Business Partner Consulting

The Intelligence Cycle starts and ends with your needs. Business Partner Consulting will interview you and your peers to determine and prioritize elements of the external market place that are essential to your business success. Our understanding of the way you view your decision horizon will help us determine your intelligence TARGETS and TOPICS. From that taxonomy will emerge specific time-based questions that a formal intelligence process can answer.

• TARGETS: major competitors, and niche and emerging competitors.

• TOPICS: specific aspects about your competitors that tell you about their future strategic or tactical direction and include things like their organization, assets, competencies, and their relationships (supply chain, channel, alliances).

We help you define a finite list of targets and topics. That will allow us to generate specific questions to investigate. That specificity produces efficient and targeted collection and analysis of information to give you answers that you can act on.

We collect published and publicly available information from as many sources as is relevant and possible. The precision of Key Intelligence Questions will define information sources – places and people most likely to know relevant information. We specialize in primary interviewing, collecting information others overlook.

We also develop information by building or using existing source networks.

Secondary information sources include:

• News: from the general business, local media, and specialty trade publications

• Databases: information housed in technical repositories of product information as well as other general external sources (such SEC and D&B)

• Gray literature: of competitors’ publicly available white papers, marketing and vision materials

Primary human information sources include:

• Internal experts: Sales reps, R&D staff, Marketers, finance and manufacturing specialists, Human Resources

• External experts: trade journalists, industry/equity analysts, trade show/conference participants and attendees, customers, suppliers, channel partners, other professionals

Primary Source Interviewing

Business Partner Consulting specializes in gathering primary information from live persons.

• We use standard interviewing and elicitation in phone conversations as well as during in person, including trade show, contacts. BPC identifies key individuals to contact for insights, explanation, or information relevant to research questions.

• Secondary information -- what has already been published -- is an essential foundation for good competitive analysis. From experience, BPC knows that the best information -- insights that predate observable actions -- resides in someone's head.

If its been published, we advise our clients that competitors could have already read and interpreted it.

We employ primary interviewing techniques, not only to gather information, but also as part of our approach to determining your key intelligence needs.

We advise on the most effective way to store and share your raw and finished competitive information. Those means must conform to your tastes, interests, and staff and IT resources. Storage is an easily overlooked link between collecting and analyzing information. At other times, storage and retrieval technologies give the illusion of automating the entire competitive analysis process.

• Hardcopy storage: cost effective and quick...sufficient until specific information processing “mission-outcome” definitions emerges.

• Manual electronic storage: facilitates sharing raw and semi-processed market and competitor information.

• Automated electronic storage: once its function and scope are designed — an administrative burden that would speed the sharing of competitive analyses. It could also be a conduit to distribute analytical product to secondary and tertiary clients.

Gathered information has no intrinsic value. We regularly warn clients that information storage can sometimes be a bottomless pit of IT investment. Any storage mechanism has resource implications: the time to manage hardcopy, and the time to update and excise automated storage.

Business Partner Consulting interprets gathered information against your key intelligence topics.

• We distinguish facts from rumor by assessing source reliability (track record in past and being in the position to know).

• We conduct a Validation Analysis to ascertain if similar information findings are coming from multiple and independent sources. The more a fact is validated, the higher confidence we can place on that fact.

• We conduct a Gap Analysis, determining quickly where missing information is essential to our intelligence predictions. Gap Analysis feeds a return to the collection step.

• Through our analysis of facts that we have collected, we construct multiple future predictions with different levels of confidence.

We design for you the most effective form and channel of disseminating competitive analytical findings. No matter the form, each will focus on the “what so,” “so what,” and the “now what” of our intelligence investigations. We work with you to pick the best reporting vehicle carefully to avoid poor resource use and substandard product.

Generic Intelligence Reporting Types:

• News bulletin or Competitor profiles: standard products that serve as benchmarked or baseline competitive analysis materials.

• Impact Documents or Monthly Intelligence Briefings: regular or ad hoc, yet succinct reporting of news with direct analysis and implications for you.

• Situation Analysis or Special Analytical Summary: analyzes strategic issues on an ad hoc basis.

Distribution Channels for Your Intelligence

• Findings that we provide to you in person is most effective mechanism because it is real time, and customized to you.

• We design E-mail and voice-mail distribution that is non-real time, though customizable.

• We design analytical products that you could post to the “masses” for their use whenever they want. It is neither real time nor customized.

The key to effective dissemination is to realize that no “magic” mechanism exists. Your preferences alone dictate the most effective delivery mechanism.