You Must Have a Competitor Intelligence Program

“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a thousand battles.”

Sun Tzu said that, and I always took it to heart.

This newsletter is about why you need a competitive intelligence program and why AI is making it easier than ever….as well as a specific example that might get your juices flowing.

How would I define a competitive intelligence program?

It's a living, breathing understanding of what your competitors are doing.

It's nothing illegal like those dweebs at Deel….But it is aggressive and in your face. 

My test is “if this was on the front page of the newspaper, would I be OK with it?”

That’s always served me well.

When you are a new entrant into the market, you don’t have the luxury of not be aggressive, and this is certainly that.

In some industries, this isn't terribly important because there's not much attention or the competitive dynamics are not very dense due to something like geographic isolation… that makes people kind of stay out of each other’s ways.

In other industries where your buyers are presented with multiple options, or there's crowded or confusing marketing messages, understanding clearly what your competitors are up to, how they're positioning, and how you can counterposition against that is remarkably important.

I've written on Twitter before about how we have a pretty well-built-out competitive intelligence machine at Sagan.

It works very successfully for us.

This is because of three factors:

1. Most of our customers have bought from our competitors before. We steal a lot from our competitors… we let others grow the primary market.

2. In a digital sector that is very noisy like global talent recruitment, positioning hard against competitors is one of the strongest ways to differentiate. There's no geographic barrier here.

3. It’s fun and we are good at it.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to routinely have folks contact your competitors, seeing how they position against you, see how they position themselves, read their landing pages, opt in to their email sequences, et cetera.

We are doing this at least once a month with a half-dozen of our competitors.

You can track all sorts of things this way - people (especially sales folks) are very chatty!

Last thing I’ll say before getting into a specific example - is AI makes this hilariously easy.

Things like searching for former employees, finding negative reviews, mapping new subdomains on their website… all are rather easy with some smart prompting and the bigger models.

You don’t have an excuse anymore.

Now, on to some specifics!

I’m going to pick on the guys over at Somewhere (I’m jealous of their margins and the private jets they pay for) , but we do this with everyone… they are one of a long list.

Now there are the obvious places to look like their ad libraries on Linkedin and Facebook… but the two below might make you think a bit!

1) They use a referral platform called referral factory. Clicking around a bit (no login required) you can see someones referral stats, if you have the referral source’s email.

I picked podcast host Shaan Purri as my target (this is the link at the bottom of the my first million podcasts, active as of today), and pretty easily found his email.

Hit enter….YIKES. Guess the podcast isn’t the sales machine it was hoped to be?

We’ve mapped out all of their distribution like this, track the data over time… fascinating insights for us!

2) We found them doing something silly… using Trust Pilot (which is supposed to be for CUSTOMER reviews) to have the PEOPLE THEY GOT JOBS leave reviews.

It boosts their number for anyone who isn’t looking too carefully, but it is shaddddddy… probably 75% are from the TALENT.

I sure hope they give you five stars, you got them a job…

Anyway… rather than just shake my fist at the sky, let’s do something about it using our big brains.

Using the magic of AI we can download all the reviews on their page:

But wait!

Is that the FULL NAME of someone they got a job, and the country they live in?

Let’s put in the first one to AI, a Brazilian named “Flavia Hurtado” and see if we can figure out who she is…

We now find her Linkedin…

And her current place of employment a US based law firm

We now have an absolutely KILLER sales lead for Sagan, “Hey I know Flavia is great, but you want to save 80% on subsequent hires?)

When the only competitive differentiation is you have is distribution, you have to HIDE your customers (and this leaks them, systematically).

another example Luigi Giazzoni (we did the whole list, of course)

See how valuable this is?

The only reason I'm comfortable sharing all of these is because frankly they are some of our weaker ways that we do competitive intelligence.

The cat is out of the bag on these.

I’ll give one small peak into our most powerful method (again, not much that they can do about it)….that might give you some more ideas.

• Imagine you know that your competitor is finding their customers on social media

• Imagine you could track when they connected with people, and enrich the contact to determine if they connection was in your ICP

• Imagine they could be enriched and added to target lists, all using AI agents.

• I imagine that would be pretty useful

The lesson here is you need to be aggressively tracking and exploiting your competitors.

There is GOLD in those hills.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. You might be thinking, “Shit! What’s a defensive strategy if someone is doing this to my company!” Which is a good question. That’s a whole different newsletter!

Also if I don’t tell you to join Sagan, my cofounder will be mad at me.