Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence: an essential duo
What is 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', or Business Intelligence.
What is BI and what are the challenges? It's a set of actions that make it possible to collect a large amount of data (Big Data) using IT processes (algorithms, machine learning, etc.) and to reprocess it 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 directors of start-ups or major CAC 40 groups?
Quite simply because start-ups think directly in digital terms from the outset. They take into account the new challenges of today's world by directly choosing the tools that are best suited to their operations and that will enable them to grow as quickly as possible. What's more, it's aware that its innovative idea requires it to take a regular, in-depth look at its 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 work of "crawling". Why not focus on the major groups (CAC40)? It's simple: they use batteries of expensive tools and people to stay at the top of the food chain in their sector.
In short, as you will have gathered by now, we're going to be talking about SMEs, who are full of preconceived ideas about 'BI', which they often call ' intelligence ', because of a lack of language.
Intelligence, yes, but above all 'BI'!
Let's start by reminding ourselves that monitoring is just one component of a wider branch known as ' Business Intelligence ', which focuses on analysing and highlighting the strategic risks and threats to a company, particularly in the face of competition, whereas 'BI' (Business Intelligence) is more focused on controlling and optimising activities and costs using IT solutions. The two fields are not incompatible - quite the contrary, in fact. Ultimately, business intelligence is a cross-functional function, since it enables opportunities and threats to be detected.
If our focus here is more on 'BI', it's because we're thinking like an SME manager : his primary obsession is to increase his turnover, so it's in terms of 'BI' that he's talking, even if business intelligence will be part of the process to achieve it.
How do you make the most of the web when you're an SME in e-commerce?
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 more than 180,000 e-commerce sites in 2016, with leaders such as Amazon and Cdiscount achieving record sales with no real competition. However, this is not the reality of the market, since over 96% of online sales are generated by sites with annual sales of less than €1 million (source: FEVAD).
To clear up the fog in this competitive jungle, tools exist to help these companies stand out from their competitors. 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 gives you everything you need to know about your competitors' marketing campaigns. It's an essential tool for making strategic marketing and sales optimisation decisions.
This software was born out of a simple observation: if a company is given clear and relevant information to optimise its sales, such as competitors' price changes, promotional actions, new products, etc., it can be consulted in real time at any given moment. Will they find it useless? Of course not. All companies want and need high-quality data that they can exploit and use to gain market share, discover opportunities, diversify, and so on.
Thanks to these new tools, such as Human Responsive®, companies that have understood that a digital revolution is underway will finally have the solutions they need to change the way they work and adapt to tomorrow's world.
Article translated from French