Great Market Intelligence Builds Solid Strategic Plans

Building a solid strategic plan for your business needs great market intelligence. Market intelligence includes understanding your competition, your customer and yourself. The simplest way to start is to build a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of your company and your competitors. Doing a SWOT analysis on your customer and its competitors on the specific brand or products that you supply to is also beneficial.
The strengths and weaknesses often describe the current scenario. Opportunities and threats are possible future scenarios.

Compare your SWOT to your competitors’ SWOT analysis. Highlight those that are unique to you or items you know you are way beyond the competition. Next look at your key customer’s and their competitor’s SWOT analysis and do the same. Does your unique strengths match your customer’s? Do you see that contributing to positioning your customer against its competitors? The next thing you should then look at is your customer’s opportunities and threats. Do you see any of your strengths helping the customer to achieve its opportunities or remove its threats? If your answers to these questions are all negative, then you know that your position with this customer is not strong and may soon be replaced.


But it’s not too late. Great strategic plans highlight areas you are doing well and areas you need to improve. If your position with your key customer is not so strong, then what areas do you need to change or improve to advance your position? List initiatives to address these areas of improvement. Then list the possible barriers for your company to achieve this initiative, both internal and external barriers. Is there a way you can overcome these barriers?

Another important aspect of the market intelligence in your strategic plan is determining the size and growth of the market, your market share and your competitors’ market shares. You also need to find out your customers’ share and how they fare against its competitors. Concentrate on the market share of products you are selling to or you can sell into with your current products and capabilities. Most marketers call this your Served Available Market or SAM. Next you should also look at the Total Available Market or TAM which is your total opportunity. This along with the market growth rate could help you determine if it is worth developing a new product or technology to address your "un-served" market and eventually come up with a technology or product road map.


Getting accurate market size, growth and share is usually difficult. A starting point is usually buying research reports if they are available. But most of these reports are at least one or two years late. Getting inputs from your sales team, product managers, distributors and reps are always helpful. They could give you a sense of what is currently happening. Looking into company websites and their annual reports are also helpful.


A solid strategic plan is never done by just one person and is never done just once a year. It needs to be developed with contributions and consensus from every department - sales, marketing, manufacturing, R&D, purchasing, human resources and finance. And depending on your type of industry, it needs to be revisited and refreshed on a regular basis. Progress reports to senior management enforces execution of the strategic plan which is an area where 90% of the companies fail.

All in all though, a strategic plan is only as good as the market intelligence behind it. So start now by gathering as much information, every news or customer, competitor or even supplier encounter is always a chance to add more into that market intelligence bank.