Executive Summary

  • The enterprise software market for research has some curious features.
  • We will cover the issue of selling competitive intelligence.

Introduction

With Brightwork’s high readership in vendors, competitive intelligence is the potential natural area to provide research. Some research can be focused on buyers, but this is more speculative. Buyers are more diffuse, and the business would have to be inbound, as there are too many buyers to reasonably reach out to one by one.

Vendors are easy to access for Brightwork because we are connected to many people that work as vendors.

  1. Evidence from LinkedIn (which is helpful as I can’t see who is visiting a web page in Google Analytics) clearly shows that Brightwork’s biggest following is among vendors. Brightwork’s material is already used in sales pursuits.
  2. We perform research into vendors like SAP and Oracle that no one else does.
  3. Brightwork’s material is more understandable by those in the industry versus IT buyers. IT buyers are easily manipulated by Gartner and Forrester, indicating that the buyer sophistication level is low. Software buyers very rarely comment on Brightwork shares on LinkedIn. 
  4. Vendors are highly concentrated, and we know who the decision-makers are within these vendors and who the buyer is.
  5. We know what vendors are interested in what research item. For example, the most interested parties in the S/4HANA case study research are the other major ERP vendors.

Problems with Competitive Intelligence

So while the competitive intelligence market would seem perfect for Brightwork, it is, in fact, a bad market.

Here are some reasons why:

  1. Smaller vendors tend not to have budgets for competitive intelligence research.
  2. Larger vendors often have competitive intelligence groups, which report up through sales or marketing, and which do not want external competitive intelligence purchased as it is seen as a threat.
  3. Many people are employed by vendors overstating their knowledge about SAP and Oracle to the rest of the company. They also do not want to be replaced as the “single source of truth” on SAP or Oracle.

The competitive intelligence market is quite open, with few entities providing research. Most of the competitive intelligence created internally, and only by the largest vendors, and normally by individuals who are more out of marketing than with any technical background. However, the competitive intelligence market for enterprise software is deceptive. There is a tiny market for externally purchased competitive intelligence –so there are few entities service the market. Those that do provide this service provide it just a side item to their other research.

The Problem with Internal Competitive Intelligence

As explained to me, the reputation of competitive intelligence has suffered because it consists of the internal groups essentially telling sales what they want to hear, which is strongly related to the fact that they report to sales in each of the vendors.

It has been communicated to me on multiple occasions that salespeople ignore the information provided to them by their own internal competitive intelligence groups.

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Conclusion

SAP and Oracle resources have been accused of selling competitive intelligence — and they consider this unethical. Why this would be unethical is a mystery — and a massive belly laughs when a person from SAP or Oracle accuses anyone of being unethical, given the ethics of SAP and Oracle. SAP and Oracle provide large amounts of false information to their customer and prospects — and that is considered ethical to people employed by or who consult in SAP or Oracle. The information we provide is far more accurate — and it, of course, contradicts much of what SAP and Oracle say and publish. That is the problem that SAP and Oracle resources have with us. They want to provide uncontested promotional information to customers. 

However, the fact is that we have sold only a small amount of competitive intelligence. This is not because we would not want to sell more, but because the market for competitive intelligence is fragile. And because the market is weak, we have not directed our efforts to market competitive intelligence. Every sale of research we have made has tended to be a one-off rather than something we have pushed out to the market.

While vendors generally do not buy very much external competitive intelligence, they seem to be interested in research that they can share with prospects.