solid business intelligence creates alignment

Our Business Intelligence expertise provides custom insight reporting to help you be better prepared, exploit the competition, and exceed customer expectations. Our reports are economical, thorough and easy to understand. They are built to your specific needs and the needs of the markets you will encounter. They create alignment. Internal alignment between various groups can be powerful and help move all things forward. And, did we say they are vetted be experts? They are.

Why you need our business intelligence

Maybe you have had a series of very successful years with a core product line. Threats during successful years are often harder to spot with internal resources. (It’s not fashionable when inside to play weather geek and say a storm is coming) CEVOH will provide an objective set of facts so that your leadership team will have as much time as possible to react to changes in the markets and potential threats to market share. We will do this in a thoughtful and respectful way. Or, maybe things are not going quite so well, there has been a disruption in the industry (perhaps from technology) and core product revenue is slipping. Let us help you get to the facts quickly so changes can be made. It starts with getting on the same page as to cause and effect.  

Our philosophy is to foster this fact-based business environment. Markets are often very dynamic with swift changes in customer needs, competitor solutions and increases in disruptive technology. Its been our experience that a lot of powerful insight is resident inside the business – but this often never gets formalized. We do this too, by interviewing and capturing this – keeping an objective eye – and putting the internal knowledge into context with the external scans we do We believe that revenue growth initiatives work best when there is internal alignment on opportunities within an organization. This can be facilitated by providing a clear understanding of the market trends and a focus on actionable insight.

With this backdrop, CEVOH has developed the following high-level approach to providing business intelligence and key performance drivers. We would be happy to discuss the details about this.

our approach on business intelligence

We combine thousands of single points of information into powerful trended insight to be able to help you prepare for next quarter and for the future. We present this using key performance drives specially designed for your industry.  

• We mine your data, capture and formalize your opinions

• We look outside at customers and show you trends that can improve your business

• We explore competitors and showcase their strengths and weaknesses

• We find disruptive technologies and advise you on how these will affect your business.

Once we have all the bits of information, we push it into answering some very important questions. We compare the answers to benchmarks within the industry – and we call these ratios key performance drivers (KPDs). In essence, the business intelligence scans we do become a revenue growth assessment tool. From the assessment we can output recommended actions for you to consider. Here are some examples of the questions we answer:

• What are your brand and company discriminators?

• How do you core financials compare against you largest competitors?

• How does your unique selling proposition compare against your competitors?

• Are your markets similar or different from your competitors?

• How does your SWOT compare to others?

• How does your product and services offering and features, benefits and discriminators compare to others?

• Do you have a pricing advantage? What are the details of the competitor pricing strategies and tactics?

• What are the specifics in your market for divestitures, abandonments and M&A activity

• What is your value score?

• What is your strength of offering score?

• How does your net promoter score compare to the competition?

• How does your product services ratings compare to competitors?

Our approach is a much more effective, economical and relevant alternative to other types of  Business Intelligence.

A common option is to solicit expensive primary research, or gather secondary research at a critical time.

• Data can get stale, conclusions can be self-fulfilling and one-time charges can be exorbitant

• Content is not often vetted by a SME

Or, for some industries you can purchase a report from a third-party firm. These are often:

• Full of data that is not factual, but derived and extrapolated from only a few anchor points

• Problematic – they include some parts of an industry but exclude others

• Too broad to be worth the money

• Missing any actionable insight

And, some will take CEVOH scans and try to replicate these in-house. Some problems to avoid here are:

• Often no clear team is really responsible for gathering, sorting and making sense of market and competitor intel

• Standing-up and running an effective internal BI team is costly and is usually less skilled

• You may have legal guidance and other policies in place that prevent a deep competitive scan (done in-house) we can provide

The CEVOH business Intelligence scans are backed by relevant and proven industry expertise, cutting edge deep web research tools and experienced executive level analysis. They are simply better.

Final Summary on what we do for business intelligence scans

CEVOH provides revenue growth consulting to a variety of businesses. We find that there are often missing metrics, facts and key performance driver information resident in the client company. To fill this gap, we often conduct business scans to speed alignment and proactively uncover actionable insight. These are usually done with a big push initially and then 4 times a year – to keep current with a changing market landscape and expedite opportunities. In some very dynamic environments we will do these 6 times a year or even monthly. They are custom to each client, but typically include:

• Interviews with key internal staff – to gather and formalize what you know about the customers, competitors and potential market threats such as disruptive technology, M&A activity, and changes in the win/capture processes.

• External gathering of all relevant information, data and insight from various sources focused on ‘in industry’ competitor threats; Also, we will do this for ‘outside industry’ or commercial threats.

• Deep web scrapes and scans into all relevant public data, open digital sources to include: websites, blogs, news, official contract sources, crowdsourcing sites, forums, comments, social sites and industry groups.

• Review and augment intelligence with a subject matter expert.

• Reporting of all this into a ‘living document’ that can be accessed via excel.

• Summarization into an easy reader with insight KPDs and recommended actions.    

• Customer Insight – we clarify the current and future needs of the customers by strategic segment; this includes users, buyers and influencers. We uncover value drivers and new ways to demonstrate value to current and new customers. We simplify the voice of the customer- to help include this in all strategic and tactical projects.

• Competitor insight – we clarify the unique selling propositions of your competitors. We monitor changes in the competitor landscape. We identify gaps in the current offerings compared to customer needs and competitor offerings. We can articulate what differentiates your product and services (and potential gaps) from those of your competitors.

• Disruptive Technology – CEVOH will help you better identify trends to make this statement “we can see the future, embracing new technologies that give us strategic advantages. We can identify the ‘tech gotchas’ that might disrupt our current business model”.

• Internal Evaluations – We evaluate your offerings against the competitors. We analyze your customer satisfaction and net promoter scores to identify trends affecting initial and repeat orders and ultimately CAGR gaps. We look for internal alignment opportunities to improve hand-offs and improve customer value.