Collect Competitive Intelligence with Squirro

by Toni Birrer

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Machiavelli coined the phrase in 1513 in “The Prince” thus establishing the importance of competitive intelligence.

The amount of competitive data now available is staggering, therefore continuously collecting intelligence on your competitors is time consuming and with all the updates you might just miss the one critical piece of information.

With Squirro you keep tabs on your competitors without wasting time and without getting overwhelmed by too much information.

Lets say you’re offering a solution that helps your customers running their support operations.

You’ve already identified these competitors:

     Desk.com

     Kayako

     Zendesk

Lets setup Squirro to track these competitors:

1. Go to squirro.com and get yourself a free account.
2. Go to squirro.com/bookmarklet and drag our bookmarklet to your browsers bookmark tool bar.
3. Visit your first competitors homepage, http://desk.com.  Once the page is loaded click the ‘Squirro’ bookmarklet button. Squirro instantly shows you the latest updates about Desk.com Save it to a new Squirro Topic and call it ‘Competitors’. Congratulations! You’re tracking Desk.com. And future news about it will automatically appear in the ‘Competitors’ topic.
4. Visit the remaining two competitors homepages, click on the Squirro Bookmarklet and save the results to the ‘Competitors’ topic.

That’s it. Whenever you want to get the latest updates about your competitors, Squirro will have it ready for you in your Library where you can easily search, filter, read and share the information.

Only interested in what new integrations or what new features your competitors are offering? No problem, simply create a topic filter and Squirro will hide away all the noise.

Next time you visit a new competitors site, just remember to click the Squirro Bookmarklet and you have one more competitor tracked.

Here is a short screencast that shows how quick and easy it is to track your competitors… or really any website or organization.

See the video on YouTube or Vimeo

Try it yourself at https://squirro.com/app