September 3, 2025 • 50 mins
How to Strengthen Your B2B Differentiation with Competitive Intelligence
They say that information is power. In the ever-changing and increasingly competitive B2B landscape, it’s also a strategic advantage. When used effectively, it empowers companies to grow profitably, scale rapidly and outsmart their competitors. So how can B2B companies harness the power of competitive and market intelligence (CI & MI) to drive profitable growth?
That’s why we’re talking to Layton Cox (Senior Director of Competitive Intelligence & Strategy Consulting, Sedulo Group), who shared his experience and provided valuable insights on how to strengthen your B2B differentiation with competitive intelligence. During our conversation, Layton emphasized the importance of primary research over the reliance on secondary data, and elaborated on the value of internal data and direct competitor insights. He also discussed building a centralized intelligence framework for data storage and conducting primary research to uncover unique competitive advantages. Layton also talked about how teams can break down silos within organizations, sharing research findings across business units, and shared common pitfalls that marketing teams should avoid.
https://youtu.be/eKUOkk9C-wE
Topics discussed in episode:
[1:59] Understanding the fundamentals of Competitive Intelligence (CI) and Market Intelligence (MI)
[5:27] The role of AI in Competitive Intelligence and Market Intelligence
[9:19] Key challenges and pitfalls faced by B2B marketing teams in intelligence gathering and sharing
[14:59] How to overcome objections to conducting primary research
[17:51] Building internal alignment and effectively sharing insights across teams
[20:50] Practical techniques for gathering primary intelligence
[22:42] Mystery shopping in B2B
[31:38] Actionable tips for B2B marketers:
- Build a framework
- Leverage internal data
- Find competitors internal data
- Share with internal teams
[35:01] Key metrics and how data-driven decisions drive growth
Companies and links mentioned:
TranscriptChristian 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 o
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
They say that information ispower and in the ever changing
and increasingly competitive B2Blandscape, information can help
you to move the needle andoutsmart your competitors. So
how can B2B companies use andleverage competitive and market
intelligence to drive profitablegrowth? Welcome to this episode
of the B2B Marketers on aMission podcast, and I'm your
(00:21):
host, Christian Klepp. Today,I'll be talking to Layton Cox,
who will be answering thisquestion. As the Senior Director
of competitive intelligence atSedulo Group, Layton helps B2B
companies leverage data andinsights to maximize their
competitive advantage. Tune into find out more about what this
B2B marketers mission is.
(00:43):
And I'm gonna say Mr. LaytonCox, welcome to the show, sir.
Thanks for having me.
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 thatyou specialize in. You're
clearly very passionate aboutit, but I also think it's very
for lack of a better word,pertinent, highly relevant, also
(01:06):
for B2B marketers to beleveraging it. So we're going to
keep the audience in suspense alittle while longer while I dive
into the first set of questions.All right, so let's go. You're
on a mission to leverageresearch methods to allow
clients to identify, I'm goingto say, advantageous strategies
for their products, markets andfunctions. So for this
(01:27):
conversation, let's zero in onthe topic of how B2B companies
can leverage competitive andmarket intelligence to stand out
in a competitive market. So I'mgoing to kick off this
conversation with two questions,and I'm happy to repeat them. So
the first one is, what is itabout CI (Competitive
Intelligence) and MI (MarketIntelligence) so competitive and
(01:47):
market intelligence that youwish more B2B companies
understood first question. Andsecond question is, where do you
see most marketing teamsstruggle when it comes to
competitive and marketintelligence?
It's great set of questionsthere, and they kind of go hand
in hand. And so before wecompletely dive in the let's
make the baseline of what is CIand what is MI. And so we have
(02:10):
this conversation a lot, what wefind out is they say, Oh yeah,
we have competitor intelligence.I've looked at their website. We
have market intelligence. I'veGoogled my industry. And of
course, we've been in thisindustry for decades, or
sometimes even centuries, forsome of our clients, what we're
here to really, kind ofemphasize we want to make sure
that people understand is thatcompetitive intelligence and
(02:32):
market research, just ingeneral, aren't tactical
research activities. The goal ofboth of these is to give you a
very good understanding of whereyou play, who else is playing in
that environment with you, andthen what really you need to do
in order to win against thosecompetitive players, when it's
(02:52):
all said and done, to do that,you have to be able to one have
kind of a centralized languageinside your own organization and
A framework in order to accesssome of those more tactical
research pieces that you havealready done, and on the point
of the research side, you alsohave to make sure that you're
not relying just on secondarydata.
(03:13):
AI is fantastic. Syndicatedreports are fantastic. We often,
however, see especiallymarketing teams say, I paid
Nielsen, or I paid Kantar, or Ipaid a very large consumer
study. And I have this onereport from 2022 that told me
this, this and this. And we'vemade every decision since then
based off of that. And then, ifI need any updates, I asked
(03:35):
ChatGPT or co pilot, to say,Hey, this is what this report
used to say. What do you thinkit would say now and then?
ChatGPT tells me the answer.What we're finding is that
they're struggling to get kindof net new primary information.
And when I say primaryinformation, having
conversations with people,talking to competitors, if your
ethics, single appliance teamwill allow you to most will
(03:58):
talking to sales partners, ifyou have retail partners, if you
have VARs (Value-AddedResellers), anything like that,
of kind of what are theirexperience? Boots on the ground
and, of course, talking tocustomers themselves, trying to
actually get informationdirectly from them. And it's
more than a single conversation.It's usually 10 to 12 kind of
conversations. You have to talkto multiple sources triangulate
(04:21):
what's really going on in yourmarket, like I said, so you can
kind of build out that robustunderstanding of where you play,
who you're competing. You winsthen, then how do you beat them?
Yeah, definitely. And that's athose are some really, really
great insights. And I'm glad youbrought up the topic of AI
(Artificial Intelligence),because that was kind of like
one of these follow up questionsI had for you, like, you've
(04:43):
probably heard this or seen thismore times than you care to
count, but you know, everyone'stalking about like, oh, maybe we
can offload some of this, like,this resource or this, this
bandwidth that we've previouslyallocated for research, because
now we have AI right? So wedon't have to worry about that
any more. And to your point,like, you know, we've got this
report from Nielsen, and we justfeed it into ChatGPT, and it'll
(05:06):
get updated. So I guess myquestion there is, maybe it's
two pronged question, I wouldsay, your take on how AI is
helpful for CI and MI, and yourtake on where it's more of an
impediment.
(05:27):
And it's a hot topic even insidethe industry, and so I'm
obviously on the serviceprovider side, and it's a hot
topic on our industry, and we doour own CI and MI well. So this
is something that we'reresearching ourselves, and what
we're finding is that AI isfantastic at evaluating,
summarizing large data sets, aslong as it knows kind of what
(05:49):
you're trying to do and it hasdone something like that in the
past, or someone somewhere elsehas trained it to do something
very similar. What that usuallymeans is, if you want to ask it
some generic information ortrain it on some internal data
that only your team has accessto. It can be an extremely
powerful tool. We see a lot ofit right now kind of popping up
in the win loss space. And so asclients are talking to either
(06:15):
churned customers or lost dealsor one customers, and saying,
kind of, what is it about thesales process or about the
product that really kind of madeyou buy or made you not buy,
being able to train an AI agenton that to kind of do some post
sale surveys that's controlledby the AI and allows you to get
integrated into it that's asmall enough niche, enough kind
(06:36):
of focus for AI to be able toreally pull off, usually by
itself, with just a few kind ofcustomized agents, and the data
usually comes back in arelatively systemized way. Price
is obviously one of the thingsalmost everybody brings up every
time product featurescapabilities, you'll get
reference to certain competitornames that reoccur over and over
again, and AI can pull thoseinsights out. And so broadly, AI
(06:58):
is good when you can train it ina specific data set to do a
specific process that you'rereally looking to kind of repeat
over and over and over again.And you already know what good
looks like.
Where AI is not good is reallywhen it comes down to more
creative and strategic thoughts,and so when it's not focused on
a very tactical set ofexpectations, when it's not
(07:18):
using a set amount of data whenyou're saying, Hey, I don't know
what this looks like yet. We'reentering a new market. We're
launching a new product. We havea new competitor that's popped
up, and we have no idea whatthey do or don't do, or what
their products look like, orwhere their use cases are
impacting us all. If everythingthat's kind of new, that's where
(07:40):
AI struggles, and that's where Ithink you still have to have
real people going out thereasking other people these real
questions in order to be able toget the insights that actually
matter.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Itsounds to me, just for what I've
been hearing, that you shouldsee AI more as a co-pilot,
right? Something that you saw,something that you constantly
(08:01):
like, train, because it's allabout like, Okay, you gotta keep
training the AI, right? And it,and it does learn rapidly, but
to your point, it's, it doesrequire some human intervention,
I think might be the right word.
I would say, the way that we'vetalked about internally, even we
use, and we use AI for a goodamount of summarization of
interviews and notes and thingslike that as well. Of a lot of
(08:23):
it goes down to, I try to treatit like an intern. Of, what
would I trust an intern to dothis task? What do I need to
tell an intern before I actuallykind of give this all the way to
them, and then if it comes backand it's kind of sloppy, that's
probably on me. It's probablynot the interns fault. So then I
need to figure out, Okay, whatdid I miss communicate, or what
did I not communicate correctlyto it? That's how we've kind of
(08:45):
treated internally, and itreally helps. And I will say,
like I feel bad for all thecollege graduates right now,
because it can do a lot of thosetasks, and there's probably less
internships nowadays than therewere whenever I was back then.
So, but hopefully that is just aflash in the pan and everything
opens up here quickly.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely,absolutely. I'm gonna move us on
(09:05):
to the next question about onthe topic of leveraging CI and
MI as it pertains to B2Bmarketing teams. What are some
of these key pitfalls that youthink the teams need to look out
for, and what should they bedoing instead?
I would say there's one that'sprobably inside the scope of
marketing, and there's onethat's kind of goes beyond the
scope of marketing. Inside thescope of marketing, I would say
(09:29):
it, you really shouldn't makebig decisions based off of
secondary, generic or justbroad, publicly available
information. We see this often,where you can go and you can
subscribe to some kind ofdatabase, and you can get access
to the information and datapoints, and you can have someone
kind of say, oh, yeah, here'sthe information you're looking
(09:51):
for, and it'll be 500 bucksusing those kind of market
reports. It is valuable in someways, but your competition. If
they are at all serious or not,has that exact same data, they
have the exact same insights.They're able to leverage those
same sources, and they're goingto make the same insights and
same kind of decisions based offthat, as you probably will. And
(10:13):
so as you're looking to go buildout a kind of advantageous use
case, or as you're building outunique positioning for your
product, whereas you're justtrying to say, hey, how do I
beat this competitor in thisspace? You can't really use that
publicly available and easilyattainable information.
