How to Strengthen Your B2B Differentiation with Competitive Intelligence

They say that information is power. In the ever-changing and increasingly competitive B2B landscape, it’s also a strategic advantage. When used effectively, it empowers companies to grow profitably, scale rapidly and outsmart their competitors. So how can B2B companies harness the power of competitive and market intelligence (CI & MI) to drive profitable growth?

That’s why we’re talking to Layton Cox (Senior Director of Competitive Intelligence & Strategy Consulting, Sedulo Group), who shared his experience and provided valuable insights on how to strengthen your B2B differentiation with competitive intelligence. During our conversation, Layton emphasized the importance of primary research over the reliance on secondary data, and elaborated on the value of internal data and direct competitor insights. He also discussed building a centralized intelligence framework for data storage and conducting primary research to uncover unique competitive advantages. Layton also talked about how teams can break down silos within organizations, sharing research findings across business units, and shared common pitfalls that marketing teams should avoid.

https://youtu.be/eKUOkk9C-wE

Topics discussed in episode:

[1:59] Understanding the fundamentals of Competitive Intelligence (CI) and Market Intelligence (MI)

[5:27] The role of AI in Competitive Intelligence and Market Intelligence

[9:19] Key challenges and pitfalls faced by B2B marketing teams in intelligence gathering and sharing

[14:59] How to overcome objections to conducting primary research

[17:51] Building internal alignment and effectively sharing insights across teams

[20:50] Practical techniques for gathering primary intelligence

[22:42] Mystery shopping in B2B

[31:38] Actionable tips for B2B marketers:

Build a framework
Leverage internal data
Find competitors internal data
Share with internal teams

[35:01] Key metrics and how data-driven decisions drive growth

Companies and links mentioned:

Transcript

Christian Klepp 00:00

They say that information is power and in the ever changing and increasingly competitive B2B landscape, information can help you to move the needle and outsmart your competitors. So how can B2B companies use and leverage competitive and market intelligence to drive profitable growth? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Layton Cox, who will be answering this question. As the Senior Director of competitive intelligence at Sedulo Group, Layton helps B2B companies leverage data and insights to maximize their competitive advantage. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp 00:39

And I’m gonna say Mr. Layton Cox, welcome to the show, sir.

Layton Cox 00:47

Thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp 00:48

Great to have you on the show, Layton. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because, you know, clearly we’re gonna talk about a topic that you specialize in. You’re clearly very passionate about it, but I also think it’s very for lack of a better word, pertinent, highly relevant, also for B2B marketers to be leveraging it. So we’re going to keep the audience in suspense a little while longer while I dive into the first set of questions. All right, so let’s go. You’re on a mission to leverage research methods to allow clients to identify, I’m going to say, advantageous strategies for their products, markets and functions. So for this conversation, let’s zero in on the topic of how B2B companies can leverage competitive and market intelligence to stand out in a competitive market. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first one is, what is it about CI (Competitive Intelligence) and MI (Market Intelligence) so competitive and market intelligence that you wish more B2B companies understood first question. And second question is, where do you see most marketing teams struggle when it comes to competitive and market intelligence?

Layton Cox 01:59

It’s great set of questions there, and they kind of go hand in hand. And so before we completely dive in the let’s make the baseline of what is CI and what is MI. And so we have this conversation a lot, what we find out is they say, Oh yeah, we have competitor intelligence. I’ve looked at their website. We have market intelligence. I’ve Googled my industry. And of course, we’ve been in this industry for decades, or sometimes even centuries, for some of our clients, what we’re here to really, kind of emphasize we want to make sure that people understand is that competitive intelligence and market research, just in general, aren’t tactical research activities. The goal of both of these is to give you a very good understanding of where you play, who else is playing in that environment with you, and then what really you need to do in order to win against those competitive players, when it’s all said and done, to do that, you have to be able to one have kind of a centralized language inside your own organization and A framework in order to access some of those more tactical research pieces that you have already done, and on the point of the research side, you also have to make sure that you’re not relying just on secondary data.

