[MUSIC] Hi. Welcome back. In this video, you will learn how to gather the information you need to help with your sales management process. I can hear your brain now, how do you find the information? Which sources are reliable? And many other questions. At this point, you will be incline to start looking for as much information as possible on the Internet, don't do that. You have to do that in an organized way, in following the steps. Step one, information gathering planning. The first thing you need to do is to sit down and think. Plan must proceed actions. It is incredibly easy to get lost in data and you will find lots of it. The most practical way of dealing with that is to generate a file with the information needs in an organized fashion, so as to receive the inputs from your collection efforts. Once you do that, you just try to fill the blanks. Step two, research internal information. All organizations generate a huge amount of information in the formal reports. Spreadsheets, presentation, internal system, and others from various areas. They are spread around the company and your job is to piece those parts together. What I normally do is to ask myself, if I was a piece of information and I wanted to hide somewhere within the firm, where would I go? For example, if I was an information related to future plans from a one competitor, where would I be? Since the competitor needs parts and services, and many of the suppliers of these parts and services are also serve our firm, it seems reasonable to talk to the purchasing department to know if they heard anything. Some companies require their employees to submit a report after each company with a supplier. If the intelligence team had access to this report database, its effort would be significantly easier. Obviously, if you are in the middle of a sales campaign, this is not the time to talk to the management team, explain why you need access to another company's department database, explain what sales intelligence is, and deal with all of the political issues and many other items. The best moment to ask for this kind of access is before you need it. Step three, research in secondary sources. The next step is to search the Internet and other publicly available sources. Besides offering more information, you'll also find the names of the people you may want to talk. In this time and age, the wealth of information you can find on and offline is incredible and would merit a whole new Coursera course. Suffice it to say that most of us think we know how to use the internet to locate information. We don't. I once took a course on how to use Google to find information. It was a full 40-hours course and we didn't even scratch the surface of what the Internet can do for us. Also, you can find publicly available source like government records, patent offices, all kinds of reports produced by trade associations, university papers, etc., besides the traditional competitor and potential client website, of course. Step four, interviews with human sources, internal human sources. Refer to your firm's current employees. Imagine that you needed to find and analyze financial information from a competitor. To figure out how important a specific product line is to the competitor's bottom line, someone from the Department of Finances can help you with that. He or she will know where to find financial information, and most importantly, how to analyze them. You must keep in mind that people have far more information than they put in their reports, emails. And sometimes you can learn a lot In a good chat while having a good cup of coffee. Sometimes, you will be involved in a particularly important sales campaign and you need confidential information. You find people that used to work there and they have the exact information you need. Well, you cannot go there and just ask them information on price, terms, conditions, list of clients, and others because of antitrust laws and confidentiality agreements. If you are in doubt, consult your compliance officer. If your company does not have one, consult your legal department. Having said that, the knowledge and experience the professionals have are theirs to keep. You cannot ask for specific information, but in most companies, it is okay to ask their opinion on the strategies you want to use to win on a specific contract. If you follow these steps so far, you should've had up to 80 to 90% of the information you needed to make a good decision. But sometimes, that's not enough. That's why we go to step five, research on external human sources. You will start the job of talking to external contacts by identifying the best candidates. The identification of possible sources involve finding people with access to the information you need and the inclination to do it. Once you have identified the information you need, try and find the people who would have access to the information. And who has the inclination to share this information with you. For example, imagine that a competitor is working on a new computing project. In order to do that, competitor will need the part from a common supplier. Sully works for one of the suppliers as a sales person. He talks to your firm and also talks to the competitor's firm. Paul is your colleague from the procurement department, and he has dealt with Sully from the suppliers, for many years. Sully wants to sell more to your firm, so Sully talks to Paul about the new and exciting new products that the supplier is working on. Actually, this one new product that is being used by other manufacturers that it is helping them a lot. In order to have access to Sully's information, you talk to Paul and let him know about the information you need. Paul can find information for you provided you give him what you want. Of course, Paul is much more able than you because he already has a working relationship with Sully. Of course, you can always go talk to Sully yourself if Paul cannot talk to Sully for whatever reason. But you will probably not be as effective as Paul. After you have talked directly or indirectly to a number of people, you will have enough information to work on. This leads to our next step, collation. Collation is a very important step in which information for several sources and formats are reorganized into a single format. In the information gathering step, you will gather documents in paper format spreadsheets, slides, presentations, voice, video clips, etc. It is important that all the information is reorganized into a standard format especially if you're going to use some sort of electronic means, to help you with the analysis step. Step seven, summarization and report. This is the stage in which the information is organized and ready to be used in the following step of the intelligence cycle, which is called analysis. Thank you very much for watching. [MUSIC]