So what you can do instead,leverage the internal data that
(10:33):
you have only you have yoursales data. Only you have your
customer data. Only you shouldbe able to kind of make
decisions off of that. And ifyou're not collecting
information around sales, aroundcustomer experience, going
through kind of what pain pointsexist in our products as of
today, those are all projectsthat you can easily run
internally, that can get yousome very powerful and very
(10:56):
unique to you data, which doesallow you to make decisions that
can build a competitiveadvantage off of those because
your competitors don't have thatinformation. And of course, if
you're looking for informationbeyond what sits inside your own
walls, that's when you go outand you kind of do a focus study
and say, Hey, we need to run asurvey that targets these
individuals. We need to get togo interviews. We need to do
(11:18):
focus groups. We need to have acompetitor product tear down. We
need to go through whatever itmight end up being, but you can
gather a few different kind ofsources of information for you
to actually be able to go getinformation that is out there.
It's just hard to get that yourcompetitors won't have access
to, and that's another thingthat you can do to kind of avoid
that pitfall of using the sameinformation your competitors are
(11:38):
using.
Now, one that falls outside themarketers realm is, and this is
one of the issues almost all theresearch efforts that we see
every time we go into a largecompany, is that it's very
siloed. Everyone is doing theirown research in their own way,
for their own purposes, andmarketing is one of those key
places where that happens.They'll be doing a study on
(12:01):
pricing, they'll be doing astudy on value propositions.
They'll be doing a study on kindof market positioning. It won't
touch sales. They'll forget toshare stuff with sales and vice
versa. Sales is any better. Theywon't share it up with the
strategy teams. And maybe theCMO knows about it, if you're
lucky, the chief revenue officermight know about it too, but the
(12:23):
COO and the CFO probably do notknow the core insights of those
studies that you've been doingin the marketing function. And
so trying to take your researchefforts beyond the silo of your
function is critical.
As I mentioned, we do marketresearch on our own industry and
our own customers andcompetitors and things like that
all the time. We just got donewith one of those surveys
recently, one of the key thingswe found is that internal
(12:45):
alignment issues was the largestchallenge that respondents said
that they were facing whentrying to do any kind of
strategic planning or any kindof project initiatives moving
forward in 2025 and it justshows that no one's speaking the
same language because no one hasthe same data. And the first
thing you can do to start that,just start sharing with
everybody else. Say, Hey, wejust finished this study. Even
(13:07):
it's just a quick memo. Here arethree bullet points, and then
here's the PDF attached. Ifyou're interested in more, let
us know. We'll do a phone call.But that kind of just opening up
the Komodo to other people issuper, super valuable.
Yeah, those are incrediblyinteresting points, and partly
shocking too, because you know,when you think about it, it's
2025, and we're still dealingwith, to your point, silos,
(13:29):
yeah, fragmented efforts, right?Or efforts that are like,
collectively, like fragmented,because one hand doesn't know
what the other hand is doing.
And depending on the industry,if you're working remotely, it's
even worse nowadays, because youcould be just in your own little
world, doing your own littlething, and even people inside
your function don't know what'sgoing on, right? So the old
days, if everyone's on the samefloor and we're all talking at
(13:50):
the water cooler of I did thissurvey, oh, I would love to see
the results of that doesn'texist anymore. So it's a new way
of just ensuring that peoplehave visibility into what's
going on. It's very, veryhelpful.
Yeah, I might be dating myselfhere or, like, back in the day,
you know, when you just get upfrom your cubicle and just
scream across the room, hey, doyou have that report? Like,
right, exactly. But you broughtup a couple of things, and I
(14:13):
wanted to go back to them and acouple of follow up questions
there, if that's okay with you,the point that you made about
the reliance on secondary dataand information, which basically
drives the point home thatprimary, primary research going
out into the field, conductingthose interviews, conducting
(14:34):
those focus groups, that that isstill Paramount so and you and I
know that That said, it's notalways easy to get buy in from
the customer for that kind ofresearch, because, well, the
investment certainly is one oneissue, but the other one is that
is the time. So how do youovercome that, that type of
(14:55):
pushback, or those objections tosaying, Okay, we need to do this
primary research.
So usually, my advice is toeverybody who's in kind of a
role who has to get data to makedecisions, is leverage one
internal data first. It'scompletely free to you. It takes
effort, yes, but just an hour aday of kind of trying to figure
(15:18):
out where does this data live.And if you document that, then
all of a sudden, pretty quickly,you'll be able to have an AI
agent who can do a lot of thatfor you. And so internal data
should be your first place yougo, no matter what, if you can
find it internally awesome thatusually can solve a lot of your
problems, you can go from there.Second is the free, publicly
available secondary data. Ifit's out there, you should at
(15:40):
least go look at it, if onlyjust to see what your
competitors are saying at thevery, very minimum, but also, if
you can compliment that withyour internal data, maybe you
can prove a hypothesis. Maybeinternal data said, Hey,
directionally speaking, we thinkthat customers were complaining
about this one product featureand but then we went out to look
at the public review websites,we found that this is a common
(16:01):
issue for the entire industry.So it's not just our product,
it's the entire use case thatthe industry is trying to solve
right now has the same kind ofcomplaint. Well, there you go,
so that that can help a marketerfigure out exactly what the next
step should be. And then afterthat, I'd say, before you go
buying reports, which sometimescan be very expensive, then
that's when you have aconversation about is primary
worth it, and then at thatpoint, you will have exhausted
(16:23):
at least two options, the lowcost, free options, and you can
take that up to your boss andsay, Look, I've tried internal
data. I've tried just what's outthere publicly for free, and now
my hypothesis is this, and Ican't validate or not validate
it because of that, so I have togo run this survey, and as long
as you can, and a lot ofresearch providers such as
(16:43):
ourselves as well, we're open tohaving conversations on
brainstorming on this. You don'thave to come to vendors with
like, Hey, I know exactly what Iwant to do, and I know exactly
how I want to handle it. Thingssay, hey, like, I'm looking at
this stuff. I don't know exactlywhat I'm feeling right now. I
know these three things are veryinteresting to me. What do you
think like? What would this looklike? How could this feel? And
(17:04):
then putting together a businesscase with you is something that
we do relatively often as well,to help figure out, what is this
actually valuable like? Is thisvaluable research? Will you be
able to make a key decision ifwe were to get you the right
answers to these questions? Ifthe answer is yes, then how
valuable is that decision? Ifthe answer is no, that you
really shouldn't pay us and youshould, shouldn't do primary,
(17:24):
because it's an unanswerablequestion.
No, absolutely, absolutely. Sothat was the first follow up
question. The second follow upquestion was going back to what
you were saying about theinternal alignment issues
because of the reality ofdepartments being siloed. So
just from your experience andyour perspective Layton, how do
(17:45):
you think CI and MI can helpfill that, fill that gap and
break those silos down?
This is where it goes beyond theresearch. And so what, what we
found throughout our kind of 20years of doing this is the
research, the facts bythemselves, the insights even
generated from the facts bythemselves. That's maybe half of
(18:05):
the story at most. What youreally want to do is you want to
identify what implications doesthis have for us, and who should
know if you can figure out thosetwo pieces, the next thing that
we usually suggest to clients isget them in a perfect world,
that's a half day workshop, afull day workshop, if you can
really swing it, depending onwho the stakeholders are,
(18:27):
depending on how big thedecision is that you're looking
to make, if you're doing a fullblown product launch, market
entry kind of decision, ifyou're looking to make some big
strategic bets, it's wortheveryone taking a day out of
their time to go sit down andactually think hard about this
stuff. And so usually what wesee is, when we're facing large
decisions by our clients,they'll actually sit down into a
workshop like environment. We'llgo through the insights that we
(18:50):
have developed through the MIand CI world, and then we'll
actually say, now, let's do somewar gaming. Let's do some
scenario planning. Let'sactually think, What will our
competitors do. If we do this,what should we do if our
competitors do that, and then,based off of those, they can
start pulling out, ooh, theseinitiatives would really make
sense. And here are somepriorities that we should have
and go from there. But I wouldsay, get them in a room, if in a
(19:14):
perfect world, for a day inperson, in a non perfect world,
a two hour conference call, canactually solve a lot of problems
when structured correctly.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely,absolutely. It's almost like you
are, you're leveraging the datato simulate potential scenarios
and and perhaps evenopportunities, right?
Exactly.
It's important to like,highlight realities too. Like,
(19:35):
Listen, guys, if we don't, if wedon't do this, this might
happen, right? But also going atit from a positive angle of
like, if we do this, this is,this is the potential return,
right?
We get more of the form of thelatter right now, just because
macroeconomic conditions, yes,right now, everyone's saying,
Hey, what are the threats? Whatare the risks that are that I'm
facing? But rewind a few years,and I'm sure fast forward a few
(19:58):
years, you're going to besaying, Okay, what opportunities
are out there that we can gocapture, where can we find
growth? What can we look like?And the great part about it is
that a lot of the techniquesthat you use in MI and CI can
answer both those questions witha lot of the same kind of
conversation techniques and alot of the same ways of getting
in front of the right people,whether those are competitors,
whether those are customers,whatever that might look like.
(20:20):
Absolutely, absolutely. So youbrought up some of these points
already, but like, just fromyour perspective, if you can
provide some examples of how CIand MI can help with the
following, and I'm happy torepeat them this. So I've got
three points here, right? So thefirst one is uncovering new
buyer pain points or shiftingpriorities. The second one is
(20:41):
differentiating B2B messaging,which ultimately impacts
positioning. And the third oneis refining unique selling
propositions in B2B.
I think the best way to kind oftalk about all three of those
pieces is to kind of go throughsome techniques to just
gathering the information. Andso before I dive into that
though, I'll say we work throughwhat we kind of call the four
(21:04):
eye system. And so we startwith, kind of, what's just the
raw facts, how does that feel?What does that look like? What
intelligence is out there? Andso first of all, just gathering
that and turning that intointelligence is kind of one of
the first steps there. And then,okay, we have some information.
Now, what's the insights fromthis information, and this kind
of goes throughout all of theworld of data analytics has gone
(21:25):
through the same exact processof taking just raw data and
pulling it into insights to say,Okay, here's the story from the
data that we're seeing, and thengoing from there into that
implication of, okay. Now whatdoes this mean for our specific
circumstances today?
