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5 Takeaways from Gartner’s Market Guide for Competitive and Market Intelligence

Gartner recently released a Market Guide for Competitive and Market Intelligence Tools. Here are 5 key takeaways 👇

1. There's been a rise in CI technology demand over the last 18 months.

Competition continues to increase across every industry, but the pandemic seems to have kicked CI tool adoption into a new gear. Buyers are interacting less with vendors as more of the sales cycle goes digital. Even a lack of industry events means fewer face-to-face convos, so sales reps are less able to gather intel. So orgs are trying to find alternative ways to capture competitive intel.

2. By 2026 Gartner expects 40% of tech companies to be using commercial off-the-shelf competitive and market intelligence tools, up from 10% today.

90% of technology and service companies are not using this technology today, which means there’s a good chance your competitors still aren’t either. A good opportunity to gain a competitive edge.

3. The average org is low (2 / 5) on Gartner’s maturity scale for CI practices.

Tooling aside, the average company has an unsophisticated CI program. It’s still heavily manual and ad hoc. They lack repeatable processes for analyzing the intel, gaining an understanding of the competitive landscape, and turning it into positioning and insights that help them win. This is even more the case in smaller, younger companies.

4. CI technology growth is driven primarily by sales team requirements and objectives.

A quote from Gartner “The digitalization and automation of the sales and overall go-to-market process is a keen driver in the development of this market. Vendors report an increase in demand from sales teams for up-to-date market insights found in collateral like battle cards to help them both differentiate and win deals.”

5. Vendors need to have strong integrations with existing sales tools.

CI platforms need to be tightly integrated into the systems that sales reps work in every day. Things like Salesforce, enablement tools like Highspot, Showpad, and Seismic, and communication tools like Slack and Teams.

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