Monitoring competitors and identifying leads
Jinfo Blog

18th November 2009

By Penny Crossland

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Information on what your competitors are up to and where the best sales prospects are is becoming increasingly important, especially in a tough economic climate. As reported recently by Jonathan Gordon-Till (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26225), understanding the whole competitive environment is crucial. A couple of vendors with strengths in those areas have made the information news headlines recently: Virginia-based Attaain Inc (http://www.attaain.com), winners of this year’s prestigious AIIP Technology Award (http://digbig.com/5baqnt) is an aggregator of web-based competitive and marketing intelligence. What is interesting about this product is that it pulls together real-time information from sources that are not usually part of a competitor profile product. Apart from basic company data, some of which is sourced from Hoovers and SEC filings, Attaain CI reports contain website statistics and analysis, details of web advertising, as well as social media mentions. Since checking blogs, videos and sites such as Twitter is part of the research I do for due diligence reports, the fact that all this is contained in one place, makes this a valuable tool for my purposes. To complete the picture, reports also list patent activity, job postings and hiring trends. The newest release of Dow Jones Companies & Executives (http://www.dowjones.com/product-djce.asp) is billed as a social sales intelligence solution for B2B sales and marketing teams. Using social networking media, the system identifies warm leads and aims to supply sales people with introductions to target organizations, essentially using the power of ‘who you know’. (See earlier Livewire postings http://www.vivavip.com/go/e25995 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26050 on this subject) Potential leads are identified by ‘triggers’, such as management moves or product launches. Combined with in-house email and social networks, maps identify relationships between key executives and companies wishing to sell to them. Look out for the January edition of VIP Magazine which will contain a review of relationship management databases.

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