Sales Intelligence "SINT"

Sales Intelligence "SINT"

In my continuing effort to gain additional clarity on the parallels between business and war, I have found myself on the topic of intelligence. Many executives talk about Business Intelligence or Competitive Intelligence. So it's nice to see that this subject is not foreign to the professional world.

Initially when I enlisted, I wanted a position in intelligence. A friend of mine was already in and working as a Counter-intelligence agent for the Army. Though they could not tell me what they did (I didn't ask much either), I was able to get a general understanding of what the job entailed. Based on some family background and my own desires, I felt this was a great fit for my military career path. I talked to the recruiters, watched some interesting videos and started the paperwork for a security clearance so I could get put into a training cycle. When I found out that there was a 9-12 month backlog on getting a clearance and open training slots I had second thoughts. The fact was that the time frame I was given was just to get the process started and the actual clearance could take a couple of years. I had to make a decision to get back to regular life for a while and wait it out or choose a different path that would still give me the experiences and training I wanted. I knew that life moves fast and in 9-12 months I could be in a position that I would not want or be able to go to training. I was ready to join then and I made my decision to modify my specialty and join a unit that had a focus on combat field missions. That's how I got into the Military Police Corps. But I digress, as I often do.

Since most companies understand that intelligence on some level is important to do business, I'll outline some of the military classifications of Intel sources and their professional counterparts.

HUMINT: Human Intelligence. The collection of information from human sources. Professionally speaking. Anytime you talk to customers or potential customers you can be getting answers to questions about the industry that will allow you to make better decisions that day or in the near future. This can be done above board and not compromise any laws or regulations. There have been many books written on the importance of this and consulting agencies that can help. With that being said, this can also be done in a way that can cost you your job or have you sent to prison. Just Google "Hewlett Packard spy scandal" to see an example.

OSINT: OpenSource Intelligence. This is the the most widely used of the disciplines mainly because as the title explains, it's open source and freely available. Do you want to know what your competition is up to? Just read magazines, look for the information in widely available places. There is no need to hire investigators or hide in the shadows. In business getting information on the competition is as easy as typing in the web address and clicking through. For example. I come up against SalesForce a lot during business. So I need to know what they are doing that makes them appear to be better. I went to iTunes and downloaded about a dozen podcasts they published that outlined their positions towards every vertical market I work with. They published it for their customers and I can use that information to my benefit. That's a clear advantage of OSINT in the business world. (I'll discuss Podcasts in more detail in a later post.)

FININT: Financial Intelligence. The gathering of information about the financial affairs of your targets or competition, to understand their nature and capabilities, and predict their intentions. This sounds a bit shady, but the fact is that all of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States use this technique to gaining additional market share in their industries. Many smaller companies are getting into the mix of this and realizing that knowing your competition and customers on a financial level will allow them to make better and more direct decisions to keep customers loyal and cut out their competitors. This is done by companies like Walmart that constantly work on having lower prices on goods or the banking industries to analysis risk vs. reward with potential loans. In my line of work this can be used to know what customers have the ability to purchase the products I sell.

These are only some examples and there are many more that you can dig deeper into. When combining these along with the strategies and tactics you deploy to do business, you will inevitably gain an advantage over the competition and even some of the other people in your own company that are beating their heads against rocks trying to figure out "How do I do find out about 'X'"