding good answers is asking clever questions. Create a list of all the companies that provide a product or service that can get between you and your customers.

The best way to start may be to simply ask your customers from whom else they have considered purchasing. Be up front--tell them you're trying to improve your services. The tough part here is identifying indirect competitive threats, the sort of products and services that lie outside of the marketing-defined idea of competing products.

The classic example from business school: Coke competes with Pepsi. It also competes with water. Examine the capabilities of potential competitors as much as the actual products in play. You want to target your intelligence gathering to expose competitors' weaknesses against your strengths. But what is your company supposed to be good at? Do you know your core competitive advantage?

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The questions you will want to answer stem directly from the strategy you are pursuing and the strategies competitors are pursuing. The hiring process can be an opportunity to conduct some competitive research. This is an ugly and callous sentiment, but it's up to the job candidate to protect most kinds of competitive information. He is a Mensan, and his interests include mountaineering, martial arts, meditation, guitar, scuba diving, surfing, foreign languages, Eastern philosophies, and foreign travel.

Home on the Strange was his second novel. He currently lives in a converted and fortified former women's prison in Jalisco, Mexico, with his wife Laurie, and daughter Maya. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime. NSA Operative Dragos has blown a mission and lies in a Tunisian hospital awaiting certain death, when two men offer him a new life working in Corporate Black Ops.

He accepts and sets off into a strange world where creativity is key, Co-Operatives are bizarre, guns are frowned upon, and weaponry consists of martial arts moves and a device known as a spinal separator. At first he finds the work thrilling and exotic, but soon discovers that this form of espionage is far more dangerous than the one he left behind.

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