From Signals to Decisions: How Competitive Intelligence Really Drives Advantage with Tracy Berry, Founder at Berry Insights

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to the Insiders Club Podcast, brought to you by Stravito, the enterprise knowledge management solution that drives impactful decision making. I'm your host, Ross Dempsey, and each episode we'll be speaking with insight leaders from across the industry to hear how they're turning insights into business impact. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Insiders Club Podcast. Uh, happy new year to our, uh, listeners. I'm super thrilled today to welcome Tracy Berry. Tracy is founder and principal at Berry Insights. She is also vice president of the Council of Competitive Intelligence Fellows and also former consumer intelligence leader at Freshworks and ServiceMax, and interestingly, former senior intelligence analyst at the US Department of Defense. Tracey, first of all, thank you for coming along. Super, uh, thrilled to have you on the show, but maybe you can give us a quick history of your, of your route through your career, some really interesting experience there.

Speaker B: Sure. So I actually cut my teeth as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense. Uh, right out of college I was recruited, I spent 12 years there where I think, feel I really, uh, developed my skill set or my toolkit or whatever you want to call it, to become a competitive intelligence professional, which I did once I left the government. Uh, I ran a consulting firm for CI for a number of years. And then at the time I was an avid equestrian and I saw a need in California where I lived for good horse show management on the West Coast. And so I transitioned out of consulting, ran horse shows for number of years, and then decided I kind of like the steady paycheck and the benefits that came with that. So I went back to a program at UC Berkeley on market analytics just to get smart on what was going on in the world of competitive and, uh, intel and analytics. And then I went back into corporate America and That was about 15 years ago now. So I've been practicing as a CI professional ever since. And I feel like that's, that's been pretty much my career in one form or another.

Speaker A: Amazing. I have to introduce you to Amanda on my team, who is also a researcher and obsessed with horses as well. So I think I might have to, uh, join you two together. Uh, really interesting. And I think for our listeners, I'll maybe set today's chat up with a little bit of an intro, which is, I think most companies, I think, would say that they're market led or would certainly have the ambition to be market led. You know, they track competitors, monitor trends, gather, uh, signals. I hear the phrase signals a lot on the podcast over the past 12 months, but I think it's probably also undeniably true that decisions, the important bit, can still feel slow, can be reactive, or increasingly perhaps overcautious. And, uh, today I think it'll be interesting to explore, well, why does that happen? What, what separates informed organizations from being more decisive ones? And in my team and the work I do with Stravito, with insight teams, this is perhaps the primary thing we focus on, which is how do you make sure insight is impacting the right decisions at the right time for the right audiences? Uh, it's not easy, but hopefully we can learn a bit from your experience around this today, Tracey. So, you know, I would say based on your little intro there, you've worked in some of the highest levels of competitive intelligence. You know, you were talking about the Department of Defense, and that's certainly a first for us on the podcast. And then all the way at the other end of the spectrum, moving to kind of quick moving SaaS companies. So when you hear leaders or decision makers say, you know, we're market led, what kind of comes to mind for you? Ah. And where do you see, or do you often see a gap between kind of that perception of what a company's doing and the actual reality? Why do so many organizations feel informed but, you know, kind of feel surprised or act surprised when there's kind of a big shift, whether it's kind of in the consumer arm of the business? I fired three questions at you there. But, you know, maybe the focus here is do you see that difference between perception and reality?

Speaker B: Yeah. You know, whenever I hear someone say we're market led, I actually greet that with a, uh, uh, fair level of skepticism. If possible, I usually ask them what they mean because it's so easy to say we're market led. And I think the gap between perception and reality, I mean, market led actually encompasses all of a company's external touch points. It's market intelligence, it's competitors, it's customers, it could be partners. I mean, suppliers, really. It's any. Anything that is part of your ecosystem. And I think people tend to the gap there is that they tend to focus on one or two of those, but don't see the entire ecosystem as a source for insights. And I think that, uh, this happens a lot when stakeholder needs aren't clearly articulated to the insights gatherers or creators, and when an organization lacks a process for the dissemination of those insights or the sharing of that intelligence.

