Have you ever wished you were Bond? James Bond? Here are 007+007 = fourteen ways to spy on your competitors’ web sites, without breaking any FISA laws.

Your rankings don't just depend on how good your site is. They depend on the quality of your competitors' sites as well. As a result, keeping an eye on your competition should be a regular part of every webmaster's tactical plan. Use these 25 tools to get the lowdown on their sites.

What are your rivals' future plans? Will they launch new products? How profitable are they? Find out - the legal way - with BNET's step-by-step guide to competitive research techniques.

Remember the days of Cold War espionage and intrigue, popularized in Bond films and John Le Carré novels? Well, times have changed geopolitically, but businesses have come to embrace the merits of "tradecraft": They want to gain market advantage through a better understanding of the competition. In the corporate world, tradecraft is called "competitive intelligence." A former CIA agent-turned-management expert tells how to make it work for your company.

The fields of finance and accounting are well established, with numerous well-written articles and books available on how to understand financial statements (FS). However, the availability of information is not the real problem: there is too much information for people to absorb. Not only do you need to understand how financial statements are created, but what critical and essential information you can glean from the data itself, using financial ratios for trend, competitive, and comparative analysis. This article offers a framework to build a financial analysis and gives an overview of financial ratios and their general classifications.

Sales guides often paint a too-rosy view of the company's competitive position, or contain insufficient and/or outdated competitive information. Find out how such competitive information sets up a sales force to lose, what sales people need to win, and how to package information in ways that one's sales force finds useful.

According to CFO Magazine's latest survey, companies have been diligently pruning overhead, leaving them primed to capitalize on an economic recovery.

Editor's Note: The actual text of the article is of limited and topical value, but the reason I have posted this is for the useful CI info found in the industry tables, which list average cost management index (CMI) values for a variety of industries. You can even download a more detailed look at each industry in excel (look for this link on the right sidebar titled "WEB EXCLUSIVE: COST MANAGEMENT"

Competia offers four tips that will be useful for the CI professional who wants to gain credibility in their organization:
Tip#1: Defining your mandate
Tip#2: Understanding your key users' needs
Tip#3: Identifying the key analysis techniques you need to master
Tip#4: Keeping up to date

When there is hint of a rumor that is a potential deal of a partnership between two competitors, analysts will be knocking on the competitive intelligence unit to execute a partnership profile. This article will furnish readers with a structured outline for a partner profile report. There should be six elements contained in the report, specifically:
- Background
- Financial status
- Management teams
- Core competencies
- R&D capabilities
- Past alliances

The best place to peek at a company's proprietary secrets? At meetings and trade shows. Intelligence professionals tell you how it's done.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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Future-oriented, Accurate, Resource-efficient, Objective, Useful, Timely - a framework for competitive analysis.

The 2002 Working Capital Survey (sixth annual conducted jointly with REL Consultancy Group) reveals ways to reduce working capital without punishing customers or suppliers. But the alternatives aren't totally pain-free.

Editor's Note: I find the 2002 Working Capital Survey Charts (last page) a very useful benchmark/CI tool.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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Efficient capital markets require that companies that have raised money in the capital markets must file detailed, timely and sometimes intimate information with regulators. These filings are open for everyone - not only investors in the company. Prior to the www, these filings were available to the public, but the means for everyone to access this information easily was not available. The free flow of information of capitalism combined with the reach of the internet gives you, the CI analyst, very powerful information.

In this article, we will be looking at some methods of accessing this powerful information.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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Have you ever been in a situation where your competitor claimed a market share that was not even close to the calculations you gave to your senior management? Or where annual reports claimed market shares you could not retrace in your calculations? Understanding how you can calculate - and use - market shares can be extremely useful.

"How does your company stack up against the competition? You better know the answer to that question on a number of fronts. Our new column on business research debuts with a look at sources available to help you get started in your quest to benchmark against your peers."

"In this article we propose to examine various types of information required for the CI activity, as well as reliable sources to monitor. The CI searcher must continuously monitor, evaluate, and analyze many data components in order to maintain a comprehensive competitive intelligence program within an organization. Besides looking at data types, we will examine how new Web-based technology has revolutionized the gathering, storage, and dissemination of information."

There is a tendency in marketing to think mostly about what customers care about. That is, what benefits customers really want. But there is another important part that should be deeply appreciated by anyone who markets products, and that is customer perceptions, or how customers view (or perceive) the different products on the market. One technique that clearly depicts these customer perceptions is "snake-plot". It is a technique that falls under the umbrella term of "perceptual mapping."

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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The Art of War, compiled over two thousand years ago has been a valuable source of insight for leaders and strategists. The ‘nine grounds' examines the ‘tactical' issues of a group in relation to its terrain or territory, useful in its application to competitive and market analysis and to the social, political, and more abstract senses.

Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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"Many corporate executives have a faulty understanding of just how to go about doing the kind of intelligent intelligence gathering that will keep them one step ahead of the competition. While corporate CI [competitive intelligence] units need to know the arsenal of dirty tricks competitors might use against them, specialists say they should also understand that good competitive intelligence can often be accomplished without resorting to such shenanigans. If you know what you're doing, they say, the information you seek about your competitor's plans can usually be obtained by legitimate 'open source' means."

What is business intelligence (BI) and how can it benefit your organization? This article offers two examples to show how a company might use BI and then asks several questions to help you determine how well you're putting this intelligence to work.

Internet resources have changed the landscape for competitive-intelligence professionals

experts provides a six-point program for keeping an eye on your rivals.