Layton Cox 03:13

AI is fantastic. Syndicated reports are fantastic. We often, however, see especially marketing teams say, I paid Nielsen, or I paid Kantar, or I paid a very large consumer study. And I have this one report from 2022 that told me this, this and this. And we’ve made every decision since then based off of that. And then, if I need any updates, I asked ChatGPT or Copilot, to say, Hey, this is what this report used to say. What do you think it would say now and then? ChatGPT tells me the answer. What we’re finding is that they’re struggling to get kind of net new primary information. And when I say primary information, having conversations with people, talking to competitors, if your ethics, single appliance team will allow you to most will talking to sales partners, if you have retail partners, if you have VARs (Value-Added Resellers), anything like that, of kind of what are their experience? Boots on the ground and, of course, talking to customers themselves, trying to actually get information directly from them. And it’s more than a single conversation. It’s usually 10 to 12 kind of conversations. You have to talk to multiple sources triangulate what’s really going on in your market, like I said, so you can kind of build out that robust understanding of where you play, who you’re competing. You wins then, then how do you beat them?

Christian Klepp 04:31

Yeah, definitely. And that’s a those are some really, really great insights. And I’m glad you brought up the topic of AI (Artificial Intelligence), because that was kind of like one of these follow up questions I had for you, like, you’ve probably heard this or seen this more times than you care to count, but you know, everyone’s talking about like, oh, maybe we can offload some of this, like, this resource or this, this bandwidth that we’ve previously allocated for research, because now we have AI right? So we don’t have to worry about that any more. And to your point, like, you know, we’ve got this report from Nielsen, and we just feed it into ChatGPT, and it’ll get updated. So I guess my question there is, maybe it’s two pronged question, I would say, your take on how AI is helpful for CI and MI, and your take on where it’s more of an impediment.

Layton Cox 05:27

And it’s a hot topic even inside the industry, and so I’m obviously on the service provider side, and it’s a hot topic on our industry, and we do our own CI and MI well. So this is something that we’re researching ourselves, and what we’re finding is that AI is fantastic at evaluating, summarizing large data sets, as long as it knows kind of what you’re trying to do and it has done something like that in the past, or someone somewhere else has trained it to do something very similar. What that usually means is, if you want to ask it some generic information or train it on some internal data that only your team has access to. It can be an extremely powerful tool. We see a lot of it right now kind of popping up in the win loss space. And so as clients are talking to either churned customers or lost deals or one customers, and saying, kind of, what is it about the sales process or about the product that really kind of made you buy or made you not buy, being able to train an AI agent on that to kind of do some post sale surveys that’s controlled by the AI and allows you to get integrated into it that’s a small enough niche, enough kind of focus for AI to be able to really pull off, usually by itself, with just a few kind of customized agents, and the data usually comes back in a relatively systemized way. Price is obviously one of the things almost everybody brings up every time product features capabilities, you’ll get reference to certain competitor names that reoccur over and over again, and AI can pull those insights out. And so broadly, AI is good when you can train it in a specific data set to do a specific process that you’re really looking to kind of repeat over and over and over again. And you already know what good looks like.

Layton Cox 07:09

Where AI is not good is really when it comes down to more creative and strategic thoughts, and so when it’s not focused on a very tactical set of expectations, when it’s not using a set amount of data when you’re saying, Hey, I don’t know what this looks like yet. We’re entering a new market. We’re launching a new product. We have a new competitor that’s popped up, and we have no idea what they do or don’t do, or what their products look like, or where their use cases are impacting us all. If everything that’s kind of new, that’s where AI struggles, and that’s where I think you still have to have real people going out there asking other people these real questions in order to be able to get the insights that actually matter.

Christian Klepp 07:49

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It sounds to me, just for what I’ve been hearing, that you should see AI more as a co-pilot, right? Something that you saw, something that you constantly like, train, because it’s all about like, Okay, you gotta keep training the AI, right? And it, and it does learn rapidly, but to your point, it does require some human intervention, I think might be the right word.

Layton Cox 08:14

I would say, the way that we’ve talked about internally, even we use, and we use AI for a good amount of summarization of interviews and notes and things like that as well. Of a lot of it goes down to, I try to treat it like an intern. Of, what would I trust an intern to do this task? What do I need to tell an intern before I actually kind of give this all the way to them, and then if it comes back and it’s kind of sloppy, that’s probably on me. It’s probably not the interns fault. So then I need to figure out, Okay, what did I miss communicate, or what did I not communicate correctly to it? That’s how we’ve kind of treated internally, and it really helps. And I will say, like I feel bad for all the college graduates right now, because it can do a lot of those tasks, and there’s probably less internships nowadays than there were whenever I was back then. So, but hopefully that is just a flash in the pan and everything opens up here quickly.

