A Step-by-Step Guide to Starting Your Competitive Intelligence Program - even if you are alone!
Ever find yourself blindsided by a competitor’s flashy product update, or worse, a customer bringing it up before you’ve even heard about it? You’re not alone.
Keeping track of what your competitors are doing isn’t just a “nice to have” anymore. Competitive Intelligence (CI) is quietly becoming a daily necessity.
Think of it as a radar for your product and go-to-market teams. The point isn’t to mirror your rivals, it’s to know what they’re up to so you can build, market, and sell smarter.
Some of the questions CI can help answer:
When CI is done right, it becomes a quiet superpower. You start noticing patterns before others do. You avoid building things no one wants.
Whether you're a marketer, a product manager, a sales professional, or stepping into your first role dedicated to CI, studying your market can help you think more strategically, and make better day-to-day decisions.
If you've ever wondered how to start gathering and using competitive insights, and are unsure where to begin, this guide is for you!
We'll walk you through the basics, the bottlenecks, and how to get quick wins, even if CI is only 5% of your job right now.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through:
Okay, so what is Competitive Intelligence, really?
Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering, analyzing, and applying information about your competitors and your market. It helps you understand what's happening outside your organization so you can make better strategic decisions.
At its core, CI involves:
Information gathered as part of Competitive Intelligence can vary a lot from one company or one industry to another, but generally include :
If it helps you understand what your competitors are prioritizing and how the market is reacting, it’s probably worth your attention!
Let’s be clear: CI is not spying. If you’re pretending to be a customer on a sales call to dig for secrets, you’ve crossed a line.
Stick to public sources, respect NDAs, and don’t put your company or your reputation at risk. Good CI isn’t Corporate Espionage.
CI can impact virtually all areas of your organization, from marketing and product development to sales and overall business strategy.
It’s also a great opportunity for collaboration, as teams can discuss findings and develop a new perspective on your industry. It brings fresh insights that make day-to-day decisions easier.
For product managers, CI provides insights that can guide roadmaps and development decisions:
At an organizational level, CI influences broader strategic decisions:
Getting started with CI can feel like standing before a giant haystack of information.
There’s a lot to look at. Some of it’s interesting. Some of it’s noise.
Let’s talk about the most common challenges people face, especially when CI isn’t their full-time job, and how to get past them without burning out.
"I don't have a dedicated team or budget for CI—can I still make an impact?"
Classic. You’re already juggling roadmaps, launches, campaign deadlines, internal reviews: adding CI on top can feel like a luxury you can’t afford.
"There's so much information out there—how do I even begin?"
The firehose is relentless: tweets, blogs, G2 reviews, press releases, Reddit threads…
"I'm excited about CI, but no one else cares about this but me."
It's common to face skepticism. Popular advice and startup culture have told us for a long time to “worry about your customers, not your competitors”.
This one’s a mindset shift. Your job isn’t to be perfect. It’s to keep your eyes open and help the team stay grounded in reality, even when it stings.
Taking the initiative is already making a progress. Take baby steps to overcome those challenges, share quick wins, and your work will be recognized soon enough!
So, you’re convinced CI matters, your caffeine’s kicked in, and now you’re staring at a blank doc wondering where to begin!
Before you open another competitor blog or Google some press releases, take five minutes to write down a simple question:
“What’s one thing I want to help my team do better using CI?”
This could be:
Without an anchor, you’ll collect interesting-but-useless trivia (“Wow, their CEO used to be in fintech!”). With a goal in mind, you’ll filter info through a strategic lens.
Pro Tip: Turn your goal into a quick metric, like “Improve win rate against Competitor Z from 45% to 55% by end of Q3.” Something you can point to later when someone asks if CI is worth the effort (it is).
Here’s a common trap: trying to track everyone. Don't. You don’t need a 47-row spreadsheet with every adjacent tool that’s ever raised a Series A.
Start with 3–5 competitors. Pick the ones who either:
The most important criteria to determine a competitor's relevance is the Share of the Market you are targeting: focus on competitors with a significant or growing presence. Then, consider Product Similarity and Customer Overlap, prioritize those whose offerings closely match yours or competitors with a different offering, targeting the same customer segments.
You can use the following analysis to classify your competitors into 3 different types.
For each competitor, create a profile that includes:
With your competitor list ready, it's time to start collecting information.
Tools like Google Alerts, Feedly, and yes, just checking their websites, can go a long way. No need to overengineer it (yet).
CI does not means hiring a team, buying an expensive platform, and becoming a full-time analyst. Nope. You just need the right tools for your level of effort, and some common sense on what to track.
Here’s how to set up a lightweight, low-maintenance CI stack.
Our practical guide to creating a Competitor Dashboard for your company is a great way to start.
Discover how to effortlessly build the perfect competitor analysis dashboard for your SaaS company in a few easy steps.
You don’t need to “tool up” on Day One. Some of the best insights come from slow, boring, manual processes. Seriously.
Competitor websites are treasure troves of information. Make it a habit to:
Pro Tip: Don´t get lost in doomscrolling. It’s easy to get caught up. Always have a goal in mind, and log significant updates you find during your reviews.
Sign up for your competitors' newsletters to receive updates directly in your inbox. This allows you to:
Pro Tip: Consider using a dedicated email address for subscriptions to keep your inbox organized and share with colleagues.
Social media platforms offer real-time insights into competitor activities and customer sentiment.
This in-person side of Competitor Intelligence is often underlooked but often yields rich insights.
Pro tip: When attending Industry Events, collect brochures, slide decks, or any distributed materials. Bring them home to your colleagues in Marketing and Product. (Salespeople probably have already snagged their own copies!)
While manual methods are essential, they can be time-consuming. Free and low-cost tools can automate some of your CI tasks and are generally a good way to start automating things.