Speaker A: Absolutely. A couple of things there really, really sparked my mind. And I think it's interesting that, because you talked there about Dissemination as well, which is something kind of very, very close to my heart actually. You can do a lot of the legwork quite well or you might focus on um, as you say, a certain lever where you are being market led clearly, but maybe not, you know, holistically being, being market led. And I think when it comes to dissemination as well, I've, something I've realized through my career is you have to be really purposeful and explicit how you talk about the insight that you're sharing as well. I don't think it's, it's not good enough anymore just to share the insight. You know, you really need that commentary over the top. You need to be explicit about your confidence levels and things. You need to be explicit around the sources of that insight. And you know, think, thinking about this because we hear, we hear a lot about tracking and having more and more data and particularly in, you know, 20, 20, 26, that's only going to increase, I think. But do you think there's an equation and companies uh, are effectively equating being market led with just tracking competitors? Is that uh, an oversimplification that that's quite dangerous?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it is actually because like I said, I think it fails to include insights from the rest of your ecosystem and so it leaves you open to gaps in your intelligence. So you can end up with the wrong conclusions because you're not going forward.

Speaker A: Where would you describe the kind of difference between kind of activity, whether that's uh, you know, sort of monitoring and dashboards and alerts and then the advantage, because the thing that I often talk to insight teams about and this comes back to some basic things as well. I think as an industry we could get a lot better at uh, which is, you know, where is the advantage? You know, for me it's often is a customer I work with tracking the life cycle of an Insight. So once it's left the Insight team and it's gone into the business, are we actively quantitative or qualitatively following that insight to see the business impact outside of those kind of water cooler conversations with the stakeholder, you know, are we actively keeping an eye on the bottom line, the value of insight? And I'm interested in your, your view there, uh, what happens to make competitor tracking, you know, advantageous. Where, where does the impact come?

Speaker B: Right? Well, I think the, the advantage is the result of acting on the insights. Right? So you have your dashboards, you're monitoring different things, you issue alerts, but unless there's action, there's never going to be an advantage based on those insights. Right. So I think in competitive intelligence, to me it's competitive. Competitive intelligence seeks to allow the user of the information to act. So it's not enough to give the what? I mean, you could issue a newsletter that gives you summaries of actions that your competitors took, but if you just deliver that what, here's the value. Right. You need to take it up a level to so what? You have to explain or analyze the activity or the event to say not only why it matters, but why it matters to you, the stakeholder and your stakeholders. It could mean different things to different internal stakeholders. Right. And then let's elevate it to yet another level. And that is the what, the so what and the now what. And that is more of a strategic look or a look to leadership where it's like, what should we do based on all this? But it can also translate to marketing. What should our messaging be? It could go to sales. What should your tactics be? So again, knowing your stakeholder needs and then being able to tailor your intelligence or your insights to those needs.

Speaker A: And that's a little bit of an offshoot question here that's sparked my interest. I talk a lot internally and externally about building insight narratives, shared stories, and uh, you touched on a few things there actually, which is the what, the say what and what's next. How have you found it throughout your career in tailoring that messaging for different audiences? Because I think something insight teams tend to struggle with invariably is they have a lot of data and maybe insight teams are kind of spread across the organization. There's different pockets. Everyone might interpret very valid data and insight in certain ways that's valuable for their team or their department. But uh, often I find there's not really a kind of centralized responsibility to join those dots together and tell a joined up story that gives over time, you know, the data might change, the signals might change, but actually you've got a narrative where senior decision makers immediately kind of know where they are in the story on kind of big decisions for the business. Have you kind of found that throughout your career? Is that something you had to hone through kind of experience, Other kind of examples where this went particularly well or particularly badly to something I think is quite important for inside teams going forward.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, and I hope this answers your question, I think it's really important to take a step back a little bit and understand that insights or intelligence teams can't operate in a vacuum. They have to have stakeholder engagement. They have to understand what's important to the various stakeholders and hopefully they have more than one in the company. They certainly should. And from that becomes there you create over time a trust factor. So they learn to trust your insights and or your intelligence. I use those interchangeably. And from that they are able to understand the narrative. Right. Because hopefully you provide that to them and articulate it themselves. So whether it's a salesperson articulating the narrative to a prospect or someone on the partner team helping a partner understand your value proposition or whatever it is, it's being able to create like a comfort zone where there's trust and constant feeding of the narrative and adjusting of it. Obviously.