Layton Cox 09:19

I would say there’s one that’s probably inside the scope of marketing, and there’s one that’s kind of goes beyond the scope of marketing. Inside the scope of marketing, I would say it, you really shouldn’t make big decisions based off of secondary, generic or just broad, publicly available information. We see this often, where you can go and you can subscribe to some kind of database, and you can get access to the information and data points, and you can have someone kind of say, oh, yeah, here’s the information you’re looking for, and it’ll be 500 bucks using those kind of market reports. It is valuable in some ways, but your competition. If they are at all serious or not, has that exact same data, they have the exact same insights. They’re able to leverage those same sources, and they’re going to make the same insights and same kind of decisions based off that, as you probably will. And so as you’re looking to go build out a kind of advantageous use case, or as you’re building out unique positioning for your product, whereas you’re just trying to say, hey, how do I beat this competitor in this space? You can’t really use that publicly available and easily attainable information.

Christian Klepp 10:30

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question about on the topic of leveraging CI and MI as it pertains to B2B marketing teams. What are some of these key pitfalls that you think the teams need to look out for, and what should they be doing instead?

Layton Cox 10:30

So what you can do instead, leverage the internal data that you have only you have your sales data. Only you have your customer data. Only you should be able to kind of make decisions off of that. And if you’re not collecting information around sales, around customer experience, going through kind of what pain points exist in our products as of today, those are all projects that you can easily run internally, that can get you some very powerful and very unique to you data, which does allow you to make decisions that can build a competitive advantage off of those because your competitors don’t have that information. And of course, if you’re looking for information beyond what sits inside your own walls, that’s when you go out and you kind of do a focus study and say, Hey, we need to run a survey that targets these individuals. We need to get to go interviews. We need to do focus groups. We need to have a competitor product tear down. We need to go through whatever it might end up being, but you can gather a few different kind of sources of information for you to actually be able to go get information that is out there. It’s just hard to get that your competitors won’t have access to, and that’s another thing that you can do to kind of avoid that pitfall of using the same information your competitors are using.

Layton Cox 10:30

Now, one that falls outside the marketers realm is, and this is one of the issues almost all the research efforts that we see every time we go into a large company, is that it’s very siloed. Everyone is doing their own research in their own way, for their own purposes, and marketing is one of those key places where that happens. They’ll be doing a study on pricing, they’ll be doing a study on value propositions. They’ll be doing a study on kind of market positioning. It won’t touch sales. They’ll forget to share stuff with sales and vice versa. Sales is any better. They won’t share it up with the strategy teams. And maybe the CMO knows about it, if you’re lucky, the chief revenue officer might know about it too, but the COO and the CFO probably do not know the core insights of those studies that you’ve been doing in the marketing function. And so trying to take your research efforts beyond the silo of your function is critical.

Layton Cox 10:30

As I mentioned, we do market research on our own industry and our own customers and competitors and things like that all the time. We just got done with one of those surveys recently, one of the key things we found is that internal alignment issues was the largest challenge that respondents said that they were facing when trying to do any kind of strategic planning or any kind of project initiatives moving forward in 2025 and it just shows that no one’s speaking the same language because no one has the same data. And the first thing you can do to start that, just start sharing with everybody else. Say, Hey, we just finished this study. Even it’s just a quick memo. Here are three bullet points, and then here’s the PDF attached. If you’re interested in more, let us know. We’ll do a phone call. But that kind of just opening up the Komodo to other people is super, super valuable.

Christian Klepp 13:19

Yeah, those are incredibly interesting points, and partly shocking too, because you know, when you think about it, it’s 2025, and we’re still dealing with, to your point, silos, yeah, fragmented efforts, right? Or efforts that are like, collectively, like fragmented, because one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.

Layton Cox 13:37

And depending on the industry, if you’re working remotely, it’s even worse nowadays, because you could be just in your own little world, doing your own little thing, and even people inside your function don’t know what’s going on, right? So the old days, if everyone’s on the same floor and we’re all talking at the water cooler of I did this survey, oh, I would love to see the results of that doesn’t exist anymore. So it’s a new way of just ensuring that people have visibility into what’s going on. It’s very, very helpful.

