3. Identify sources of information for each competitor

The method is simple and can be applied to just about any activity:

• ask the recipients of your competitive intelligence if they already know of any essential sources of information on competitors. You'll save precious time and avoid missing out on what's essential for your recipients;

• perform a simple Google search on the names of the competitors you've identified, and you'll already be able to identify the most visible sites, and therefore often the sites of your competitors themselves;

• On your competitors' sites, don't hesitate to use Google to target certain file types. For example, ask Google on one of your competitor's sites to alert you to every PDF, Word or Excel document put online with a query like: "site: concurrent.com filetype: xls" and set up an alert on the...