Speaker A: Um, I really like that she has a great point around. You know, whilst you m might own the insight or the, or the narrative, but I really like that idea around. A good narrative should have transferability. You know, it should be able to be articulated by other people in the business if it's going to have legs to travel through the business in a kind of value effective way. Uh, I think that's a really interesting point. So going back to our previous question, something that kind of popped out to me actually is, you know, doing competitive intelligence, tracking competitors. It's always been important. It's always been a big focus for businesses. But can businesses in your experience get too obsessed with what the competition's doing? Is that boxing them in in some way or leading them down the wrong garden paths? And I'm wondering if you've seen any. Are there any sort of common dysfunctional patterns you've seen, uh, without, you know, throwing anybody under the bus where maybe that's tipped over too much and it's kind of impacted your strategic flexibility in some way.

Speaker B: Yeah, I personally, having come, you know, having been, you know, within the CI or competitive intel organization for most of my career, I don't think you can be too obsessed with your competitors unless it's at the expense of other factors. Like we've talked about the other direction system. I think sometimes you have to, you have. Sometimes being too obsessed means you've isolated CI at the expense of your other market dynamics. As far as dysfunctional patterns that I've seen, I think in SaaS companies, what I have seen that always worries me is that they tend to be more product led. Like everything becomes about feature parody or feature superiority. Usually, uh, in sas it's always chasing to parody. Right. I mean, that's what been my experience anyway. And that shortsighted approach really resonates across the organization. And I've seen it manifest itself in Most go to market approaches where it's always a race to the bottom of the feature function pile. You know, like green, yellow, red comparisons, you know, and everybody's fixated on the cell that's not green. And I think that sales, I mean, again and again, I've seen in SaaS, there's lip service paid to value selling, right? But at the end of the day it's not. And that's, uh, where companies sell themselves short. They really need to focus more on selling the value to the customer, the prospect, not the feature or the widget.

Speaker A: I totally agree. And you just remind me, I was having, uh, a series of conversations recently, actually, where I was talking to some insight teams. And I think understandably, and I've kind of seen this over my career as well, insight teams often, you know, the kind of apex of a lot of data and intelligence. A lot of really good tools that, uh, are necessary, whether it's something to do with data quality, whether it's something to do with, you know, doing the best analysis or the best research you can. And they're very necessary tools for teams to use. But often, I think when it comes to influencing people and influencing decision makers, you can't always product your way out of that challenge. And sometimes the solution isn't, I need this product over here to come and do this thing for me and I can tick that box. It's kind of getting out your own comfort zone. And, um, I need to go and speak to those people and find out who they are. And I need to, you know, I'm always encouraging insight teams to, you know, we're going to put you on camera. You're the subject m matter experts. You know, we're going to put you out there in front of everybody in the business as the owners of this insight and the narrative builders and, you know, unconscious. That isn't the natural kind of comfy position for, uh, for many people in the inside discipline. I think it will be more going forward. I really, that point resonated with me. You can't product your way out of everything. So a really good point there. And this kind of brings me back, actually to we mentioned at the start, you know, the difference or the challenge with Signals, uh, we live in a crazy world. Signals is kind of top of the list for a lot of people. I've certainly spoke about this a lot on the podcast as well. And when we think about signals versus, you know, actual strategy, most organized are kind of drowning in them at the moment. The bells are ringing with market moves, price uh, changes product launches, customer chatter. How much of that actually turns into strategic action, would you say? And I'm thinking this kind of signal overload. Other problems with the interpretation of multiple signals is that something might come back to narrative a little bit. But yeah. Interested in your view here.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I would say don't confuse signals with data. Data makes the noise. I think signals are what you find in the noise. Signals are like in competitive intelligence. You have key intelligence questions or key intelligence topics. Those are, those are the things you seek to answer. Right. The signal contribute to or towards answering those questions. So you're pulling out all those signals. Yes, there are. You can have a lot of signals. Usually those are the nuggets in the data and you have to know what to look for. You also have to know what your corporate strategy is or your sales strategy or whatever the needs are of your stakeholders to associate the signal with the answer to their questions. Right. And I think an Insight team can extract the signals from the noise and create the intelligence to drive the action.

