Commercial intelligence that helps businesses understand
competitive environments, opportunities and challenges means collecting,
analyzing, interpreting information about competitors, customers, products, and
other market factors, and using them in strategic decision-making processes
that can provide competitive advantage. The collected information is target
oriented. After this information is interpreted and turned into intelligence,
it is transformed into a decision and practice.
What are the Channels to Acquire Competitive Intelligence?
In competitive intelligence, data sources are
divided into two as primary and secondary.
1. Primary Data Sources
The primary data source is a source where data
is collected first-hand by the researcher for a specific research purpose.
- Competitors
- Customers
- Suppliers
- Speeches
- Government officials
- Industry experts
- Presentations
2. Secondary Data Sources
Secondary data sources are pre-compiled for
various purposes using primary data sources.
- Commercial databases
- Financial reports
- Search engines
- Competitors' websites
- Associations
- Newspapers and magazines
- Ready reports
- Technical and patent documents
- Fairs
- Consultant reports
- Commercial consultancies
Importance of Commercial Intelligence in Import and Export
The intense competitive environment in
international trade necessitates the use of commercial intelligence in
strategic decisions. The use of commercial intelligence in all decision-making
stages in foreign trade is of great importance for both companies and countries
to increase their competitiveness.
In exports, target market determination, target
country market research, target customer and competitor analysis using
commercial intelligence, and target-oriented use of all power and resources
thanks to commercial intelligence help to obtain more effective results with
pinpoint exports.
For good quality, cheap, reliable and
sustainable import, it is possible to determine the importing countries on a
world scale, to find potential suppliers and to make price research thanks to
commercial intelligence.
Increasing the competitiveness in world trade
in imports and exports, saving time and money with accurate target market
determinations, taking steps by knowing the competitors and the market well
depends on analyzing and interpreting the correct information acquired through
commercial intelligence.
Benefits of Being Ahead in Commercial Intelligence for Competitors and Current Partnerships
Being ahead in commercial intelligence is of
great importance in terms of competitiveness. Using commercial intelligence, it
is possible to obtain information about changing market needs, price policies
of competitors, new developments in the sector, potential competitors, threats
or opportunities that may affect competitiveness, strategies and investments
implemented by competitors, short and long term trends, strengths and
weaknesses of competitors. Analyzing this information and using it in strategic
decision stages provides great benefits in ensuring the continuity and
strengthening of the partnerships, acting with the knowledge of the strategies
followed by the competitors, meeting the changing market needs and increasing
the competitiveness by making correct pricing.
Innovations and Benefits of Information Age to Commercial Intelligence
Commercial intelligence experts have spent a
considerable amount of time in the past to manually access, analyze and make
decisions based on the information they have obtained. The possibility of
changes in the market at the end of this long process meant that all these
efforts turned into a waste of time and money. However, with the development of
technology and the intense competitive environment, the fact that commercial
intelligence has almost become a necessity has increased automation in this
process.
With the development of technology, data
collection and analysis methods have changed. The widespread use of the internet
has created a huge data pool. However, it was still a very time-consuming
process to reach the required data in this crowd of data. With the development
of information technologies, B2B services have emerged that provide data
services and enable this data to be analyzed and made meaningful and useful.
Thanks to these services that provide processed and interpreted business
intelligence, it has become fast, easy, reliable and low-cost to turn to the
right markets and to take strategic activities in these markets.
TradeAtlas Helps Companies to Grow Their Businesses in Global Markets
There are some data provided by TradeAtlas.com
to its members:
- New importer information for exporters,
- From which supplier, how much and at what
price foreign importers import,
- Monthly and annual total import value of
foreign importers,
- At what price to which importers foreign
competitors export,
- How much importers import from their
competitors,
- Average unit price of exporters' export
products in foreign markets,
- Which companies import a product in a certain
country at most and how often,
- In which period of the year an importer
company imports,
- How much share an importer has in the import
of the country concerned.
As Trade Atlas, we also process data for the
intended purpose and make it more useful for companies. While doing this, we
analyze the data using "big data" processing techniques, and with the
"smart search" feature on the website, we highlight the importer or
exporter company information sought among millions of companies by using
certain parameters. Thus, we facilitate and safely present searches that
require specialization, take time and may lead to erroneous results if done
individually.
Our member companies determine their target
markets more easily, reach the right customers without wasting time, and follow
their competitors better with the commercial business intelligence
service and data we offer.
For
detailed information on the subject cross trade, you can review the content “What is Cross Trade?”.
