Glossary
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the practice of tracking named rivals, through their pages, pricing, reviews and what sales hears about them, in order to win against them. It produces battlecards, change alerts and win-loss reports.
Updated 19 September 2026
What does a competitive intelligence team produce?
Battlecards for sales, alerts when a rival changes its pricing or messaging, win-loss reports, and briefings for leadership before a launch or a board meeting. The work is organised around a list of named competitors, and its customer is usually the sales team.
How is competitive intelligence different from industry intelligence?
Scope and question. Competitive intelligence watches the companies you sell against and asks how to beat them. Industry intelligence reads the whole field, including people who are not competitors at all — customers, investors, regulators, engineers — and asks where the industry is going and why the people in it think so.
Where does competitive intelligence stop?
It sees what rivals publish about themselves, which is marketing, and what your own sales team hears, which is anecdote. A shift that starts outside the competitor list — a new buyer habit, a platform change, a regulator’s remark — is outside its field of view by design. That gap is what industry intelligence is for.