Speaker A: I think this is really interesting actually. I was, I was talking about this recently, the importance of having your finger on the pulse of the business. And I don't just mean, you know, kind of knowing the consumer strategy plan or you know, having some sort of direction on the overall five year plan for the company. But what matters to the business today, this week, this month, what do we, we did this a lot when I was at Burberry where we kind of operated an Insight newsroom of uh, broadcasting Insight kind of corporate wide, but also to senior decision makers when the time was right as well, which was being much more proactive than is sort of standard, I think, for, for an Insight team. What does the business care about and how do we move away from something I work a lot with Insight teams on is how do we move away from completeness to clarity. So when we think about value, what do we know that we can share with the business today? Whereas I think the default position, understandably for many Insight teams, because it's important when it comes to robustness, is what are we missing? But I think that kind of gets you, you stuck in the mud a little bit. And I'm interested, you know, from your background, you know, particularly working at like the Department of Defense, are there any principles there? And um, I think we've just mentioned one, you know, that it's just not applied very well in the corporate world. I mean the stakes are very different of course, but I'm really interested in things you saw from that your 12 years of experience there that the corporate world would really benefit from because I imagine, you know, taking insight to strategic decision making is obviously incredibly important in terms of national security. But uh, any observations there from the two worlds that we're really missing out on?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question and I'm happy to answer it because there are a few things that I think corporate intel units could learn from defense or national security intelligence organizations. I think the first one that I think most is most important is there's almost a tradecraft to intelligence analytics and how you document your sourcing, your confidence levels, your how you reason things out so decision makers can see the uncertainty and the caveats. We had a very like a nomenclature or there was a difference when you said something could possibly happen versus something could probably happen versus something would happen and people who read that understood what that meant. Possibly versus probably versus would. That gives a degree of confidence. Right. And you miss, you miss out on that in the corporate world. I think CIA outputs into companies hide the analytic doubt in their decks, you know, their multi page PowerPoint decks and they underplay the ambiguous but often critical signals that are out there.

Speaker A: Just a quick question on that one.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: If I might because I think what's really interesting there is, and I'm wondering, you know, because I, I think often the fear for insight teams is you know, if I stay neutral, I stay safe or you know, the data speaks for itself, uh, for want of a better word. But I'm really interested in how your decision makers reacted to that kind of banding of importance and you know, giving that clarity. Because I, I imagine that decision makers are quite happy with reasoned judgment. They're not, they're not looking for certainty, you know, they're experienced people. I'm wondering was that something that decision makers in your world really encouraged and warmed up to? Like you don't need to have everything perfect, but what we do need is a hierarchy of possible decisions that we can take.

Speaker B: That's exactly what it was. That's exactly what it was. I think that uh, any decision maker is going to feel a level or absence of comfort based on possibly versus probably versus will, will occur and can act accordingly. Right. I mean you may not commit the same number of resources or something. You may, you may choose to wait to do something based on that degree of confidence.

