I started my Competitive Intelligence career as an intern exactly when LinkedIn launched in 2003. Back then it was a hard and tedious job to find the right human sources for information. You had to buy subscriptions to databases such as Monster.com and you had to do multiple google searches trying to find the contact information of the people listed in scientific articles.

I stopped doing Intelligence collection in 2008 when I joined Novartis. Since then I pretty much lost touch on what it meant to be in the “front line” gathering competitive intelligence. After joining Novartis my focus moved to managing CI vendors and later to building the Global CI team at Novartis and later at Roche.

However, last year everything changed again. I found myself once again on the vendor side with ATACANA (a boutique firm specializing in commercial intelligence and strategy). Shortly after “opening the doors” for business we got our first CI project. The turn around time was fast and we were still on-boarding our researchers.  Therefore, I had to roll-up my sleeves and do part of the intelligence gathering myself.

The project had the following Key Intelligence Topics:

• Size of the commercial operations for Company X in therapeutic area Z (e.g. number of marketing and sales rep teams)
• Identify commercial channels and activities (e.g. congresses, medical education)
• Identify local partners and understand how they collaborate

My first instinct was to check-out LinkedIn. Over the years I had been using it to keep track of my professional network and as a recruitment tool when building my CI teams. I knew that some people tend to share a lot of details about their job and companies on their profile.

Luckily for us, the target company employees had a lot of details on their profile. Using the advanced search function of LinkedIn we found the VP responsible for marketing and sales.

To my delight they had the following bullet point in their profile (slightly modified to protect the source identity):

• Commercial Structure: Sales and marketing team of XXX to include X marketing teams totaling XX marketing managers and XXX sales representatives (X Regional Directors, XX Area Managers, XXX Key Account Managers)

Once we looked up the marketing managers they had in detailed all the activities in their business plan including budgets. When we searched for the product name we also found out the other companies that were marketing the product.

Within a few hours we had answers to the majority of the Key Intelligence Questions thanks to LinkedIn. This turned out to be unusual. In other projects other target company employees didn’t have as much details. Nonetheless, I still love LinkedIn for CI for the following reasons:

• There are more than 6 millions professionals listed in LinkedIn working in the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical devices industry. There is information on pretty much every company working in these industries.
• LinkedIn makes it very easy and affordable to search by company, product name, job title and pretty much any keyword relevant to our projects. We have found answers to a myriad of key intelligence topics by learning how to use the advanced functionality.
• The data contained in the LinkedIn profiles is a goldmine from a competitive intelligence perspective. As in the example above, just using LinkedIn we were able to quickly do a benchmarking study of the field force.

LinkedIn is a clear example of how a social media tool has transformed the competitive intelligence field in the last 10 years. In the next 10 to 20 years, we we are going to live in a world very different from today. Technological advancements are going to change the world so rapidly that 40 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist in 10 years (according to a  study from the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University).

I look forward to sharing about these exciting technologies in the upcoming posts.

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