Curriculum Vitae Engagements Licensing Internet Commercialization Consulting Computer White Paper Business Forms Seminars Incubators Services Engagements Marketing Email Program Marketing Seminars

Here are the steps to implement a competitive intelligence and data gathering system for a company with sales of less than $50 million per year for a total system cost of less than $10,000.  Need help send me an email.   Tools: Mailcast ($499) Outlook ($100) Frontpage 2000 ($200) Operating web site or network accessible public folders Implementation Procedure: Collection of Stakeholder names Make a list of all possible stakeholders who might help in collecting information about your competitors. These could be, but certainly are not limited too, company employees, suppliers, trade magazine free lance writers, trade association employees, teachers, consultants, bankers, distributors, dealers and customers. Stakeholders are anyone who might benefit from helping you or your company become successful. It is usually a broader and longer list than most people recognize.   You will probably develop a list of 25-50 collectors. You need to get their email address and their first and last names. Their names allows you to personalize your email to them and increase your ability to get their cooperation   This is particularly true for CI collectors that do not work for your company. The email program should have the capability to personalize the email mess age in the form. Dear Joe:, Dear Jill , and allow you to keep their email address confidential format he rest of your collector list. Nothing is more annoying than to receive an important and email and see your email address and everyone else the email has gone to at the top of your email message.   Send a personalized email to your collectors. Next draft an email to everyone on your collector list. The email should describe your CI activity and specify the names of the companies you wish to collect information. You will need to be specific and also describe the kind of information you wish to collect. You may wish to specify at a minimum, articles, web site links, press releases, articles in local papers and magazines, rumors or street talk about one of the target companies heard at trade shows, association meetings, bid openings, from dealers distributors or any organization in the distribution channel, purchasing, quality control problems and other items that fit your specific needs.   The more specific you are the better. Do not worry about your individual sources qualifying or verifying their own information. You will be better able to do this with your own corroborating information from your other collector sources. Use Outlook to archive CI data Use the "rules" feature of Outlook to automatically sort your incoming emails into appropriate folders. For example, designate a folder with the name of competitor A. Invoke a rule to examine all incoming email with the name competitor A in the subject line of in the body of the text and send this email to your competitor A folder. Invoke similar rules for other competitors. As you become more proficient with rules you cal also designate other rules to scan the email and archive the information into other folders designated competitor A/sales or competitor A/pricing or competitor A/manufacturing. You get the idea. Publish CI data to: a public access folder a web site with or without password entry requirements   Install this system in your business for data collection: Here is an email program that you can combine with Microsoft Outlook rules and a web editor and make yourself a slick competitive intelligence collection and publishing system for your business. The email program costs only $149 and can be purchased and downloaded from this site.