Speaker A: Really interesting. And I don't know if there was a follow up point you had there.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's another area like the intelligence cycle is ingrained into you, into your brain when, when you're an intelligent and that it starts with the direction which for a corporate world would be what is your strategy, what are your key intelligence topics, what are you seeking to get answers to? Right, so you've got your direction then you've got your collection, then you've got your processing in your analysis and then there's the dissemination and um, feedback which is huge. And we often forget about that step in the corporate world. You know we usually jump straight from collection to creating slides. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: And we've got weak tasking or direction and we've got very little in the way of postmortem analysis or we're of Mrs. Like where did we screw up or where did we succeed? Shouldn't focus on the negative. And then finally there's this missing culture. Uh to me I talk a lot in the CI community about creating a culture of competitive intelligence. Let's just translate that to a culture of insights. The Insights team or the intel team does not have a corner on the market of intelligence collection. Just about everyone in your company has the potential to touch the information that has value to your company. Whether you're in customer experience or customer success. You're talking to customers, they're going to give you insights, your partners will give you insights, the sales team will get insights and m intelligence by talking to prospects or customers. So CI or Insights operate in a vacuum and there has to be the acknowledgement that yes, everyone can touch intel or Insights, uh, intel let's say intel. They can touch the signals so to speak and should be collecting that and forwarding back. So there should be constant two way communication between stakeholders and the insights or intel team.

Speaker A: I absolutely love that. I love the idea there on um, you know the retrospective is just as important as doing the work. If we're going to, if you're going to learn something from the kind of process and the delivery and ultimately the value and uh, I suppose the more I think about it the more I'm thinking wow, there's a ton we could learn from the way analysis and competitive intelligence and I'm sure many of the fields are done in areas like national security because you don't have the luxury of you know, creating silos that don't need to exist. And I, I'd be interested as well. Something I've encountered a fair bit working with sort of big global businesses or particularly multi brand businesses is insight teams are kind of very aware of organizational silos in the decision making arm um of the business or other parts of the business. They were less aware of the silos that existed within their own teams and within sort of groupings of them and other insight teams. Is that something that you had to, had experience of having to crack in your career? You know that because I love this idea of like a joined up culture. Uh, and I've worked places where we've achieved it. It's been like a multi year effort and it's not easy and you need sort of senior buy in and you got to use those soft skills of kind of winning hearts and minds. And I'm just wondering, I've also seen places where it didn't work and you know, it was very much a traditional stakeholder route and that was the way things were done. Do you have any kind of strategy or tips around how you get people to sign up to that culture? Uh, you know, how much is carrot, how much is stick and how uh, how do you achieve that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I've had success and I've had failures, I can tell you that. I almost feel like breaking down silos and takes a certain personality or mindset. Not everyone is equipped necessarily to do it. Honestly, I don't think there's a textbook you can follow that's, you know, if you do this then your silos will fall down and everyone will kumbaya together. But I have found when you can create a sense of, I call it esprit de cor, you know, teaming, working together oftentimes help. I had success in the intel community where we had a problem we had to solve. And being the intel community is many, many agencies have touch points on intelligence and it meant bringing all of them together in a group to solve a problem, which you do, but you had to have like a common good. Right. And that you can even establish that in the corporate world it's not, you know, isolated to defense or national security.

Speaker A: Definitely.

Speaker B: But I've also had failure where it was just almost impossible to break down the territorial nature of the different teams in the organization that touched on intel or were doing intel managed to have some success. But no, and again a lot of it's personality driven and at the end of the day if, well you could go into, if you have a corporate sponsor, you have leadership that helps you, guides you, you can go a long way in breaking down some of those stovepipes.

Speaker A: So, um, I agree and I, I've always found uh, the most effective way, and particularly we did this fairly well at sky and Burberry, which was to kind of pave the way for the new world. So when we, you know, and These were kind of big, complex global organizations with all of the standard politics that you would imagine and you know, moving towards insight, democratization maybe sounds like a, uh, scary thing sometimes, but actually when you break it down to, well, hey, this is the way we do things at the moment and this is the way we could do it, it's quite a simple decision for a sort of senior decision makers because one is clearly inefficient and means you're losing value and legacy knowledge and almost certainly, uh, you know, money and customer value. But I always found being very explicit and loud with the business on what you're doing tends to bring those pockets of the business along because if they don't, then they have to justify it. And often me, it's a fairly threadbare justification. But yeah, like you, successes and failures, uh, as well. One thing I want to touch on with you actually, which I've, I've heard you say before, is slow interpretation can be a problem when it comes to advantage. And obviously in competitive intelligence, advantage is very important. But what does that look like in practice? Is it waiting too long for, for validation? Is it, you know, an attitude towards risk or worrying too much about the trade offs or hidden costs? I'm interested in your opinion, uh, here. What slows things down and how might we, how might we get better at stopping that?