Set up Google Alerts to receive email notifications when new content matching your specified keywords appears online.
While not all websites support it, RSS feeds allow you to aggregate updates from multiple websites in one place.
These tools help you track social media activity and mentions of your competitors. Some free options include : Hootsuite, TweetDeck and Social Mention.
Those are great to keep track of changes in pricing on your competitor websites. Free Options include Visualping and ChangeDetection.
At some point, the Google Docs and Slack threads stop cutting it.
You’ve got competitor updates scattered across your inbox, screenshots buried in a shared drive, and three different people asking, “Wait, didn’t someone mention this last week?”
That’s when you know it’s time to centralize.
If CI is becoming more than just a side project, or you just want to stay organized from day one, a dedicated Competitor Intelligence Platform can make life a lot easier.
Because without one, you’re stuck duct-taping your CI workflow together with half a dozen tools and hoping everyone checks the right folder. A good CI platform does the heavy lifting for you.
Here’s what the right one helps with:
Forget digging through Notion pages or re-Googling that press release. With a proper platform, you’ve got a centralized home for Competitor Profiles, Insights, and Win/Loss Analysis results.
It makes it easy to organize, search and surface the right info at the right time.
Instead of manually checking competitor sites or news feeds, the platform watches them for you.
Real-time alerts keep you in the loop, without living in a browser tab jungle.
Modern CI platforms (like PeerPanda, just saying) use AI to pull out what matters.
Instead of reading an entire press release, you get:
Don’t waste time wading through fluff.
No more last-minute decks thrown together before a sales call. You can build:
And yes, you can export or share them with whoever needs them, without teaching them how to use yet another tool.
If any of this sounds familiar, it might be time:
Or… maybe you just want to look organized and proactive without losing your evenings to competitive research. That’s valid too.
PeerPanda was built for product and GTM teams at SaaS companies who don’t have time to mess around. It’s simple, structured, and even fun!
With PeerPanda, you can:
No credit card. No sales pitch. Just jump in and see for yourself!
Get Started for freeHaving gathered tools and techniques, the next step is to structure your CI program to organize your CI activities.
In this section, we'll explore how to develop a plan, integrate CI into your daily workflow, and share your insights.
Creating a structured plan for your CI activities provides a roadmap that guides your efforts and keeps you focused on your objectives.
Identify immediate tasks, such as setting up monitoring tools or compiling competitor profiles. Some projects will require implementing specific tools or training people. Do this early to get bandwidth from other teams if needed.
If you’re solo, be honest with yourself about how much time you can realistically give CI. Set a weekly recurring calendar block and guard it.
If you’ve got others onboard (lucky you), get clear on who’s doing what:
Just make sure people know CI isn’t someone else’s job.
Consistency is key. Making CI a seamless part of your routine ensures that it does not become something "extra”, that you only do when you have free time (you never have).
Here’s a sample cadence to steal:
Pro tip: Sync your CI updates with existing rituals - Monday standups, monthly OKR reviews, launch planning sessions. If you try to run it separately, it’ll feel optional.
What will be your source of truth on competitor data? How will you share important news? How will you ensure that salespeople effectively use insights on competitors to prepare their customer calls?
Gathering information is important, but it’s useless without the proper communication channels in place.
The best intel in the world is useless if no one knows where to find it.
So pick a spot. Name it clearly. Stick to it.
Could be:
What matters most: keep it clean, current, and easy to navigate.
And when something becomes outdated? Archive or delete it. Outdated info kills trust faster than no info at all.
When sharing insights, less is more. You don’t need to write formal reports every week. In fact, please don’t.
When you find something useful:
Getting creative in your communication is a great way to draw engagement and attention to your CI program. Here are some ideas that you can implement in your company:
CI is a deeply collaborative activity. Encourage team members to provide feedback on CI reports and share their perspectives. Sales, Product and even Customer Success can contribute their side of the story.
Also, take the time to regularly evaluate how well your CI activities meet the needs of your company, and make changes to your documentation and communication methods based on feedback.
Implementing Competitive Intelligence (CI) effectively requires more than just gathering and analyzing data. It involves adhering to ethical standards, continuously improving your skills, and fostering collaboration across your organization.
Adhering to laws and regulations is obviously non-negotiable. Also, ensure the information you use was obtained ethically. That's surefire way to damage your own reputation, and break trust.
Drawing inspiration from the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) Code of Ethics, here are some fundamental principles to guide your CI activities:
Teach ethical considerations during the training of new members, and ensure everyone in your organization is aware of the risks of doing things the bad way.
CI works way better when it’s not just your job.
The most valuable insights often come from casual conversations, Slack threads, sales calls. But to capture those moments, your company needs a culture where CI is a shared habit.
CI isn’t just for product marketing. Or PMs. Or sales enablement.
So invite others in. Not with a lecture. With curiosity.
Here’s what that can look like:
The trick here is not to create a brand new process. Just plug into the places where people are already talking.
A few ideas:
CI often has delayed payoffs, you catch a pattern, you share an insight, and weeks later someone mentions it helped in a deal or decision.
So when that happens? Share it. Out loud. And give credit.
The best CI setups help everyone in the company do their jobs better.
So don’t just ask for intel, give people something useful in return.
People won’t contribute to CI just because it’s “important.”
They’ll contribute because it’s helpful, easy to engage with, and even fun!
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’re already doing more than most teams when it comes to Competitive Intelligence.
CI isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being aware. Aware of what your competitors are doing, where your market’s headed, and how your product can stand out.
It’s about catching patterns early, helping your team make sharper calls, and occasionally saving everyone from wasting three sprints building something that no one ends up using.
You don’t need to track everything.
You don’t need to have it all figured out.
You just need to start.
Track Competitors, Get Notifications, Share Insights
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