This is the fourth lesson specifically focused on guarding your business against disruption. In this article we will cover a framework that helps organizations structure their response to potential disruptors.

Turn Your Competitive Research into an Action Plan

Understanding and then reacting to a changing competitive landscape is required of any business, but not everyone gets it right. It is understandable that many leadership teams prioritize the efficiency of operations, streamlining of communication, and even product development above looking up and out into the market. The outcome of doing this is most-often a best-of-breed-product/service that is no longer relevant to a shift in the market or is lost in the messaging of competition.

For those companies that have invested in strategies designed to aid in the mapping of future growth and opportunities, outdated methods, conflicting priorities, and truthfully, the overwhelming amount of data available about competitors and markets can lead to a noisy channel from which it is both difficult to navigate and nearly impossible to gather any valuable insights.

With tools like predictive analytics and competitive intelligence software, the task of staying on top of the market has become much more attainable. But, simply having access to these tools and leveraging them to their fullest potential are two different stories.

Setting yourself up to actually benefit the most from those tools is quite straightforward – a study that combines multiple schools-of-thought from intelligence experts, the government, and the work of those from the past has created a framework to help you get a real action plan from studying your competitive landscape.

Monitor, Plan, and Act

With your competitive data in one place, there are three important next steps that you should take:

• Track & Monitor
• Plan/Analyse
• Act

Track & Monitor

Establish and maintain a system of observation mechanisms (e.g. regular reporting and alerts) to continuously observe developments related to both competitor actions and market reactions. This allows you to continue to focus on the areas of the business that require your attention but also gives you the real-time information you need about what’s happening in your market.