Speaker B: Yeah. You know, you can't sit on your findings. You, your information becomes intelligence when you give it value. Right. And that value is dependent, um, on what your stakeholders see as, as value. And like I said, that translates into the what, the so what and the now what. I think too often. Well, let me back up a little bit and say that some people can do this and some people can't. But the job of an insights team, or at least a competitive intelligence team, let me just leave it there. The job of a competitive intelligence team is not to broadcast how wonderful your company is and that you rock and your product is the best and you beat everyone. Your job is to call the baby ugly. Okay? Your job is to call the baby ugly, but then tell, you tell the stakeholder whose baby is ugly how to make it prettier. Right? So year, year, oftentimes I've been called, you know, the harbinger of doom and gloom. And that's fine because that's my job. But my job is not just to deliver the doom and gloom, but, you know, how to get us back out into the sunlight again, for lack of a better analogy. And I think that sometimes delivering the message people don't Want to hear slows down the delivery of the insights. Because insights isn't all happy news. Right. Uh, so I think that sometimes is a factor anyway.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And you uh, know a couple of things that really resonated with me. One thing I encourage teams I work with to do is to develop an insight engagement mindset which is to think about yourself as much as an insight promoter as and uh, a curator of insight as much as anything else and to take every available opportunity to share that insight. If you're in a team meeting, you know, and we used to do all sorts of things, you know, videos, podcasts, board sessions, all of that. But you know, in those micro, day to day, on repeat, share your insight, you know, share your narrative over that insight, promote your own work as the subject matter expert. But you're totally right. Something I realized quite early on that was seen I think is like a limiting, a limiting challenge actually it was a bit of a superpower which was when we had insight to share that wasn't the best news. Often that's some of the most important insights. You know, there was always a fear of okay, we need to socialize this with 15 people. We don't want to chuck anyone under the bus. And then you come out with like a sanitized sort of thing that doesn't really mean anything. And it's certainly not going to stop a busy person who's got 10 minutes between meetings in their tracks like they need to do something with this. And I found that journalistic nous was, was really useful here. You know there are, there are ways and means to say we're losing x million pounds on this problem. But also framing it in a way where you know, I often used to find out something that team had done really, really well that year, share, acknowledge uh, the success of that team and then identify an opportunity to make X, you know, million pounds in value for the business by focusing on these areas and then sort of, you know, massage the message around that. So it still had import and kind of attention grabbing value but also was kind of politically safe. And I'm conscious that uh, that's not easy for insight teams to do. You know, I'm a trained journalist and kind of used to doing that kind of thing. And I wonder, uh, going forward storytelling for sure, but having now to craft those kind of narratives I think is going to be a really important skill set for insight professionals going forward, particularly with generative AI as well where people can self source very good answers. So I those points really, really resonated with Me and I think probably an area we, we touched on a little bit so far is decision confidence. I think we both mentioned, you know, being explicit about your confidence levels and that hierarchy of decisions that you want to be able to provide to stakeholders. And if kind of signal collection is, is maybe seen as table stakes. What does, what does good competitive intelligence actually enable at a, uh, kind of leadership level? So not just awareness. Uh, I'm really interested in your opinion here of how do you craft something that has good decision confidence and has legs to travel through the business.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that good competitive intelligence enables both tactically and strategically, really across the organization. But even at the leadership level, tactically, they have much better situational awareness. Right. And can, uh, respond to queries, et cetera, based on knowing what's happening to them or uh, to your company. And I think that that situational awareness allows leadership to be more proactive instead of reactive. You know, case in point, you're on an earnings call, you can proactively plant information that you want the market to know, or you can react to an analyst question that pops up about that. Right? Like what would you rather do? I personally would rather be proactive than to have to react to something. So I think you get that. And then you also strategically, you can anticipate outcomes based on foresight. Right. Like if you have a really good insight stage team that delivers that, now what, or even what's possible, you allow your leadership to anticipate outcomes that they might not otherwise have been needed to do, outcomes that may or may never transpire. But if they do, you have put them in a position where they are going to know how to respond.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's really interesting actually, because I imagine there's probably, let's say for people who sit in competitive intelligence teams, but I can imagine there's a perception that competitive intelligence is used as a lever to kind of reinforce a direction of travel that the business was thinking about and is kind of, you know, not retrospectively but is consulted on, you know, what can we find that's going to back up this course of action? So I'm really interested there in doing this. Well, actually is more about playing a serious role in executive decision making. You know, really framing how leaders strategically think about the business, how they horizon scan when it comes to executive decision making and sort of senior leadership. What role? Where have you seen competitive intelligence play a really successful role? So what should it do and what should it not do? Because I can imagine, you know, different leaders have different personality traits and uh, you know, some leaders love lots of data. Other leaders won't read more than three slides. In your experience, when is it used most effectively? So what, how should it be used and how should it not be used at the senior level?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think a really good competitive intelligence function, whether it's a team of one or a team of 20, but the leadership within that CI team acts or becomes a trusted advisor to, to the executive team. I think that's the only way that you're really going to be able to influence both tactically and strategically as a compete function is when you are trusted as an advisor. Your word, your, your word, what you deliver, your message resonates. And what I see too often is that the messenger should be the competitive intelligence person. But for reasons that are varied, oftentimes what they have to say is passed on to someone higher up in the food chain and things get diluted or misquoted or left out or, you know, everybody's editing, you know, the 50 slide deck down to five slides and, you know, and so you risk the message being lost. And so really, the closer you can get the CI leadership to the executive team, and it should be face to face, quite honestly, the better off you're going, the more your message is going to have impact. And to do it wrong is to not allow that to happen.

