What ways do you gather competitive intelligence that are ethical and fair?

The key rule of thumb is to always be truthful. Don't lie about who you work for, your role with the company, and what you are looking for. For example:

• When filling out an online web form to download content from a competitor's website, use your real name and business email address.

• When approaching a competitor's booth at a trade show, disclose who you are and who you work for.

• Don't ask anyone else to misrepresent their intentions so that you can get eyes on a competitor's product or get insider information.

• When interviewing former employees of a competitor, remind them to not disclose confidential or proprietary information.

There's nothing that says gathering intel in standard ways isn't ethical or fair. There are definitely some tactics that might straddle the line and a few that go way over the line that should obviously be avoided. I would rely on approaches that are very common, ethical, and effective:

• Win/loss interviews
• Seller interviews
• Analyst inquiries
• Analyst category/industry analyses
• Investor resources
• Using competitor products (if possible)
• Competitor websites
• Competitor community forums
• Industry community forums
• Social media
• YouTube
• Media reviews

This is just a start, but there are many ways to gather intel that will work no matter your product. Also, check out a product like Crayon that will help you supercharge your efforts if you have limited capacity.

As mentioned in some of my other responses, there are lots of places to gather competitive intelligence that are ethical and fair. Some key ways include:

• Competitor websites (pricing pages, online demos, self-guided tours, other content, etc)

• Competitor webinars

• Competitor social posts

• Peer review places like G2, TrustRadius etc.

• Forums like Reddit, Quora, and other industry specific community sites (Pavilion for sales and marketing for example) - read existing responses but don't pretend to pose as a prospect and ask one yourself, that can verge into the ethical gray zone

• Marketplaces like the Salesforce AppExchange etc.

• Win/loss interviews with your customers and prospects

• Industry analysts like Gartner, Forrester etc.

• Sales calls where prospects mention the competitor

• Public filings like S-1s, earning reports, earnings calls etc. if applicable

There are certainly gray zones but a clear no no is proprietary information people might have if they've left a competitor and come to work for your company. Make sure you do not ask to see any documents they might have taken with them.

I've gathered competitive intelligence in a few ways:

1) Voice of Customer interviews (either conducted by myself or a 3rd party)

2) Market analyst reports

3) 3rd party-conducted interviews of ex-employees of the competitor 

4) Review sites such as G2 or Gartner Peer Insights 

5) The competitor's website 

6) My own internal teams (ie, salespeople)

7) Competitive intelligence tools such as Klue or Crayon

Regarding interviews related to competitive intelligence, I've found that it's always best to be transparent about why you're conducting the interview. If the interviewee doesn't feel comfortable answering the question, that is absolutely respected. 

It's important to note that competitive intelligence is strongest when it's a team-wide initiative. At Twilio, and in previous companies where I've worked, my team has developed a Competitive Intelligence Task Force. That's a tiger team of PMMs, PM, and Sales who come together to discover and discuss competitive intelligence and implications on our ability to win more deals.  

I never thought of checking competitions as immoral or "scammy". I would go and say that I do like to play detective and spy on the best competitors but that's simply called gathering intel. 

If I'm being a little bit philosophical here, that's what you do in life as well as in business. You go out and search for success factors that resulted in a positive outcome in someone's life. If you do that on 4-5 individuals you will come up with overlapping patterns and factors that you can (up to a certain degree) sum up to helpful pieces of information on what to do next. 

In business, it's the same. If you want to reverse-engineer a company, product, or process, you'll find breadcrumbs and tracks that your competitor has left behind.

This could mean:

• use special intelligence tools to discover the story behind the success (social listening tools, web traffic tools, etc..)
• Interviews from management teams (podcasts, YouTube videos, conferences/events talks)
• Your Internal CRM data. Ask your sales and customer success teams when they encounter competitor phrases or mentions. You can go back and listen to those recordings. 
• Explore your competitor positioning over time - the Wayback Machine is great at that. Also opt-in in their customer journey to understand their messaging strategy. 

The unethical things that I wouldn't do is:

• bash your competition internally or publicly. You only have one reputation.
• Poach and try to convince competitor employees to share their secrets 
• Camouflage myself as an interested buyer and go on sales calls with competitors

These are just couple of thoughts. I hope it helps! 🤘🤘