Now going the second half ofthat is where we kind of do the
strategic brainstorming. That'sthe workshopping. That's where
we actually sit down withleaders and stakeholders and
(21:46):
have conversations. The firsthalf of that is just getting
information, and sometimesthat's through the secondary
research we talked aboutearlier. It's the internal data
that you might already have, orprimary research methods. Now,
given we're talking to B2Bmarketers here, there's a few
different ways that we go aboutgathering primary information.
The most common is probablysurveys, surveying customers,
(22:07):
surveying sales partners, saleschannel partners, surveying
competitors, even surveyingpeers. If you're looking for
benchmark information or pieceslike that, surveying market
experts, but really, anyone inthe world that you might think
might have some information thatyou're looking for. Building out
a survey and then putting thatin front of them is probably one
(22:29):
of the easiest ways to collectdata, no matter what.
Second would be, interviews andfocus groups, you can do this
with that same stakeholder list.If you're looking to do like
voice of the customer. You cantalk to a whole bunch of
customers looking to the voiceof the market. You can the
market. You can talk tocustomers, sales, partners and
competitors. If you're lookingfor very specific competitor
information, you can talk tojust a few people who have to be
(22:52):
inside that function at acompetitor too, and you can find
out really fast what they'redoing on their side of the
table.
those are all other that'sprobably our second most common
way is actually just one on oneinterviews, or kind of one on
five focus groups kind of thing,and then last and these are not
as common, but they are verypowerful when it makes sense to
do so is B2B and mysteryshopping, partnering with real
(23:15):
companies that are going throughvery similar kind of buying
cycles as your prospects wouldbe, and then actually walking
them through a competitor buyingexperience, walking them through
a buying experience for ourclients, just so they can see,
what does it actually feel likewhen a real customer goes
through this? What are we doingwell? What are we doing poorly,
benchmarking that againstcompetitors and going through
(23:36):
those kind of pieces. If you doit in this mostly comes up in
software and pieces like that,where it's a little bit harder
to have a really goodunderstanding of pricing,
packaging, positioning,discounting, things like that,
but going through their salescycle with a real prospect,
getting real pricing, gettingreal discounts, understanding
what that might look like, issomething that we can do
relatively often. That's goingto be to be mystery shopping
(23:58):
experience.
And then last but not least. AndI know I know I already said
last, but this one's the finalone. I promise. It's the
actually doing demos, gettingyour hands on competitive
products, and actually doingkind of, what we call a product
tear down, where we will go outand procure competitor products,
their services, whatever itmight be, and we'll tell you how
what's good, what's bad, kind ofgive you an unbiased opinion and
(24:21):
say, here are some of thefeatures that they offer. Here's
how they actually look when it'sworking. Here's what doesn't
work with them. And that canprovide you a lot of kind of
good data for you to go andeither on the threat side or on
the opportunity side, like wetalked about earlier.
Fantastic, fantastic. Thanks forsharing that. Those pretty those
are pretty comprehensive listyou probably condensed 20 years
(24:42):
of experience into about likethree or four minutes.
Just about there's a lot ofdetails that go into all four of
those different kind ofactivities. But yeah, high
level, I'm sure give AI a littlewhile, and they'll be able to
handle a lot of that for you.But it's definitely one of those
things that you can if you getcreative. And if you know what
information you're looking togather, there are various ways
(25:04):
to go get it when it's all saidand done.
Absolutely, absolutely. I wantedto go back to what you said at
the tail end of that, Layton,you were talking about mystery
shopping for B2B. So, you know,in a traditional sense, when
people hear mystery shopping,their mind probably goes to a
place that's, that's like, Oh,so you're gonna send somebody in
(25:24):
here to spy on me. And thatmight be, that might be a bit
harsh, but, like, but how do youget buy in for that, from
customers that that have thatprobably negative perception, if
you will, of mystery shopping,because it's not, it's, it
actually does have its strategicvalue.
Yeah. And so, I mean, mysteryshopping is most commonly used
(25:44):
for consumer services, consumergoods. That's just the way that
it ends up being. It's easy forme to go mystery shop my local
supermarket and just say, hey, Iwant to walk into here and I
want to see one, does someonegreet me? Two, what's the price
of tuna? Is that comparable towhat the grocery store is down
the road, those kind of things alot easier on the consumer side,
on the B2B side, obviously notas easy, because there's no just
(26:07):
big supermarket that anyone canwalk into. You have to be
somewhat qualified to have justthe first conversation your
sales reasoning has to makesense for that conversation to
continue. And so what we end updoing, and this is the slowest
part of this entire process, isusually finding a real world
buyer of whoever you're tryingto, mystery shops, customer,
(26:29):
product or service or offering,whatever that ends up being. And
so easy I'll use to do low hereas an example. So do low is one
of many kind of market research,competitive intelligence
strategy firms, if we wanted togo mystery shop a competitor, I
could go find a another kind offortune 500 company and say,
Hey, I need to find someone onthe insights team who's willing,
(26:52):
or as a friend of the firm, oras a contact I know personally,
or whomever it might be, andsay, Hey, I need you to kind of
go have a few conversations withtheir sales team, put in a form
and say, hey, I'm interested inyour services. See where it
takes us. And that's kind of howwe start a lot of these
conversations, is that we'llactually go find friends of the
firm. We'll have past clientsdepending on the fit, or we'll
(27:14):
go custom source, actual kind ofwe'll go out as our team members
and our researchers will go outinto the world with billions of
kind of companies, and we'llsay, Hey, we're looking for a
company who does this, this andthis, who is interested in
acquiring these kind ofservices.
And so sometimes our mysterybuyers watch it go through and
purchase things, just like Iwould if I was a consumer and I
(27:35):
was going to my local grocerystore, I might buy that can of
tuna. Who knows? Same thinghappens here? Well, we'll work
off of our kind of mystery B2Bshop or firm. As they go through
that sales journey, they mightend up saying, Yes, I totally
want this risk managementsoftware, whatever it might end
up being that we're mysteryshopping that day. Or it could
be like I sat through the salespitch. I understand the pricing.
(27:55):
It's just out of our budget,whatever it might be, but that's
kind of where that process comesand so it becomes much more of a
we piggyback off of these salesconversations that were going to
happen anyway, and we just kindof take notes in the background.
Yeah, yes, it's certainly, itcertainly sounds like it's, it's
more nuanced, and it's also abit more of a logistics
exercise, right? Because it'sbecause you're talking as you
(28:18):
say. You're talking about morelike, I guess, real world
buyers, who tend to be alsospecialized in a particular
segment, certainly like adifferent set of circumstances,
as compared to, like the mysteryshopping you do for consumer
rent.
Exactly, exactly. It takes us along time to find the people
that would be actually makesense for to go through the
(28:40):
sales job, the journey, and itgets harder. I mean, we'll have
and sometimes, and that's why wehave so many different ways to
get this primary intelligencedoesn't always make sense. So
for example, if you are tryingto sell medical equipment to
massive hospital systems, themassive hospital systems already
know that medical equipmentreps, they already know what
(29:01):
that looks like, and the medicalreps already know probably all
the conversation people thatthey need to have, because these
are very, very long salescycles, like buying a CAT scan
machine takes years. It's notjust a pick up the phone and
call on your clothes in 12 or 12hours to four weeks kind of
thing. And so depending on thesales cycle of the product or
service or offering or whateverit might be. There are certain
(29:23):
ones where B2B, mystery shoppingjust makes no sense whatsoever.
And then there's certain oneswhere it really does. And so
depending on what you're tryingto solve, there's other ways to
get information, if we have to,but when it makes sense, it's
one of the best ways to do it,because it's as real of an
experience you can possibly getan insight into your competitors
sales process, into how theyposition themselves, into their
(29:43):
sales reps skill set, and intotheir pricing, of course.
And quite frankly, Layton, like,which marketing team wouldn't
want that, like, which marketingteam wouldn't want to have that
insight into what theircompetitors are doing, so that
they could have that they couldbe one step ahead, right?
Exactly, and that's and there'sa lot of ethical rules and legal
rules about what can and cannotbe shared throughout those
(30:06):
journeys. But I would say thevast majority of the time, price
data is usually capturedrelatively freely and easily,
positioning data of how they goabout positioning themselves
against competitors, includingwho could be our end client when
it's all said and done, or justinside the market in general.
And of course, any kind ofdifferentiators that they're
trying to really emphasizeduring that sales process, of
(30:28):
where do they plant the flag,and what do they keep coming
back to over and over and overagain as we're asking them these
questions. And of course, thosecan be ways that you understand
as a marketer, where you canattack them if you think they're
really not as strong as they saythey are, or where you should
steer away, because maybe theydo beat you in that spice but,
or they do beat you in thatspace, but you can beat them
(30:48):
somewhere else along the way.And so all of it really helps
marketers get a much betterunderstanding of what does that
environment look like, and thenhow do you win.
Exactly? Or you can spice up thespace to use your word, right?
Exactly, exactly.
All right, my friend, we come tothe point in the conversation
where we're talking aboutactionable tips and latent man,
(31:10):
I'm looking at the time now, andit's been 30 minutes, and you've
given us a ton, you've given usa ton of insights and ton of
tips and recommendations. Butjust imagine that there's a B2B
marketer out there, or, I hope,a marketing team that's
listening to this conversationand there were based on the
advice that you've given threeto five action items, or three
(31:32):
to five things that you wantthem to take action on right
now, after they listen to thisinterview, what will those
things be?
I'll do four. And so I'll splitthe difference there. One is
build a framework. Buildsomething that allows you to
store all this information in acommon language that, at the
minimum, your team understands,but hopefully the entire
(31:53):
organization can kind of getbehind. You'll be blown away by
how many times we come intosituations where any past work
is just lost into the etherbecause no one understands where
it's saved or how to name it, orwhere it could live. Or is this
competitor intel? Is this marketintel? Is this customer intel?
But some kind of tagging systemof some way, shape or form,
fantastic. That's number one,figure out how to store
(32:15):
information.
Two, leverage internal data, asmentioned earlier, that's gold.
Your competition doesn't havethat they can't make decisions
based off of that data. You can.So leverage that. Go out,
collect it, organize it, make ituseful.
Three then go try to find yourcompetitors internal data.
(32:36):
That's the conduct primaryresearch in some way, shape or
form, so that you can go findout the stuff that only your
competitors know as of rightnow. Market research,
competitive intelligence, allthat kind of falls inside that
space. And of course, talking tocustomers helps a lot, too,
customers and prospects.
