Competitive Intelligence and the Sales Force: How to Gain Market Leadership Through Competitive Intelligence

Government intelligence agencies throughout the world are finding once again that human abilities and sources rather than technology are more reliable and instrumental in intelligence gathering efforts. Companies have known this for quite some time and have tried to leverage their best source of competitive intelligence: the sale force!

Because of their daily presence in the field and favored relationships with their customers, salespeople are the eyes and ears of their companies. In the new economic war, managers cannot take the chance of not being fully aware of the way they could be threatened by the competition. Yet, organizations face great difficulties to stimulate salespeople’s collection and dissemination of competitive intelligence, and to manage market-based intelligence efficiently.

This book aims to assist sales and marketing managers face such challenges while providing them with answers to the following key questions:

• How can a firm transform information into intelligence?
• What kind of information should be collected in the field?
• How can a firm manage and distill market-based intelligence across its functions and maintain a market orientation strategy?
• What is the best method to enhance and sustain the sales force’s commitment to the firm’s competitive intelligence system?
• Which methods might improve salespeople’s competitive intelligence acquisition techniques and exploitation capabilities?
• How should firms approach ethical questions surrounding competitive intelligence activities?

By leveraging the latest research, practitioners’ interviews, companies’ best practices, along with practical tools and guidelines, this book helps organizations achieve their market-orientation strategy and maintain a sustainable competitive edge.

About the Author

Joël Le Bon is a Marketing Professor at the University of Houston, C.T. Bauer College of Business, where he also serves as the Director of Executive Education for the Sales Excellence Institute.

He received a Bachelor of Arts in Management Science, a Master of Science in Marketing and Strategy, and a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Paris Dauphine. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University within the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) and is also an alumnus of the Kellogg ITP program of Northwestern University.

Prior to joining the University of Houston, he worked for over 10 years in Singapore and France as a Marketing Professor at ESSEC Business School where is also served as Department Head. Before joining academia, he was a Strategic Account Manager for XEROX, and had sales and sales management roles in the media industry where he won several all-time sales awards.

He has received 12 academic distinctions for his research from the American Marketing Association (AMA), the National Conference in Sales Management (NCSM), the Society for Marketing Advances (SMA), the French Marketing Association (AFM), and the French National Foundation for Management Education (FNEGE). He is the first international professor awarded the AMA's Prentice Hall Solomon-Marshall-Stuart Teaching Award for Innovative Excellence in Marketing Education, and the first French winner of the IBM Faculty Award.