Christian Klepp  00:00

They say that information is power and in the ever changing and increasingly competitive B2B landscape, information can help you to move the needle and outsmart your competitors. So how can B2B companies use and leverage competitive and market intelligence to drive profitable growth? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Layton Cox, who will be answering this question. As the Senior Director of competitive intelligence at Sedulo Group, Layton helps B2B companies leverage data and insights to maximize their competitive advantage. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:39

And I’m gonna say Mr. Layton Cox, welcome to the show, sir. 

Layton Cox  00:47

Thanks for having me. 

Christian Klepp  00:48

Great to have you on the show, Layton. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because, you know, clearly we’re gonna talk about a topic that you specialize in. You’re clearly very passionate about it, but I also think it’s very for lack of a better word, pertinent, highly relevant, also for B2B marketers to be leveraging it. So we’re going to keep the audience in suspense a little while longer while I dive into the first set of questions. All right, so let’s go. You’re on a mission to leverage research methods to allow clients to identify, I’m going to say, advantageous strategies for their products, markets and functions. So for this conversation, let’s zero in on the topic of how B2B companies can leverage competitive and market intelligence to stand out in a competitive market. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first one is, what is it about CI (Competitive Intelligence) and MI (Market Intelligence) so competitive and market intelligence that you wish more B2B companies understood first question. And second question is, where do you see most marketing teams struggle when it comes to competitive and market intelligence?

Layton Cox  01:59

It’s great set of questions there, and they kind of go hand in hand. And so before we completely dive in the let’s make the baseline of what is CI and what is MI. And so we have this conversation a lot, what we find out is they say, Oh yeah, we have competitor intelligence. I’ve looked at their website. We have market intelligence. I’ve Googled my industry. And of course, we’ve been in this industry for decades, or sometimes even centuries, for some of our clients, what we’re here to really, kind of emphasize we want to make sure that people understand is that competitive intelligence and market research, just in general, aren’t tactical research activities. The goal of both of these is to give you a very good understanding of where you play, who else is playing in that environment with you, and then what really you need to do in order to win against those competitive players, when it’s all said and done, to do that, you have to be able to one have kind of a centralized language inside your own organization and A framework in order to access some of those more tactical research pieces that you have already done, and on the point of the research side, you also have to make sure that you’re not relying just on secondary data. 

Layton Cox  03:13

AI is fantastic. Syndicated reports are fantastic. We often, however, see especially marketing teams say, I paid Nielsen, or I paid Kantar, or I paid a very large consumer study. And I have this one report from 2022 that told me this, this and this. And we’ve made every decision since then based off of that. And then, if I need any updates, I asked ChatGPT or Copilot, to say, Hey, this is what this report used to say. What do you think it would say now and then? ChatGPT tells me the answer. What we’re finding is that they’re struggling to get kind of net new primary information. And when I say primary information, having conversations with people, talking to competitors, if your ethics, single appliance team will allow you to most will talking to sales partners, if you have retail partners, if you have VARs (Value-Added Resellers), anything like that, of kind of what are their experience? Boots on the ground and, of course, talking to customers themselves, trying to actually get information directly from them. And it’s more than a single conversation. It’s usually 10 to 12 kind of conversations. You have to talk to multiple sources triangulate what’s really going on in your market, like I said, so you can kind of build out that robust understanding of where you play, who you’re competing. You wins then, then how do you beat them?

Christian Klepp  04:31

Yeah, definitely. And that’s a those are some really, really great insights. And I’m glad you brought up the topic of AI (Artificial Intelligence), because that was kind of like one of these follow up questions I had for you, like, you’ve probably heard this or seen this more times than you care to count, but you know, everyone’s talking about like, oh, maybe we can offload some of this, like, this resource or this, this bandwidth that we’ve previously allocated for research, because now we have AI right? So we don’t have to worry about that any more. And to your point, like, you know, we’ve got this report from Nielsen, and we just feed it into ChatGPT, and it’ll get updated. So I guess my question there is, maybe it’s two pronged question, I would say, your take on how AI is helpful for CI and MI, and your take on where it’s more of an impediment.

Layton Cox  05:27

And it’s a hot topic even inside the industry, and so I’m obviously on the service provider side, and it’s a hot topic on our industry, and we do our own CI and MI well. So this is something that we’re researching ourselves, and what we’re finding is that AI is fantastic at evaluating, summarizing large data sets, as long as it knows kind of what you’re trying to do and it has done something like that in the past, or someone somewhere else has trained it to do something very similar. What that usually means is, if you want to ask it some generic information or train it on some internal data that only your team has access to. It can be an extremely powerful tool. We see a lot of it right now kind of popping up in the win loss space. And so as clients are talking to either churned customers or lost deals or one customers, and saying, kind of, what is it about the sales process or about the product that really kind of made you buy or made you not buy, being able to train an AI agent on that to kind of do some p