Speaker A: I really like that. And I think your point on Face to Face, that a small offshoot question here, something I'm quite interested in is through your career, did you kind of look at stakeholders and say, okay, uh, maybe I'm in a new role, I'm in a new business, my stakeholder is this kind of person, and I'm going to approach delivering insight to them in this kind of way. And did that differ greatly from other stakeholders or did you have more of a, uh, a kind of blueprint of how you like to kind of create your narratives and deliver them? I ask because when I've interviewed people on the podcast, interestingly, I found some of the most sort of successful insight leaders with sort of longevity have realized quite early on that they need to get the human being at the end of the, of the chain and really get to know them first before they start firing, uh, you know, lots of information at them. I'm just interested in your, your experience here.

Speaker B: No, I think it's very much personality driven. The challenge becomes whether someone in the leadership position is open to getting to know the CIA team or not. And that, and that honestly, at the end of the day, dictates the success of the Message to the leadership team. Fortunately, one person does not generally operate in a vacuum on an executive leadership team. And so as long as you find a sponsor or a champion on that T, you're, I think you're held in pretty good stead. But it's definitely personality driven and, and so you have to tailor, you have to tailor how you disseminate your information and even the tone of what you do disseminate based on that.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And just coming uh, to the, the sort of final act of the, of this chat given, we could spend three hours, I think talking about this stuff. But, um, a couple of questions I wanted to get in were is there, uh, I always find this is an interesting question for any guest we have on the show, but is there a commonly held belief in the insights and even intelligence space that you passionately disagree with and why anything you've observed?

Speaker B: Yeah, and I'll try not to spend too much time on this. Uh, it may or may not resonate with your listeners, but I am very vocal in the CI community that the CI position does not belong in product marketing. That's my, that's the flag that I have placed on the top of the mountain. And the reasons very quickly for that is that product marketing professionals are trained to articulate the value of the product through rose colored glasses. Everything is the best it can be. We are the best we are number one, uh, we have no flaws. And CI, our message is the complete opposite. Like I said, the baby is ugly analogy. And if you leave it to product marketing, not only is the messaging skewed and not believed, so you lose that trust factor right away, but also through management chain, product marketers prioritize product marketing. And it's a rare soul that can put the eye, uh, as a priority when it needs to be within a marketing organization. And that's, that's just, that's my stance.