Then the fourth one is, once youactually have all that stuff,
share it with other people.Share it with sales. Share it
(32:59):
with product. Share it withstrategy, move it up the chain,
move it down the chain. And ofcourse, as you do that, and this
is something that we get a tonof value out of in all of our
projects, is we start everyproject with stakeholder
interviews, where we talk tovarious different departments
inside of our clients, just tofigure out, hey, what do you
know that we should know? Andthen what are you looking to
learn that we can go get foryou? And if you have that same
(33:21):
attitude whenever you share thisinformation, to say, hey, here's
what we know. Do you know?Anything else can you add to our
data? And then all of a sudden,if you end up being kind of
source for that one, your commonframework ends up being
extremely helpful across theentire organization, and your
internal data set just gets somuch more powerful. And so share
what you know, because you neverknow what anybody else might
know, and that can be justexponentially helpful.
(33:44):
Information is power, as theysay, right?
It is, but only if you can allspeak the same language and
understand it the same way. Ifeveryone's running their own
ship and they're running alldifferent directions, ends up
being kind of a spider web ofnausea, yeah?
Hot Mess, essentially.
Exactly.
But no, no, fantastic,fantastic. Let me just quickly
(34:04):
recap your tips here. So one wasbuild a framework. The second
one was leverage internal data.The third one was find
competitors internal data, andthe fourth one, which I couldn't
agree with more. Share withinternal teams, get everybody on
the same page, because the it'sso important to get alignment
right?
(34:25):
Exactly, exactly. If you just dothose four things, you'll be
head and shoulders above most ofthe marketing organizations that
we come up against, and you willhave a legitimate competitive
advantage when you're makingdecisions.
Right? Fantastic. Okay, we getto the part with the I call it
the love it or hate it question,but you know what we're talking
about, CI and MI. We got to talkabout metrics too, right? And I
(34:48):
appreciate Layton that you cango down a very deep rabbit hole
with that question. But likejust top level, what are some of
these metrics that you from atop level perspective, that
marketing teams should be payingattention to?
So, I know everyone lovesmetrics like all the time,
especially like anythingquantitative, I would say,
(35:09):
unfortunately, CI and MI is hardto metricize. If that's a word,
there are certain metrics that Ithink everyone should know no
matter what. What's the size ofyour market? How is that
segmented? What competitors ownwhat percent of that market and
of those segments, and that canbe your core competitors, that
can be your emergingcompetitors. If you can do it by
(35:31):
competing products, that's evenbetter. But that, by itself, can
give you a lot of information.But beyond that, I think
everything else is qualitative.When it comes down to making
these large strategic decisions,you decisions, the quantitative
stuff is extremely valuable. Ihave an accounting undergrad
degree and so like, that's all Iknew for a very long period of
time, was the math, and it'sextremely, extremely helpful.
(35:53):
But as I've kind of gone throughthis process more and more with
clients and pieces like that,the qualitative parts of what
does it feel like? Like, what'sthe sales journey of our
competitors feel like? Have weactually touched our competitors
products like, and you'd beshocked, even in non B2B, but in
like B2C, how many people havenever tried their competitors
(36:13):
products? If you're working forToyota, you probably don't drive
a Ford. Maybe you should just tosee what it's like, those kind
of things. And this goes on theB2B side too. You can do the
exact same experience andactually physically figure out,
what does it feel like to playwith it? What's it feel like
when they give you the offering?What's it feel like to buy it?
And then, of course, how do theydifferentiate themselves from
you? All that's qualitative, andall that's extremely valuable
(36:36):
too. And it really gives you thedifference between just looking
at a number and saying thatnumber looks pretty good to
actually saying, Oh, no, like, Ican make a decision, because
that number is good, and becauseI've had this experience, I now
know exactly what we should godo to fix this.
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely,absolutely, no. I mean, I'm
actually not that surprised. I'mactually more surprised by the
marketing teams that don'tactually know their product very
(36:59):
well, because they haven'tactually, like, tried it out,
right?
Not uncommon, I will say. Sodon't give them too hard of a
time, because it's we, it'srelatively rare, especially in
the B2B world, where we come upand say, Okay, what do you know
about your competitors products?And they'll say nothing like we
know its name and we know thewebsite it lives on, and that's
about it. And so we're, we'resaying, hopefully, we're
(37:21):
hopefully trying to influencethis as well. You should try
your best get your hands oncompetitors products as much as
possible.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.It's absolutely right. Okay,
sir. This is the part we'regoing to ask you to, like, get
up on your soap box, because I'mgoing to ask you about your area
of expertise and what status quothere is in that area of
(37:42):
expertise that you that you keephearing that you passionately
disagree with and why?
So area of expertise, I wouldsay what we most likely do for
most of our clients is help themmake decisions using data in
some way, shape or form. Anddata, of course, is a very broad
term, what that usually meansand what we usually come across,
(38:05):
and what we're trying to fix formost of our clients is that the
data they are using is thatfree, publicly available
secondary research, they aremaking large bets, millions of
dollars based off of Gartnerreport from 2022 and while I'm
sure that was extremely valuablein 2022 it's just not today. The
(38:28):
world changes so fast. Youreally have to be constantly
talking to your competitors. Youhave to be constantly talking to
customers. You have to beconstantly evaluating your
market that you're in andleveraging old data, publicly
available data for these largedecisions that you're saying
this will be a differentiatorfor us. This product is going to
revolutionize our industry. Ifyou're leveraging the same data
(38:50):
set that your competitors haveaccess to, it's not going to do
any of that you really if youreally want to build something
special, you have to go getspecial data. The only way to
get special data is to do kindof special efforts, and that's
around primary research.
Roll up your sleeves and getyour hands dirty. I'm over.
It takes time and effort, butthat's the only way to do it,
(39:11):
and that's why you see so manyproducts that really aren't
differentiated, is their teamsdidn't actually go out there and
didn't actually try to findspecial information. They just
kind of said, Hey, one of theexecutives thought this was a
good idea. We read a Gartnerreport who said this was going
to be a hot topic, and so wewent and built this product, and
now we have no traction. It'slike, yeah, like, because you
(39:33):
didn't actually talk to anybodyon the competitive side who was
doing the exact same thing,because their executive went to
the same executive brain stormthat yours did, and they read
the same Gartner report that youdid or you didn't talk to any
customers. They don't reallywant this. They want this little
feature over here. And so beingable to actually go out and talk
to people, whether it'scompetitors or customers, but in
(39:54):
a perfect world, talk to both,that is just so much more
valuable.
You know, like the way thatyou've laid it out so
beautifully. It sounds sosimple, but it's, it's
surprising how many people don'tdo it, right?
And that's, this, is othersoapbox rants, is a lot of
people do it once, and they'relike, Oh, perfect. We have the
(40:14):
data. We're done one of them,and it's a shot. It's, yeah, we
took a snapshot of what theworld looks like today as of
this report getting handed overto you, it's easier actually, to
do it on a reoccurring basis,because your research team,
whether it's us or internal,builds relationships with
customers that way. And we cansay, Hey, I know we talked about
this last fall. How's thingschanged? I know we ran out an
(40:36):
update. What do you think ofthis update? And those kind of
conversations, those kind ofrelationships, are just
something you can't build on aone off study, whether you're
doing it internally orexternally. And that even goes
on competitor side. If you'reusing someone to talk to
competitors for you, we canbuild relationships with
competitor resources on aongoing basis. And we can say,
hey, we just saw this in yourlatest earnings requirement. Can
(40:56):
you give us some moreinformation about what this kind
of new initiative means? Andthey'll say, Oh, yeah. Like,
this is about this, this andthis, but if we only have one
conversation with them, one timeout of their entire life cycle
of being at that company, thenall of a sudden we only know
that one thing that they knewthat day, and sometimes it's the
next day they get a memo thatchanged everything that they
told us. And so being able to doa ongoing kind of monitoring
(41:19):
program is really powerful, andit's honestly easier once you
get it up and running.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no,absolutely, absolutely. It is
something like, you know, toyour point, it's something that
has to be done on a regularbasis, or at least frequently,
right? Because what was valuableor relevant two years ago
probably is obsolete now.
(41:40):
Especially the way everything'smoving. Everything is so fast
nowadays between economiccircumstances, regular
regulatory environments,technology world, yeah, it's
just blazing.
Absolutely, absolutely okay. Twomore questions before I let you
go. The bonus question. So ifyou were to go, well, not
necessarily back in time, but ifyou were to go back and learn a
(42:03):
new skill, what would that be?And why?
That's a good question. This isgoing back to like a top of mind
one off study here? So when wefilmed this, I think just few
days ago, the news broke thatall the open AI employees got a
$1.5 million bonus. And so Idon't know what skill requires
(42:26):
me to go work for the open AIorganization as of August 2025
but whatever skill that is, Iwish I would have gone and done
that one, because I think thatbonus would have been very nice
to have, and so very selfishlyfocused. But I think looking
back at it, that's a skill setthat would have been helpful.
What that skill is. I don't knowif I need to go conduct some
(42:50):
more research to figure out whatthat actually would be. But 10
years ago, instead of studyingfinance and accounting and then
marketing, I probably would havestudied whatever the hell I
needed to to do that one.
Ask ChatGPT.
I probably should do exactly,yeah, reverse engineer my way
back into that.
Yeah, yeah. No. Fantastic.Fantastic. Layton, thank you so
much for your time and forsharing your expertise. This has
been a great conversation, soplease quick introduction to
(43:12):
yourself and how folks out therecan get in touch with you,
especially if they're looking toup their CI and MI game.
Yeah, of course. So my name isLayton Cox. I am the Senior
Director of Business ServicesGroup at Sedulo Group. Sedulo
group is a competitiveintelligence, market research
and strategy consultancy firm.We've been around for about 20
years now. I think 2005, 2004 isour first year of operations.
(43:35):
We've been doing this forcompanies in every industry
across the globe for that kindof two decades of experience. As
you've heard through ourconversation so far, we really
specialize in finding that hardto get information that allows
you to make big decisions. So ifyou're looking to enter markets,
looking to launch new products,looking to kind of gain market
share in a way you have nothistorically, or you're looking
(43:57):
to figure out what competitorsare doing that might be all
those things as well, and you'retrying to figure out what you
can do to protect your marketshare from new product entry,
from new competitors enteringyour own market. All that kind
of falls inside of our purview,and we love what we do. A lot of
it's talking to people, which iskind of the hard thing to do,
but it's also what kind ofempowers us, and then getting
(44:19):
insights out of thoseconversations, and then kind of
making sure that the strategyand the big decisions based off
those insights actually are databacked.
