🤘🤘 These Personal Traits Will Make You a Solid Competitive Enabler

I bet my left kneecap, that your childhood dream wasn't becoming a competitive intelligence professional. 

It might be because that kind of job didn't exists back then, or you just didn't know what it means. But then again, no-one wakes up and says I want to be a litigation or procurement specialist either.

But every single person does have pre-disposition that leads them to their professions. If you're good with maths and physics, you will probably like engineering. 

Here are the three traits that every competitive enabler possess:

Curiosity

You’re the nosiest person and your favorite books were Agatha Christies’s murder mysteries and Sherlock Holmes adventures.

Ok, I’m only slightly kidding but the genuine curiosity is a mandatory trait for CI professionals. You’d want to know why, who, and hows of your industry, competitors, and marketing trends.

Analytical and Objective mindset  

You’re going to get tons of data. Think about that scene in Matrix, where Neo is surrounded about pieces of code. That's too much data!

Your mission - to spot patterns, to sift through the noise and find the music. Isolate the significant from the insignificant and deliver information from all that data.

Ever played with marbles, and segment them based on size and color - and for some reason that was insanely fun thing to do? You'll do good in competitive intel. 

Team Player

Your work "enables" and you're always have to get closer to your team members to  deliver your work or present it. Being a good communicator and connector is going to be key in your work as a CI professional.

You're the person "with the latest scoop" and there's that useful info stays in the domain of your skull caverns or digital clouds.

But knowing is only one piece of the effective collab. Respecting your team-members and sharing information that is useful in a friendly and easy-to-consume (and use) format will make you a solid person to work with!

Here's a neat example how CI finds its way into marketing copywriting. The Product Management Software is an extremely competitive pool.

Companies are willing to allocate a lot of budget to persuade a lead to give them a chance. Here's an example how Monday's PPC copy add works way better than Atlassian's due to the context of buyer's intent. 

Even though it's on the second place in search results, the copy makes me click on Monday's ad first and not Jira's. 

Check my search query as well - neither of those companies appear in my search field. The ads are tailored for leads that are in somewhat high intent and are in the comparison/decision phase. 

If you're looking to test how sharp your your compete intelligence is, take the compete program check out the free assessment below (takes less than ~2min to fill in).

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Newsletter Shoutout

Speaking about competitive intelligence and enablement, Andy's Healthy Competition  newsletter (and community) is the place to learn more about the subject, rub elbows with the experts who have years of experience under their belt, and share a meme or two to take that (competitive) edge off. 

3 Wicked Songs

1. The more digital The Comet is Coming is spicy as ever 🌶️ Great piece to combo-break your regular listening stack of sounds.

2. Italy is becoming the cradle of the crunchiest and fuzziest stoner. I love Black Rainbows and I'm digging Sonic Demon's noise too. Just turn all distortion pedals to 11 and see what happens 🤘🤘

3. Round out the noise-week with trio rock pack Wild Powwers that makes me miss the Seattle music scene. Check out their KEXP performance if you like the sounds.

Have a wonderful week!

🤘🤘

d.