Speaker A: So no, I love it. And the journalist in me is loves the uh, call the baby ugly headline. You know, I know that's uh, Yeah, I think that's a really important truth that I think should be entertained and talked about more. So I really like that. And then I think another interesting question that I wanted to put to you for listeners who might be listening to this. And you know, we talked about senior leaders. If uh, a CMO or a CMI leader is listening to this and kind of realizes, hey, we collect a lot of intelligence but we're not acting fast enough on it, where do they start? So you know, is it behavioral shifts, is it technology? And Tools and platforms, is it kind of how they interact with their teams? Interested in your experience here? What should they stop doing now and where should they start effectively?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, you're collecting a lot of data and that creates your insights, right? And in competitive intel we have the key intelligence topics or questions, like I said, and that's what your direction is. So that's what you should be coming up with first is what is your direction, what are you trying to solve to. And then once you have the information or the intel related to those, it's your job to get the insights to the stakeholders as quickly as possible. And that general revolves around agreed upon processes and procedures. So really a lot of this is about being able to deliver effectively is based on processes and procedures you put into place so that people know what to do when the proverbial shit hits the fan, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: I think it also helps to prepare in advance. Uh, like a decision tree is what I've used at times. It helps you identify who to disseminate to and how to go about doing it. And then if you have problems with speed like we talked about, analyze your processes and eliminate the bottlenecks. So figure out what's not working and why it's not working and then fix it. And that's not always easy either. But then you also may need to coach your teams to create a sense of urgency around certain types of insights or a, uh, response. You know, like for example, we had a news flash that we put out whenever something major happened with a competitor. You had an acquisition or a merger or, well, a major lawsuit or something like that. We had a process, we had a timeline and we stuck to it. And it and everyone it involved, like everybody checking off on this before we disseminated to our stakeholders what to do, what to do about the sky falling. So those are just a few ideas like that that's more around speed of response, timeliness of response, that sort of thing. But that, that's, that's my take.

Speaker A: And then I think a final question, which I think probably is a good mechanism to, to sort of summarize some of the points we've been discussing today. But for our audience, if you had to redefine what it really means to be market led today, how would you describe it?

Speaker B: I would say, uh, to be market. There, there's two terms here and I think there's a great wordplay here. Being market led versus being market leading. It's subtle, but the distinction is there, right? I think being market led, to me is almost short sighted. It sounds like I want to be ecosystem led, right? Like I don't want to be led by what's happening in the market, uh, unless my market involves everything I'm interested in, like my customers, like my partners, like my suppliers, like my competitors. Right. You've got to include all those different touch points for insights. And it's a few years in that entire ecosystem, um, of outside influencers that would truly make you market led.

Speaker A: Well, Tracy, a. Ah, fascinating conversation. I think we could learn a hell of a lot from you and your experience that we could carry over to the corporate world. So I'd absolutely love to have you back on the podcasts, uh, sometime in the future.

Speaker B: I'd love to come. This has been a fun chat.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. So a big thanks for me and a big thanks from our listeners, uh, as I think they'll all greatly benefit from some of the stuff we've been talking about. But until we have you on again, thanks again, Tracy, and, uh, we'll hopefully speak again soon.

Speaker B: Thank you, Ross.

Speaker A: The Insightist Club podcast is brought to you by Stravito, the enterprise knowledge management solution that drives impactful decision making. To learn more about how Stravito helps leading brands make the most of their enterprise knowledge, visit stravito.com be sure to click follow so you don't miss out on any future updates. And if you would like even more insightful content, you can subscribe to the Insiders Club newsletter at, uh, the link in the show notes. On behalf of the entire team here at Stravito, thank you for listening.

Speaker B: Sam.