Strategically Thinking - Simple Ways to Get Better Today

Issue 7 Volume 2 July 2010 www.jthawes.com

Simple Ways to Get Better Today

Greetings!

"We are a small business, we don't have the resources to invest in CI."

"We want to get better but we don't know where to start."

"What is competitive intelligence and why should I care?

These are common questions that I hear most every day. Small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) struggle with allocating time and people to activities when a plan matched to their constraints is unclear.

I can answer those questions.

More than that, I can teach your team how to embed competitive intelligence (CI) into their everyday tasks. What do you get? You get much more insight into your competitors, more clarity for your strategic directions and increased confidence in your decisions.

I can help you. I am good at it. Let's talk.

Competitive Intelligence for SMBs

Lay the foundation. Integrate with strategy. Expect value.

"The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of
his or her organization is going to blow the competition away."
Walter Wriston

You have to get better than you are today. Your organization has to get better, too. Otherwise, your competitors will beat you.

Fortunately, you have the ability to improve how you use competitive intelligence. Good competitive intelligence makes a difference.

How? I have recently written an article for SMBs and what they can do. It explains CI fundamentals and shows how CI is used to help with major strategic questions. Furthermore, it shows how to do this in a step-by-step fashion that matches the budget.

If you would like a copy, email me and I will send it to you.

Workshop Options for You

Tailored to your business issues. Delivered on-site. Practical techniques with immediate benefits.

Competitive intelligence helps you look at the world differently. How do you get started? What is a simple first step?

A short competitive intelligence workshop may be what you need.

I have customized workshops for companies. Each is a low cost way to expose your team to new ideas about how to understand, interpret and respond to the competitive environment. Here are examples.

Getting Started with Competitive Intelligence: A four hour workshop exposing your team to important fundamentals, a CI project framework and an approach to identifying your CI priorities.
Implementing a Gaps Analysis Process: A one day workshop to explain and begin implementation of a process to identify, monitor, evaluate and close important competitive gaps.
Improving Competitive Intelligence: A one day workshop to complete an organization diagnostic, explain a CI maturity model and outline a plan to improve CI in your organization.
Competitive Intelligence Cases: An interactive four hour workshop dealing with actual CI cases for a company. Improved problem solving approaches are described in context of actual CI projects.

Email me to talk about how these workshops can be tailored for your company.