Christian Klepp 14:00

Yeah, I might be dating myself here or, like, back in the day, you know, when you just get up from your cubicle and just scream across the room, hey, do you have that report? Like, right, exactly. But you brought up a couple of things, and I wanted to go back to them and a couple of follow up questions there, if that’s okay with you, the point that you made about the reliance on secondary data and information, which basically drives the point home that primary, primary research going out into the field, conducting those interviews, conducting those focus groups, that that is still Paramount so and you and I know that That said, it’s not always easy to get buy in from the customer for that kind of research, because, well, the investment certainly is one one issue, but the other one is that is the time. So how do you overcome that, that type of pushback, or those objections to saying, Okay, we need to do this primary research.

Layton Cox 14:59

So usually, my advice is to everybody who’s in kind of a role who has to get data to make decisions, is leverage one internal data first. It’s completely free to you. It takes effort, yes, but just an hour a day of kind of trying to figure out where does this data live. And if you document that, then all of a sudden, pretty quickly, you’ll be able to have an AI agent who can do a lot of that for you. And so internal data should be your first place you go, no matter what, if you can find it internally awesome that usually can solve a lot of your problems, you can go from there. Second is the free, publicly available secondary data. If it’s out there, you should at least go look at it, if only just to see what your competitors are saying at the very, very minimum, but also, if you can compliment that with your internal data, maybe you can prove a hypothesis. Maybe internal data said, Hey, directionally speaking, we think that customers were complaining about this one product feature and but then we went out to look at the public review websites, we found that this is a common issue for the entire industry. So it’s not just our product, it’s the entire use case that the industry is trying to solve right now has the same kind of complaint. Well, there you go, so that that can help a marketer figure out exactly what the next step should be. And then after that, I’d say, before you go buying reports, which sometimes can be very expensive, then that’s when you have a conversation about is primary worth it, and then at that point, you will have exhausted at least two options, the low cost, free options, and you can take that up to your boss and say, Look, I’ve tried internal data. I’ve tried just what’s out there publicly for free, and now my hypothesis is this, and I can’t validate or not validate it because of that, so I have to go run this survey, and as long as you can, and a lot of research providers such as ourselves as well, we’re open to having conversations on brainstorming on this. You don’t have to come to vendors with like, Hey, I know exactly what I want to do, and I know exactly how I want to handle it. Things say, hey, like, I’m looking at this stuff. I don’t know exactly what I’m feeling right now. I know these three things are very interesting to me. What do you think like? What would this look like? How could this feel? And then putting together a business case with you is something that we do relatively often as well, to help figure out, what is this actually valuable like? Is this valuable research? Will you be able to make a key decision if we were to get you the right answers to these questions? If the answer is yes, then how valuable is that decision? If the answer is no, that you really shouldn’t pay us and you should, shouldn’t do primary, because it’s an unanswerable question.

Christian Klepp 17:25

No, absolutely, absolutely. So that was the first follow up question. The second follow up question was going back to what you were saying about the internal alignment issues because of the reality of departments being siloed. So just from your experience and your perspective Layton, how do you think CI and MI can help fill that gap and break those silos down?

Layton Cox 17:51

This is where it goes beyond the research. And so what, what we found throughout our kind of 20 years of doing this is the research, the facts by themselves, the insights even generated from the facts by themselves. That’s maybe half of the story at most. What you really want to do is you want to identify what implications does this have for us, and who should know if you can figure out those two pieces, the next thing that we usually suggest to clients is get them in a perfect world, that’s a half day workshop, a full day workshop, if you can really swing it, depending on who the stakeholders are, depending on how big the decision is that you’re looking to make, if you’re doing a full blown product launch, market entry kind of decision, if you’re looking to make some big strategic bets, it’s worth everyone taking a day out of their time to go sit down and actually think hard about this stuff. And so usually what we see is, when we’re facing large decisions by our clients, they’ll actually sit down into a workshop like environment. We’ll go through the insights that we have developed through the MI and CI world, and then we’ll actually say, now, let’s do some war gaming. Let’s do some scenario planning. Let’s actually think, What will our competitors do. If we do this, what should we do if our competitors do that, and then, based off of those, they can start pulling out, ooh, these initiatives would really make sense. And here are some priorities that we should have and go from there. But I would say, get them in a room, if in a perfect world, for a day in person, in a non perfect world, a two hour conference call, can actually solve a lot of problems when structured correctly.

