Competitive Intelligence Report Template
A competitive report does not go wrong when it is written. It goes wrong afterwards, invisibly, because no claim records when anybody last looked.
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A claim like they charge 49 dollars per seat is true on the day somebody reads the pricing page. It then stays in the document forever, because the document recorded the claim and not the reading. Nothing in it knows its own age. So the report circulates, the facts drift, the conclusions built on them keep getting repeated, and eighteen months later it is folklore nobody can audit and nobody will admit is stale.
The fix is mechanical rather than diligent. Every cell in the comparison matrix carries three values instead of one: the claim, the source, and the date it was read. Each field gets its own recheck interval, because a list price and a founding year do not decay at the same rate. Pair it with a company filing analysis for the figures a listed rival must publish, and a competitor monitoring pack for the changes between rechecks.
The part that pays is the join. Observations and conclusions get set in the same font in every competitive document ever written, so a judgement inherits the credibility of the facts underneath it and then outlives them. Here a conclusion names the cells it rests on, which is a separation the US intelligence community's own analytic standards make mandatory. One rebuild found 19 of 48 cells past due and withdrew three conclusions already in circulation. Nineteen expired cells is a maintenance queue. Three withdrawn conclusions is why the queue matters.
What is in the pack
Comparison Matrix
One cell per field per player, each carrying its claim, its source, whether that source is primary, and the date it was read
Recheck Audit
Generated from the matrix rather than kept by hand, listing every expired cell with its days overdue and what the recheck found
Inference Register
Conclusions held apart from observations, each naming the cells it rests on and where it has already been circulated
Signal Register
The inbox for anything observed but not yet promoted to a cell, with four dispositions and the condition that would promote it
How Staleness Is Computed
The recheck interval per field type, the four states a cell can hold, and why a founding year is marked never rather than given a long interval
Intelligence Report
The standing document, rebuilt each cycle and led by the conclusions that were withdrawn and where each one had been used
Player Profiles
One per player, generated from that player's column, carrying every source and date through and marking expired claims inline
Category Map and Watch List
A two-axis map whose positions are computed from cells, and ten watch items each with a threshold that can actually fire
How it works
- 1
Send what you already have
Who you track, whatever assessment exists in any shape, and the decision this is for. The messy old deck is the most useful thing you can send, not the least.
- 2
Split observation from conclusion
Your existing material carries both in the same font. Every claim naming no source becomes a gap, and every conclusion gets the cells it rests on reconstructed.
- 3
Set an interval per field
Pricing and hiring decay in weeks, ownership and integrations in quarters, a founding year never. Recheck-by is the observation date plus that interval.
- 4
Then run it against itself
The audit names its own expired cells, rechecks them at source, and pulls up every conclusion resting on the ones that moved.
Frequently asked questions
What do I need before this is useful?
Who you track and why they matter, and whatever assessment you already have. Four to six players is the working range. The existing material is the point rather than a starting inconvenience, because the first output is a list of the claims in your own report that are already past due.
How is this different from a competitor comparison template?
A comparison template gives you a grid to fill in. This gives every cell in that grid two more columns, a source and an observation date, and a recheck interval attached to its field type. That is the difference between a document that decays quietly and one that can tell you which parts have expired.
Does an expired cell mean the claim is wrong?
No, and the distinction is enforced. An expired cell is unverified, which is a different state, and it gets marked in every document it appears in. The rule is that it may not be quoted to a customer or a board until somebody has rechecked it at source.
Why keep conclusions in a separate sheet?
Because a judgement written beside a fact inherits its credibility and then outlives it. Each conclusion names its supporting cells, so a rechecked cell surfaces every judgement that just came unstuck. A broken one is withdrawn at the top of the report, naming every place it was circulated, because analytic standards require a product to state how its judgments changed from previously published analysis.
Does it score confidence or rank the competitors?
Neither, deliberately. A cell is sourced or not, current or expired, primary or secondary, and those four facts beat a number from one to five nobody can reproduce. Ranking is an inference, so it lives in the register with its cells named rather than in the matrix as though it were an observation.
What about information a competitor has not published?
It stays out, and the discard gets logged so nobody re-collects it. Everything here comes from their site, filings, job postings, press releases, documentation, published customer lists, review sites, court records and what their customers say in public. Federal law defines a trade secret partly by not being readily ascertainable through proper means, which is the line this pack sits on the safe side of.
Does this replace a battlecard?
No, it feeds one. This is the evidence base with dates on it; a sales battlecard is one competitor turned into objection handling for a live deal, and a competitor teardown is the depth pass on one player. What buyers actually said belongs in a win loss review.
Find out which of your competitive facts have expired
Send the players and whatever assessment you already have. The first pass tells you what in it is already past due.
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