And then, of course, helping ourclients set up systems that
allow them to do the exact samething over and over and over
again. So it's not a flash inthe pan report. It's not just a
PowerPoint deck that sits thereand collects dust. It's a
legitimate operating programthat you can run inside your
(44:42):
marketing organization, insideinsights, inside strategy,
inside product, or all theabove, hopefully, as we
mentioned, all your silos arebroken down, and everyone's
sharing that same information.And that's what we're hoping to
build for all of our clientswhen it's all said and done, if
you want to learn more aboutmyself or Sedulo Group. Sedulo
Group ishttps://sedulogroup.com/ and I'm
(45:02):
on LinkedIn, Layton Cox.
Fantastic, fantastic. And we'llbe sure to drop all those links
in the show notes so people canreach out to you.
Sounds like a plan.
Layton, once again, thanks somuch for your time. Take care,
stay safe and talk to you soon.
Will do Thanks, Christian.
All right. Thanks. Bye for now.
They say that information ispower and in the ever changing
and increasingly competitive B2Blandscape, information can help
you to move the needle andoutsmart your competitors. So
how can B2B companies use andleverage competitive and market
intelligence to drive profitablegrowth? Welcome to this episode
of the B2B Marketers on aMission podcast, and I'm your
(00:21):
host, Christian Klepp. Today,I'll be talking to Layton Cox,
who will be answering thisquestion. As the Senior Director
of competitive intelligence atSedulo Group, Layton helps B2B
companies leverage data andinsights to maximize their
competitive advantage. Tune into find out more about what this
B2B marketers mission is.
(00:43):
And I'm gonna say Mr. LaytonCox, welcome to the show, sir.
Thanks for having me.
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 thatyou specialize in. You're
clearly very passionate aboutit, but I also think it's very
for lack of a better word,pertinent, highly relevant, also
(01:06):
for B2B marketers to beleveraging it. So we're going to
keep the audience in suspense alittle while longer while I dive
into the first set of questions.All right, so let's go. You're
on a mission to leverageresearch methods to allow
clients to identify, I'm goingto say, advantageous strategies
for their products, markets andfunctions. So for this
(01:27):
conversation, let's zero in onthe topic of how B2B companies
can leverage competitive andmarket intelligence to stand out
in a competitive market. So I'mgoing to kick off this
conversation with two questions,and I'm happy to repeat them. So
the first one is, what is itabout CI (Competitive
Intelligence) and MI (MarketIntelligence) so competitive and
(01:47):
market intelligence that youwish more B2B companies
understood first question. Andsecond question is, where do you
see most marketing teamsstruggle when it comes to
competitive and marketintelligence?
It's great set of questionsthere, and they kind of go hand
in hand. And so before wecompletely dive in the let's
make the baseline of what is CIand what is MI. And so we have
(02:10):
this conversation a lot, what wefind out is they say, Oh yeah,
we have competitor intelligence.I've looked at their website. We
have market intelligence. I'veGoogled my industry. And of
course, we've been in thisindustry for decades, or
sometimes even centuries, forsome of our clients, what we're
here to really, kind ofemphasize we want to make sure
that people understand is thatcompetitive intelligence and
(02:32):
market research, just ingeneral, aren't tactical
research activities. The goal ofboth of these is to give you a
very good understanding of whereyou play, who else is playing in
that environment with you, andthen what really you need to do
in order to win against thosecompetitive players, when it's
(02:52):
all said and done, to do that,you have to be able to one have
kind of a centralized languageinside your own organization and
A framework in order to accesssome of those more tactical
research pieces that you havealready done, and on the point
of the research side, you alsohave to make sure that you're
not relying just on secondarydata.
(03:13):
AI is fantastic. Syndicatedreports are fantastic. We often,
however, see especiallymarketing teams say, I paid
Nielsen, or I paid Kantar, or Ipaid a very large consumer
study. And I have this onereport from 2022 that told me
this, this and this. And we'vemade every decision since then
based off of that. And then, ifI need any updates, I asked
(03:35):
ChatGPT or co pilot, to say,Hey, this is what this report
used to say. What do you thinkit would say now and then?
ChatGPT tells me the answer.What we're finding is that
they're struggling to get kindof net new primary information.
And when I say primaryinformation, having
conversations with people,talking to competitors, if your
ethics, single appliance teamwill allow you to most will
(03:58):
talking to sales partners, ifyou have retail partners, if you
have VARs (Value-AddedResellers), anything like that,
of kind of what are theirexperience? Boots on the ground
and, of course, talking tocustomers themselves, trying to
actually get informationdirectly from them. And it's
more than a single conversation.It's usually 10 to 12 kind of
conversations. You have to talkto multiple sources triangulate
(04:21):
what's really going on in yourmarket, like I said, so you can
kind of build out that robustunderstanding of where you play,
who you're competing. You winsthen, then how do you beat them?
Yeah, definitely. And that's athose are some really, really
great insights. And I'm glad youbrought up the topic of AI
(Artificial Intelligence),because that was kind of like
one of these follow up questionsI had for you, like, you've
(04:43):
probably heard this or seen thismore times than you care to
count, but you know, everyone'stalking about like, oh, maybe we
can offload some of this, like,this resource or this, this
bandwidth that we've previouslyallocated for research, because
now we have AI right? So wedon't have to worry about that
any more. And to your point,like, you know, we've got this
report from Nielsen, and we justfeed it into ChatGPT, and it'll
(05:06):
get updated. So I guess myquestion there is, maybe it's
two pronged question, I wouldsay, your take on how AI is
helpful for CI and MI, and yourtake on where it's more of an
impediment.
(05:27):
And it's a hot topic even insidethe industry, and so I'm
obviously on the serviceprovider side, and it's a hot
topic on our industry, and we doour own CI and MI well. So this
is something that we'reresearching ourselves, and what
we're finding is that AI isfantastic at evaluating,
summarizing large data sets, aslong as it knows kind of what
(05:49):
you're trying to do and it hasdone something like that in the
past, or someone somewhere elsehas trained it to do something
very similar. What that usuallymeans is, if you want to ask it
some generic information ortrain it on some internal data
that only your team has accessto. It can be an extremely
powerful tool. We see a lot ofit right now kind of popping up
in the win loss space. And so asclients are talking to either
(06:15):
churned customers or lost dealsor one customers, and saying,
kind of, what is it about thesales process or about the
product that really kind of madeyou buy or made you not buy,
being able to train an AI agenton that to kind of do some post
sale surveys that's controlledby the AI and allows you to get
integrated into it that's asmall enough niche, enough kind
(06:36):
of focus for AI to be able toreally pull off, usually by
itself, with just a few kind ofcustomized agents, and the data
usually comes back in arelatively systemized way. Price
is obviously one of the thingsalmost everybody brings up every
time product featurescapabilities, you'll get
reference to certain competitornames that reoccur over and over
again, and AI can pull thoseinsights out. And so broadly, AI
(06:58):
is good when you can train it ina specific data set to do a
specific process that you'rereally looking to kind of repeat
over and over and over again.And you already know what good
looks like.
Where AI is not good is reallywhen it comes down to more
creative and strategic thoughts,and so when it's not focused on
a very tactical set ofexpectations, when it's not
(07:18):
using a set amount of data whenyou're saying, Hey, I don't know
what this looks like yet. We'reentering a new market. We're
launching a new product. We havea new competitor that's popped
up, and we have no idea whatthey do or don't do, or what
their products look like, orwhere their use cases are
impacting us all. If everythingthat's kind of new, that's where
(07:40):
AI struggles, and that's where Ithink you still have to have
real people going out thereasking other people these real
questions in order to be able toget the insights that actually
matter.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Itsounds to me, just for what I've
been hearing, that you shouldsee AI more as a co-pilot,
right? Something that you saw,something that you constantly
(08:01):
like, train, because it's allabout like, Okay, you gotta keep
training the AI, right? And it,and it does learn rapidly, but
to your point, it's, it doesrequire some human intervention,
I think might be the right word.
I would say, the way that we'vetalked about internally, even we
use, and we use AI for a goodamount of summarization of
interviews and notes and thingslike that as well. Of a lot of
(08:23):
it goes down to, I try to treatit like an intern. Of, what
would I trust an intern to dothis task? What do I need to
tell an intern before I actuallykind of give this all the way to
them, and then if it comes backand it's kind of sloppy, that's
probably on me. It's probablynot the interns fault. So then I
need to figure out, Okay, whatdid I miss communicate, or what
did I not communicate correctlyto it? That's how we've kind of
(08:45):
treated internally, and itreally helps. And I will say,
like I feel bad for all thecollege graduates right now,
because it can do a lot of thosetasks, and there's probably less
internships nowadays than therewere whenever I was back then.
So, but hopefully that is just aflash in the pan and everything
opens up here quickly.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely,absolutely. I'm gonna move us on
(09:05):
to the next question about onthe topic of leveraging CI and
MI as it pertains to B2Bmarketing teams. What are some
of these key pitfalls that youthink the teams need to look out
for, and what should they bedoing instead?
I would say there's one that'sprobably inside the scope of
marketing, and there's onethat's kind of goes beyond the
scope of marketing. Inside thescope of marketing, I would say
(09:29):
it, you really shouldn't makebig decisions based off of
secondary, generic or justbroad, publicly available
information. We see this often,where you can go and you can
subscribe to some kind ofdatabase, and you can get access
to the information and datapoints, and you can have someone
kind of say, oh, yeah, here'sthe information you're looking
(09:51):
for, and it'll be 500 bucksusing those kind of market
reports. It is valuable in someways, but your competition. If
they are at all serious or not,has that exact same data, they
have the exact same insights.They're able to leverage those
same sources, and they're goingto make the same insights and
same kind of decisions based offthat, as you probably will. And
(10:13):
so as you're looking to go buildout a kind of advantageous use
case, or as you're building outunique positioning for your
product, whereas you're justtrying to say, hey, how do I
beat this competitor in thisspace? You can't really use that
publicly available and easilyattainable information.
So what you can do instead,leverage the internal data that
(10:33):
you have only you have yoursales data. Only you have your
customer data. Only you shouldbe able to kind of make
decisions off of that. And ifyou're not collecting
information around sales, aroundcustomer experience, going
through kind of what pain pointsexist in our products as of
today, those are all projectsthat you can easily run
internally, that can get yousome very powerful and very
(10:56):
unique to you data, which doesallow you to make decisions that
can build a competitiveadvantage off of those because
your competitors don't have thatinformation. And of course, if
you're looking for informationbeyond what sits inside your own
walls, that's when you go outand you kind of do a focus study
and say, Hey, we need to run asurvey that targets these
individuals. We need to get togo interviews. We need to do
(11:18):
focus groups. We need to have acompetitor product tear down. We
need to go through whatever itmight end up being, but you can
gather a few different kind ofsources of information for you
to actually be able to go getinformation that is out there.