Christian Klepp 19:22

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. It’s almost like you are, you’re leveraging the data to simulate potential scenarios and perhaps even opportunities, right?

Layton Cox 19:31

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 19:32

It’s important to like, highlight realities too. Like, Listen, guys, if we don’t, if we don’t do this, this might happen, right? But also going at it from a positive angle of like, if we do this, this is, this is the potential return, right?

Layton Cox 19:45

We get more of the form of the latter right now, just because macroeconomic conditions, yes, right now, everyone’s saying, Hey, what are the threats? What are the risks that I’m facing? But rewind a few years, and I’m sure fast forward a few years, you’re going to be saying, Okay, what opportunities are out there that we can go capture, where can we find growth? What can we look like? And the great part about it is that a lot of the techniques that you use in MI and CI can answer both those questions with a lot of the same kind of conversation techniques and a lot of the same ways of getting in front of the right people, whether those are competitors, whether those are customers, whatever that might look like.

Christian Klepp 20:19

Absolutely, absolutely. So you brought up some of these points already, but like, just from your perspective, if you can provide some examples of how CI and MI can help with the following, and I’m happy to repeat them this. So I’ve got three points here, right? So the first one is uncovering new buyer pain points or shifting priorities. The second one is differentiating B2B messaging, which ultimately impacts positioning. And the third one is refining unique selling propositions in B2B.

Layton Cox 20:50

I think the best way to kind of talk about all three of those pieces is to kind of go through some techniques to just gathering the information. And so before I dive into that though, I’ll say we work through what we kind of call the four eye system. And so we start with, kind of, what’s just the raw facts, how does that feel? What does that look like? What intelligence is out there? And so first of all, just gathering that and turning that into intelligence is kind of one of the first steps there. And then, okay, we have some information. Now, what’s the insights from this information, and this kind of goes throughout all of the world of data analytics has gone through the same exact process of taking just raw data and pulling it into insights to say, Okay, here’s the story from the data that we’re seeing, and then going from there into that implication of, okay. Now what does this mean for our specific circumstances today?

Layton Cox 21:34

Now going the second half of that is where we kind of do the strategic brainstorming. That’s the workshopping. That’s where we actually sit down with leaders and stakeholders and have conversations. The first half of that is just getting information, and sometimes that’s through the secondary research we talked about earlier. It’s the internal data that you might already have, or primary research methods. Now, given we’re talking to B2B marketers here, there’s a few different ways that we go about gathering primary information. The most common is probably surveys, surveying customers, surveying sales partners, sales channel partners, surveying competitors, even surveying peers. If you’re looking for benchmark information or pieces like that, surveying market experts, but really, anyone in the world that you might think might have some information that you’re looking for. Building out a survey and then putting that in front of them is probably one of the easiest ways to collect data, no matter what.

Layton Cox 22:32

Second would be, interviews and focus groups, you can do this with that same stakeholder list. If you’re looking to do like voice of the customer. You can talk to a whole bunch of customers looking to the voice of the market. You can the market. You can talk to customers, sales, partners and competitors. If you’re looking for very specific competitor information, you can talk to just a few people who have to be inside that function at a competitor too, and you can find out really fast what they’re doing on their side of the table.

Layton Cox 22:58

those are all other that’s probably our second most common way is actually just one on one interviews, or kind of one on five focus groups kind of thing, and then last and these are not as common, but they are very powerful when it makes sense to do so is B2B and mystery shopping, partnering with real companies that are going through very similar kind of buying cycles as your prospects would be, and then actually walking them through a competitor buying experience, walking them through a buying experience for our clients, just so they can see, what does it actually feel like when a real customer goes through this? What are we doing well? What are we doing poorly, benchmarking that against competitors and going through those kind of pieces. If you do it in this mostly comes up in software and pieces like that, where it’s a little bit harder to have a really good understanding of pricing, packaging, positioning, discounting, things like that, but going through their sales cycle with a real prospect, getting real pricing, getting real discounts, understanding what that might look like, is something that we can do relatively often. That’s going to be to be mystery shopping experience.

