Competitive Intelligence Report Template

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 Three withdrawn conclusions is why the queue matters.