It's just hard to get that yourcompetitors won't have access
to, and that's another thingthat you can do to kind of avoid
that pitfall of using the sameinformation your competitors are
(11:38):
using.
Now, one that falls outside themarketers realm is, and this is
one of the issues almost all theresearch efforts that we see
every time we go into a largecompany, is that it's very
siloed. Everyone is doing theirown research in their own way,
for their own purposes, andmarketing is one of those key
places where that happens.They'll be doing a study on
(12:01):
pricing, they'll be doing astudy on value propositions.
They'll be doing a study on kindof market positioning. It won't
touch sales. They'll forget toshare stuff with sales and vice
versa. Sales is any better. Theywon't share it up with the
strategy teams. And maybe theCMO knows about it, if you're
lucky, the chief revenue officermight know about it too, but the
(12:23):
COO and the CFO probably do notknow the core insights of those
studies that you've been doingin the marketing function. And
so trying to take your researchefforts beyond the silo of your
function is critical.
As I mentioned, we do marketresearch on our own industry and
our own customers andcompetitors and things like that
all the time. We just got donewith one of those surveys
recently, one of the key thingswe found is that internal
(12:45):
alignment issues was the largestchallenge that respondents said
that they were facing whentrying to do any kind of
strategic planning or any kindof project initiatives moving
forward in 2025 and it justshows that no one's speaking the
same language because no one hasthe same data. And the first
thing you can do to start that,just start sharing with
everybody else. Say, Hey, wejust finished this study. Even
(13:07):
it's just a quick memo. Here arethree bullet points, and then
here's the PDF attached. Ifyou're interested in more, let
us know. We'll do a phone call.But that kind of just opening up
the Komodo to other people issuper, super valuable.
Yeah, those are incrediblyinteresting points, and partly
shocking too, because you know,when you think about it, it's
2025, and we're still dealingwith, to your point, silos,
(13:29):
yeah, fragmented efforts, right?Or efforts that are like,
collectively, like fragmented,because one hand doesn't know
what the other hand is doing.
And depending on the industry,if you're working remotely, it's
even worse nowadays, because youcould be just in your own little
world, doing your own littlething, and even people inside
your function don't know what'sgoing on, right? So the old
days, if everyone's on the samefloor and we're all talking at
(13:50):
the water cooler of I did thissurvey, oh, I would love to see
the results of that doesn'texist anymore. So it's a new way
of just ensuring that peoplehave visibility into what's
going on. It's very, veryhelpful.
Yeah, I might be dating myselfhere or, like, back in the day,
you know, when you just get upfrom your cubicle and just
scream across the room, hey, doyou have that report? Like,
right, exactly. But you broughtup a couple of things, and I
(14:13):
wanted to go back to them and acouple of follow up questions
there, if that's okay with you,the point that you made about
the reliance on secondary dataand information, which basically
drives the point home thatprimary, primary research going
out into the field, conductingthose interviews, conducting
(14:34):
those focus groups, that that isstill Paramount so and you and I
know that That said, it's notalways easy to get buy in from
the customer for that kind ofresearch, because, well, the
investment certainly is one oneissue, but the other one is that
is the time. So how do youovercome that, that type of
(14:55):
pushback, or those objections tosaying, Okay, we need to do this
primary research.
So usually, my advice is toeverybody who's in kind of a
role who has to get data to makedecisions, is leverage one
internal data first. It'scompletely free to you. It takes
effort, yes, but just an hour aday of kind of trying to figure
(15:18):
out where does this data live.And if you document that, then
all of a sudden, pretty quickly,you'll be able to have an AI
agent who can do a lot of thatfor you. And so internal data
should be your first place yougo, no matter what, if you can
find it internally awesome thatusually can solve a lot of your
problems, you can go from there.Second is the free, publicly
available secondary data. Ifit's out there, you should at
(15:40):
least go look at it, if onlyjust to see what your
competitors are saying at thevery, very minimum, but also, if
you can compliment that withyour internal data, maybe you
can prove a hypothesis. Maybeinternal data said, Hey,
directionally speaking, we thinkthat customers were complaining
about this one product featureand but then we went out to look
at the public review websites,we found that this is a common
(16:01):
issue for the entire industry.So it's not just our product,
it's the entire use case thatthe industry is trying to solve
right now has the same kind ofcomplaint. Well, there you go,
so that that can help a marketerfigure out exactly what the next
step should be. And then afterthat, I'd say, before you go
buying reports, which sometimescan be very expensive, then
that's when you have aconversation about is primary
worth it, and then at thatpoint, you will have exhausted
(16:23):
at least two options, the lowcost, free options, and you can
take that up to your boss andsay, Look, I've tried internal
data. I've tried just what's outthere publicly for free, and now
my hypothesis is this, and Ican't validate or not validate
it because of that, so I have togo run this survey, and as long
as you can, and a lot ofresearch providers such as
(16:43):
ourselves as well, we're open tohaving conversations on
brainstorming on this. You don'thave to come to vendors with
like, Hey, I know exactly what Iwant to do, and I know exactly
how I want to handle it. Thingssay, hey, like, I'm looking at
this stuff. I don't know exactlywhat I'm feeling right now. I
know these three things are veryinteresting to me. What do you
think like? What would this looklike? How could this feel? And
(17:04):
then putting together a businesscase with you is something that
we do relatively often as well,to help figure out, what is this
actually valuable like? Is thisvaluable research? Will you be
able to make a key decision ifwe were to get you the right
answers to these questions? Ifthe answer is yes, then how
valuable is that decision? Ifthe answer is no, that you
really shouldn't pay us and youshould, shouldn't do primary,
(17:24):
because it's an unanswerablequestion.
No, absolutely, absolutely. Sothat was the first follow up
question. The second follow upquestion was going back to what
you were saying about theinternal alignment issues
because of the reality ofdepartments being siloed. So
just from your experience andyour perspective Layton, how do
(17:45):
you think CI and MI can helpfill that, fill that gap and
break those silos down?
This is where it goes beyond theresearch. And so what, what we
found throughout our kind of 20years of doing this is the
research, the facts bythemselves, the insights even
generated from the facts bythemselves. That's maybe half of
(18:05):
the story at most. What youreally want to do is you want to
identify what implications doesthis have for us, and who should
know if you can figure out thosetwo pieces, the next thing that
we usually suggest to clients isget them in a perfect world,
that's a half day workshop, afull day workshop, if you can
really swing it, depending onwho the stakeholders are,
(18:27):
depending on how big thedecision is that you're looking
to make, if you're doing a fullblown product launch, market
entry kind of decision, ifyou're looking to make some big
strategic bets, it's wortheveryone taking a day out of
their time to go sit down andactually think hard about this
stuff. And so usually what wesee is, when we're facing large
decisions by our clients,they'll actually sit down into a
workshop like environment. We'llgo through the insights that we
(18:50):
have developed through the MIand CI world, and then we'll
actually say, now, let's do somewar gaming. Let's do some
scenario planning. Let'sactually think, What will our
competitors do. If we do this,what should we do if our
competitors do that, and then,based off of those, they can
start pulling out, ooh, theseinitiatives would really make
sense. And here are somepriorities that we should have
and go from there. But I wouldsay, get them in a room, if in a
(19:14):
perfect world, for a day inperson, in a non perfect world,
a two hour conference call, canactually solve a lot of problems
when structured correctly.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely,absolutely. It's almost like you
are, you're leveraging the datato simulate potential scenarios
and and perhaps evenopportunities, right?
Exactly.
It's important to like,highlight realities too. Like,
(19:35):
Listen, guys, if we don't, if wedon't do this, this might
happen, right? But also going atit from a positive angle of
like, if we do this, this is,this is the potential return,
right?
We get more of the form of thelatter right now, just because
macroeconomic conditions, yes,right now, everyone's saying,
Hey, what are the threats? Whatare the risks that are that I'm
facing? But rewind a few years,and I'm sure fast forward a few
(19:58):
years, you're going to besaying, Okay, what opportunities
are out there that we can gocapture, where can we find
growth? What can we look like?And the great part about it is
that a lot of the techniquesthat you use in MI and CI can
answer both those questions witha lot of the same kind of
conversation techniques and alot of the same ways of getting
in front of the right people,whether those are competitors,
whether those are customers,whatever that might look like.
(20:20):
Absolutely, absolutely. So youbrought up some of these points
already, but like, just fromyour perspective, if you can
provide some examples of how CIand MI can help with the
following, and I'm happy torepeat them this. So I've got
three points here, right? So thefirst one is uncovering new
buyer pain points or shiftingpriorities. The second one is
(20:41):
differentiating B2B messaging,which ultimately impacts
positioning. And the third oneis refining unique selling
propositions in B2B.
I think the best way to kind oftalk about all three of those
pieces is to kind of go throughsome techniques to just
gathering the information. Andso before I dive into that
though, I'll say we work throughwhat we kind of call the four
(21:04):
eye system. And so we startwith, kind of, what's just the
raw facts, how does that feel?What does that look like? What
intelligence is out there? Andso first of all, just gathering
that and turning that intointelligence is kind of one of
the first steps there. And then,okay, we have some information.
Now, what's the insights fromthis information, and this kind
of goes throughout all of theworld of data analytics has gone
(21:25):
through the same exact processof taking just raw data and
pulling it into insights to say,Okay, here's the story from the
data that we're seeing, and thengoing from there into that
implication of, okay. Now whatdoes this mean for our specific
circumstances today?
Now going the second half ofthat is where we kind of do the
strategic brainstorming. That'sthe workshopping. That's where
we actually sit down withleaders and stakeholders and
(21:46):
have conversations. The firsthalf of that is just getting
information, and sometimesthat's through the secondary
research we talked aboutearlier. It's the internal data
that you might already have, orprimary research methods. Now,
given we're talking to B2Bmarketers here, there's a few
different ways that we go aboutgathering primary information.
The most common is probablysurveys, surveying customers,
(22:07):
surveying sales partners, saleschannel partners, surveying
competitors, even surveyingpeers. If you're looking for
benchmark information or pieceslike that, surveying market
experts, but really, anyone inthe world that you might think
might have some information thatyou're looking for. Building out
a survey and then putting thatin front of them is probably one
(22:29):
of the easiest ways to collectdata, no matter what.
Second would be, interviews andfocus groups, you can do this
with that same stakeholder list.If you're looking to do like
voice of the customer. You cantalk to a whole bunch of
customers looking to the voiceof the market. You can the
market. You can talk tocustomers, sales, partners and
competitors. If you're lookingfor very specific competitor
information, you can talk tojust a few people who have to be
(22:52):
inside that function at acompetitor too, and you can find
out really fast what they'redoing on their side of the
table.
those are all other that'sprobably our second most common
way is actually just one on oneinterviews, or kind of one on
five focus groups kind of thing,and then last and these are not
as common, but they are verypowerful when it makes sense to
do so is B2B and mysteryshopping, partnering with real
(23:15):
companies that are going throughvery similar kind of buying
cycles as your prospects wouldbe, and then actually walking
them through a competitor buyingexperience, walking them through
a buying experience for ourclients, just so they can see,
what does it actually feel likewhen a real customer goes
through this? What are we doingwell? What are we doing poorly,
benchmarking that againstcompetitors and going through
(23:36):
those kind of pieces. If you doit in this mostly comes up in
software and pieces like that,where it's a little bit harder
to have a really goodunderstanding of pricing,
packaging, positioning,discounting, things like that,
but going through their salescycle with a real prospect,
getting real pricing, gettingreal discounts, understanding
what that might look like, issomething that we can do
relatively often. That's goingto be to be mystery shopping
(23:58):
experience.
And then last but not least. AndI know I know I already said
last, but this one's the finalone. I promise. It's the
actually doing demos, gettingyour hands on competitive
products, and actually doingkind of, what we call a product
tear down, where we will go outand procure competitor products,
their services, whatever itmight be, and we'll tell you how
what's good, what's bad, kind ofgive you an unbiased opinion and
(24:21):
say, here are some of thefeatures that they offer. Here's
how they actually look when it'sworking. Here's what doesn't
work with them. And that canprovide you a lot of kind of
good data for you to go andeither on the threat side or on
the opportunity side, like wetalked about earlier.
Fantastic, fantastic. Thanks forsharing that. Those pretty those
are pretty comprehensive listyou probably condensed 20 years
(24:42):
of experience into about likethree or four minutes.
Just about there's a lot ofdetails that go into all four of
those different kind ofactivities. But yeah, high
level, I'm sure give AI a littlewhile, and they'll be able to
handle a lot of that for you.But it's definitely one of those
things that you can if you getcreative. And if you know what
information you're looking togather, there are various ways
(25:04):
to go get it when it's all saidand done.
Absolutely, absolutely. I wantedto go back to what you said at
the tail end of that, Layton,you were talking about mystery
shopping for B2B. So, you know,in a traditional sense, when
people hear mystery shopping,their mind probably goes to a
place that's, that's like, Oh,so you're gonna send somebody in
(25:24):
here to spy on me. And thatmight be, that might be a bit
harsh, but, like, but how do youget buy in for that, from
customers that that have thatprobably negative perception, if
you will, of mystery shopping,because it's not, it's, it
actually does have its strategicvalue.
Yeah. And so, I mean, mysteryshopping is most commonly used
(25:44):
for consumer services, consumergoods. That's just the way that
it ends up being. It's easy forme to go mystery shop my local
supermarket and just say, hey, Iwant to walk into here and I
want to see one, does someonegreet me? Two, what's the price
of tuna? Is that comparable towhat the grocery store is down
the road, those kind of things alot easier on the consumer side,
on the B2B side, obviously notas easy, because there's no just
(26:07):
big supermarket that anyone canwalk into. You have to be
somewhat qualified to have justthe first conversation your
sales reasoning has to makesense for that conversation to
continue. And so what we end updoing, and this is the slowest
part of this entire process, isusually finding a real world
buyer of whoever you're tryingto, mystery shops, customer,
(26:29):
product or service or offering,whatever that ends up being. And
so easy I'll use to do low hereas an example. So do low is one
of many kind of market research,competitive intelligence
strategy firms, if we wanted togo mystery shop a competitor, I
could go find a another kind offortune 500 company and say,
Hey, I need to find someone onthe insights team who's willing,
(26:52):
or as a friend of the firm, oras a contact I know personally,
or whomever it might be, andsay, Hey, I need you to kind of
go have a few conversations withtheir sales team, put in a form
and say, hey, I'm interested inyour services. See where it
takes us. And that's kind of howwe start a lot of these
conversations, is that we'llactually go find friends of the
firm. We'll have past clientsdepending on the fit, or we'll
(27:14):
go custom source, actual kind ofwe'll go out as our team members
and our researchers will go outinto the world with billions of
kind of companies, and we'llsay, Hey, we're looking for a
company who does this, this andthis, who is interested in
acquiring these kind ofservices.
And so sometimes our mysterybuyers watch it go through and
purchase things, just like Iwould if I was a consumer and I
(27:35):
was going to my local grocerystore, I might buy that can of
tuna. Who knows? Same thinghappens here? Well, we'll work
off of our kind of mystery B2Bshop or firm. As they go through
that sales journey, they mightend up saying, Yes, I totally
want this risk managementsoftware, whatever it might end
up being that we're mysteryshopping that day. Or it could
be like I sat through the salespitch. I understand the pricing.
(27:55):
It's just out of our budget,whatever it might be, but that's
kind of where that process comesand so it becomes much more of a
we piggyback off of these salesconversations that were going to
happen anyway, and we just kindof take notes in the background.
Yeah, yes, it's certainly, itcertainly sounds like it's, it's
more nuanced, and it's also abit more of a logistics
exercise, right? Because it'sbecause you're talking as you
(28:18):
say. You're talking about morelike, I guess, real world
buyers, who tend to be alsospecialized in a particular
segment, certainly like adifferent set of circumstances,
as compared to, like the mysteryshopping you do for consumer
rent.
Exactly, exactly. It takes us along time to find the people
that would be actually makesense for to go through the
(28:40):
sales job, the journey, and itgets harder. I mean, we'll have
and sometimes, and that's why wehave so many different ways to
get this primary intelligencedoesn't always make sense. So
for example, if you are tryingto sell medical equipment to
massive hospital systems, themassive hospital systems already
know that medical equipmentreps, they already know what
(29:01):
that looks like, and the medicalreps already know probably all
the conversation people thatthey need to have, because these
are very, very long salescycles, like buying a CAT scan
machine takes years. It's notjust a pick up the phone and
call on your clothes in 12 or 12hours to four weeks kind of
thing. And so depending on thesales cycle of the product or
service or offering or whateverit might be. There are certain
(29:23):
ones where B2B, mystery shoppingjust makes no sense whatsoever.
And then there's certain oneswhere it really does. And so
depending on what you're tryingto solve, there's other ways to
get information, if we have to,but when it makes sense, it's
one of the best ways to do it,because it's as real of an
experience you can possibly getan insight into your competitors
sales process, into how theyposition themselves, into their
(29:43):
sales reps skill set, and intotheir pricing, of course.
And quite frankly, Layton, like,which marketing team wouldn't
want that, like, which marketingteam wouldn't want to have that
insight into what theircompetitors are doing, so that
they could have that they couldbe one step ahead, right?
Exactly, and that's and there'sa lot of ethical rules and legal
rules about what can and cannotbe shared throughout those
(30:06):
journeys. But I would say thevast majority of the time, price
data is usually capturedrelatively freely and easily,
positioning data of how they goabout positioning themselves
against competitors, includingwho could be our end client when
it's all said and done, or justinside the market in general.
And of course, any kind ofdifferentiators that they're
trying to really emphasizeduring that sales process, of
(30:28):
where do they plant the flag,and what do they keep coming
back to over and over and overagain as we're asking them these
questions. And of course, thosecan be ways that you understand
as a marketer, where you canattack them if you think they're
really not as strong as they saythey are, or where you should
steer away, because maybe theydo beat you in that spice but,
or they do beat you in thatspace, but you can beat them
(30:48):
somewhere else along the way.And so all of it really helps
marketers get a much betterunderstanding of what does that
environment look like, and thenhow do you win.
Exactly? Or you can spice up thespace to use your word, right?
Exactly, exactly.
All right, my friend, we come tothe point in the conversation
where we're talking aboutactionable tips and latent man,
(31:10):
I'm looking at the time now, andit's been 30 minutes, and you've
given us a ton, you've given usa ton of insights and ton of
tips and recommendations. Butjust imagine that there's a B2B
marketer out there, or, I hope,a marketing team that's
listening to this conversationand there were based on the
advice that you've given threeto five action items, or three
(31:32):
to five things that you wantthem to take action on right
now, after they listen to thisinterview, what will those
things be?
I'll do four. And so I'll splitthe difference there. One is
build a framework. Buildsomething that allows you to
store all this information in acommon language that, at the
minimum, your team understands,but hopefully the entire
(31:53):
organization can kind of getbehind. You'll be blown away by
how many times we come intosituations where any past work
is just lost into the etherbecause no one understands where
it's saved or how to name it, orwhere it could live. Or is this
competitor intel? Is this marketintel? Is this customer intel?
But some kind of tagging systemof some way, shape or form,
fantastic. That's number one,figure out how to store
(32:15):
information.
Two, leverage internal data, asmentioned earlier, that's gold.
Your competition doesn't havethat they can't make decisions
based off of that data. You can.So leverage that. Go out,
collect it, organize it, make ituseful.
Three then go try to find yourcompetitors internal data.
(32:36):
That's the conduct primaryresearch in some way, shape or
form, so that you can go findout the stuff that only your
competitors know as of rightnow. Market research,
competitive intelligence, allthat kind of falls inside that
space. And of course, talking tocustomers helps a lot, too,
customers and prospects.
Then the fourth one is, once youactually have all that stuff,
share it with other people.Share it with sales. Share it
(32:59):
with product. Share it withstrategy, move it up the chain,
move it down the chain. And ofcourse, as you do that, and this
is something that we get a tonof value out of in all of our
projects, is we start everyproject with stakeholder
interviews, where we talk tovarious different departments
inside of our clients, just tofigure out, hey, what do you
know that we should know? Andthen what are you looking to
learn that we can go get foryou? And if you have that same
(33:21):
attitude whenever you share thisinformation, to say, hey, here's
what we know. Do you know?Anything else can you add to our
data? And then all of a sudden,if you end up being kind of
source for that one, your commonframework ends up being
extremely helpful across theentire organization, and your
internal data set just gets somuch more powerful. And so share
what you know, because you neverknow what anybody else might
know, and that can be justexponentially helpful.
(33:44):
Information is power, as theysay, right?
It is, but only if you can allspeak the same language and
understand it the same way. Ifeveryone's running their own
ship and they're running alldifferent directions, ends up
being kind of a spider web ofnausea, yeah?
Hot Mess, essentially.
Exactly.
But no, no, fantastic,fantastic. Let me just quickly
(34:04):
recap your tips here. So one wasbuild a framework. The second
one was leverage internal data.The third one was find
competitors internal data, andthe fourth one, which I couldn't
agree with more. Share withinternal teams, get everybody on
the same page, because the it'sso important to get alignment
right?
(34:25):
Exactly, exactly. If you just dothose four things, you'll be
head and shoulders above most ofthe marketing organizations that
we come up against, and you willhave a legitimate competitive
advantage when you're makingdecisions.
Right? Fantastic. Okay, we getto the part with the I call it
the love it or hate it question,but you know what we're talking
about, CI and MI. We got to talkabout metrics too, right? And I
(34:48):
appreciate Layton that you cango down a very deep rabbit hole
with that question. But likejust top level, what are some of
these metrics that you from atop level perspective, that
marketing teams should be payingattention to?
So, I know everyone lovesmetrics like all the time,
especially like anythingquantitative, I would say,
(35:09):
unfortunately, CI and MI is hardto metricize. If that's a word,
there are certain metrics that Ithink everyone should know no
matter what. What's the size ofyour market? How is that
segmented? What competitors ownwhat percent of that market and
of those segments, and that canbe your core competitors, that
can be your emergingcompetitors. If you can do it by
(35:31):
competing products, that's evenbetter. But that, by itself, can
give you a lot of information.But beyond that, I think
everything else is qualitative.When it comes down to making
these large strategic decisions,you decisions, the quantitative
stuff is extremely valuable. Ihave an accounting undergrad
degree and so like, that's all Iknew for a very long period of
time, was the math, and it'sextremely, extremely helpful.
(35:53):
But as I've kind of gone throughthis process more and more with
clients and pieces like that,the qualitative parts of what
does it feel like? Like, what'sthe sales journey of our
competitors feel like? Have weactually touched our competitors
products like, and you'd beshocked, even in non B2B, but in
like B2C, how many people havenever tried their competitors
(36:13):
products? If you're working forToyota, you probably don't drive
a Ford. Maybe you should just tosee what it's like, those kind
of things. And this goes on theB2B side too. You can do the
exact same experience andactually physically figure out,
what does it feel like to playwith it? What's it feel like
when they give you the offering?What's it feel like to buy it?
And then, of course, how do theydifferentiate themselves from
you? All that's qualitative, andall that's extremely valuable
(36:36):
too. And it really gives you thedifference between just looking
at a number and saying thatnumber looks pretty good to
actually saying, Oh, no, like, Ican make a decision, because
that number is good, and becauseI've had this experience, I now
know exactly what we should godo to fix this.
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely,absolutely, no. I mean, I'm
actually not that surprised. I'mactually more surprised by the
marketing teams that don'tactually know their product very
(36:59):
well, because they haven'tactually, like, tried it out,
right?
Not uncommon, I will say. Sodon't give them too hard of a
time, because it's we, it'srelatively rare, especially in
the B2B world, where we come upand say, Okay, what do you know
about your competitors products?And they'll say nothing like we
know its name and we know thewebsite it lives on, and that's
about it. And so we're, we'resaying, hopefully, we're
(37:21):
hopefully trying to influencethis as well. You should try
your best get your hands oncompetitors products as much as
possible.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.It's absolutely right. Okay,
sir. This is the part we'regoing to ask you to, like, get
up on your soap box, because I'mgoing to ask you about your area
of expertise and what status quothere is in that area of
(37:42):
expertise that you that you keephearing that you passionately
disagree with and why?
So area of expertise, I wouldsay what we most likely do for
most of our clients is help themmake decisions using data in
some way, shape or form. Anddata, of course, is a very broad
term, what that usually meansand what we usually come across,
(38:05):
and what we're trying to fix formost of our clients is that the
data they are using is thatfree, publicly available
secondary research, they aremaking large bets, millions of
dollars based off of Gartnerreport from 2022 and while I'm
sure that was extremely valuablein 2022 it's just not today. The
(38:28):
world changes so fast. Youreally have to be constantly
talking to your competitors. Youhave to be constantly talking to
customers. You have to beconstantly evaluating your
market that you're in andleveraging old data, publicly
available data for these largedecisions that you're saying
this will be a differentiatorfor us. This product is going to
revolutionize our industry. Ifyou're leveraging the same data
(38:50):
set that your competitors haveaccess to, it's not going to do
any of that you really if youreally want to build something
special, you have to go getspecial data. The only way to
get special data is to do kindof special efforts, and that's
around primary research.
Roll up your sleeves and getyour hands dirty. I'm over.
It takes time and effort, butthat's the only way to do it,
(39:11):
and that's why you see so manyproducts that really aren't
differentiated, is their teamsdidn't actually go out there and
didn't actually try to findspecial information. They just
kind of said, Hey, one of theexecutives thought this was a
good idea. We read a Gartnerreport who said this was going
to be a hot topic, and so wewent and built this product, and
now we have no traction. It'slike, yeah, like, because you
(39:33):
didn't actually talk to anybodyon the competitive side who was
doing the exact same thing,because their executive went to
the same executive brain stormthat yours did, and they read
the same Gartner report that youdid or you didn't talk to any
customers. They don't reallywant this. They want this little
feature over here. And so beingable to actually go out and talk
to people, whether it'scompetitors or customers, but in
(39:54):
a perfect world, talk to both,that is just so much more
valuable.
You know, like the way thatyou've laid it out so
beautifully. It sounds sosimple, but it's, it's
surprising how many people don'tdo it, right?
And that's, this, is othersoapbox rants, is a lot of
people do it once, and they'relike, Oh, perfect. We have the
(40:14):
data. We're done one of them,and it's a shot. It's, yeah, we
took a snapshot of what theworld looks like today as of
this report getting handed overto you, it's easier actually, to
do it on a reoccurring basis,because your research team,
whether it's us or internal,builds relationships with
customers that way. And we cansay, Hey, I know we talked about
this last fall. How's thingschanged? I know we ran out an
(40:36):
update. What do you think ofthis update? And those kind of
conversations, those kind ofrelationships, are just
something you can't build on aone off study, whether you're
doing it internally orexternally. And that even goes
on competitor side. If you'reusing someone to talk to
competitors for you, we canbuild relationships with
competitor resources on aongoing basis. And we can say,
hey, we just saw this in yourlatest earnings requirement. Can
(40:56):
you give us some moreinformation about what this kind
of new initiative means? Andthey'll say, Oh, yeah. Like,
this is about this, this andthis, but if we only have one
conversation with them, one timeout of their entire life cycle
of being at that company, thenall of a sudden we only know
that one thing that they knewthat day, and sometimes it's the
next day they get a memo thatchanged everything that they
told us. And so being able to doa ongoing kind of monitoring
(41:19):
program is really powerful, andit's honestly easier once you
get it up and running.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no,absolutely, absolutely. It is
something like, you know, toyour point, it's something that
has to be done on a regularbasis, or at least frequently,
right? Because what was valuableor relevant two years ago
probably is obsolete now.
(41:40):
Especially the way everything'smoving. Everything is so fast
nowadays between economiccircumstances, regular
regulatory environments,technology world, yeah, it's
just blazing.
Absolutely, absolutely okay. Twomore questions before I let you
go. The bonus question. So ifyou were to go, well, not
necessarily back in time, but ifyou were to go back and learn a
(42:03):
new skill, what would that be?And why?
That's a good question. This isgoing back to like a top of mind
one off study here? So when wefilmed this, I think just few
days ago, the news broke thatall the open AI employees got a
$1.5 million bonus. And so Idon't know what skill requires
(42:26):
me to go work for the open AIorganization as of August 2025
but whatever skill that is, Iwish I would have gone and done
that one, because I think thatbonus would have been very nice
to have, and so very selfishlyfocused. But I think looking
back at it, that's a skill setthat would have been helpful.
What that skill is. I don't knowif I need to go conduct some
(42:50):
more research to figure out whatthat actually would be. But 10
years ago, instead of studyingfinance and accounting and then
marketing, I probably would havestudied whatever the hell I
needed to to do that one.
Ask ChatGPT.
I probably should do exactly,yeah, reverse engineer my way
back into that.
Yeah, yeah. No. Fantastic.Fantastic. Layton, thank you so
much for your time and forsharing your expertise. This has
been a great conversation, soplease quick introduction to
(43:12):
yourself and how folks out therecan get in touch with you,
especially if they're looking toup their CI and MI game.
Yeah, of course. So my name isLayton Cox. I am the Senior
Director of Business ServicesGroup at Sedulo Group. Sedulo
group is a competitiveintelligence, market research
and strategy consultancy firm.We've been around for about 20
years now. I think 2005, 2004 isour first year of operations.
(43:35):
We've been doing this forcompanies in every industry
across the globe for that kindof two decades of experience. As
you've heard through ourconversation so far, we really
specialize in finding that hardto get information that allows
you to make big decisions. So ifyou're looking to enter markets,
looking to launch new products,looking to kind of gain market
share in a way you have nothistorically, or you're looking
(43:57):
to figure out what competitorsare doing that might be all
those things as well, and you'retrying to figure out what you
can do to protect your marketshare from new product entry,
from new competitors enteringyour own market. All that kind
of falls inside of our purview,and we love what we do. A lot of
it's talking to people, which iskind of the hard thing to do,
but it's also what kind ofempowers us, and then getting
(44:19):
insights out of thoseconversations, and then kind of
making sure that the strategyand the big decisions based off
those insights actually are databacked.
And then, of course, helping ourclients set up systems that
allow them to do the exact samething over and over and over
again. So it's not a flash inthe pan report. It's not just a
PowerPoint deck that sits thereand collects dust. It's a
legitimate operating programthat you can run inside your
(44:42):
marketing organization, insideinsights, inside strategy,
inside product, or all theabove, hopefully, as we
mentioned, all your silos arebroken down, and everyone's
sharing that same information.And that's what we're hoping to
build for all of our clientswhen it's all said and done, if
you want to learn more aboutmyself or Sedulo Group. Sedulo
Group ishttps://sedulogroup.com/ and I'm
(45:02):
on LinkedIn, Layton Cox.
Fantastic, fantastic. And we'llbe sure to drop all those links
in the show notes so people canreach out to you.
Sounds like a plan.
Layton, once again, thanks somuch for your time. Take care,
stay safe and talk to you soon.
Will do Thanks, Christian.
All right. Thanks. Bye for now.
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