Layton Cox 24:05

And then last but not least. And I know I know I already said last, but this one’s the final one. I promise. It’s the actually doing demos, getting your hands on competitive products, and actually doing kind of, what we call a product tear down, where we will go out and procure competitor products, their services, whatever it might be, and we’ll tell you how what’s good, what’s bad, kind of give you an unbiased opinion and say, here are some of the features that they offer. Here’s how they actually look when it’s working. Here’s what doesn’t work with them. And that can provide you a lot of kind of good data for you to go and either on the threat side or on the opportunity side, like we talked about earlier.

Christian Klepp 24:35

Fantastic, fantastic. Thanks for sharing that. Those are pretty comprehensive list you probably condensed 20 years of experience into about like three or four minutes.

Layton Cox 24:46

Just about there’s a lot of details that go into all four of those different kind of activities. But yeah, high level, I’m sure give AI a little while, and they’ll be able to handle a lot of that for you. But it’s definitely one of those things that you can if you get creative. And if you know what information you’re looking to gather, there are various ways to go get it when it’s all said and done.

Christian Klepp 25:05

Absolutely, absolutely. I wanted to go back to what you said at the tail end of that, Layton, you were talking about mystery shopping for B2B. So, you know, in a traditional sense, when people hear mystery shopping, their mind probably goes to a place that’s, like, Oh, so you’re gonna send somebody in here to spy on me. And that might be, that might be a bit harsh, but, like, but how do you get buy in for that, from customers that that have that probably negative perception, if you will, of mystery shopping, because it’s not, it’s, it actually does have its strategic value.

Layton Cox 25:41

Yeah. And so, I mean, mystery shopping is most commonly used for consumer services, consumer goods. That’s just the way that it ends up being. It’s easy for me to go mystery shop my local supermarket and just say, hey, I want to walk into here and I want to see one, does someone greet me? Two, what’s the price of tuna? Is that comparable to what the grocery store is down the road, those kind of things a lot easier on the consumer side, on the B2B side, obviously not as easy, because there’s no just big supermarket that anyone can walk into. You have to be somewhat qualified to have just the first conversation your sales reasoning has to make sense for that conversation to continue. And so what we end up doing, and this is the slowest part of this entire process, is usually finding a real world buyer of whoever you’re trying to, mystery shops, customer, product or service or offering, whatever that ends up being. And so easy I’ll use to do low here as an example. So do low is one of many kind of market research, competitive intelligence strategy firms, if we wanted to go mystery shop a competitor, I could go find a another kind of fortune 500 company and say, Hey, I need to find someone on the insights team who’s willing, or as a friend of the firm, or as a contact I know personally, or whomever it might be, and say, Hey, I need you to kind of go have a few conversations with their sales team, put in a form and say, hey, I’m interested in your services. See where it takes us. And that’s kind of how we start a lot of these conversations, is that we’ll actually go find friends of the firm. We’ll have past clients depending on the fit, or we’ll go custom source, actual kind of we’ll go out as our team members and our researchers will go out into the world with billions of kind of companies, and we’ll say, Hey, we’re looking for a company who does this, this and this, who is interested in acquiring these kind of services.

Layton Cox 27:29

And so sometimes our mystery buyers watch it go through and purchase things, just like I would if I was a consumer and I was going to my local grocery store, I might buy that can of tuna. Who knows? Same thing happens here? Well, we’ll work off of our kind of mystery B2B shop or firm. As they go through that sales journey, they might end up saying, Yes, I totally want this risk management software, whatever it might end up being that we’re mystery shopping that day. Or it could be like I sat through the sales pitch. I understand the pricing. It’s just out of our budget, whatever it might be, but that’s kind of where that process comes and so it becomes much more of a we piggyback off of these sales conversations that were going to happen anyway, and we just kind of take notes in the background.

Christian Klepp 28:08

Yeah, yes, it’s certainly, it certainly sounds like it’s, it’s more nuanced, and it’s also a bit more of a logistics exercise, right? Because it’s because you’re talking as you say. You’re talking about more like, I guess, real world buyers, who tend to be also specialized in a particular segment, certainly like a different set of circumstances, as compared to, like the mystery shopping you do for consumer rent.

Layton Cox 28:33

Exactly, exactly. It takes us a long time to find the people that would be actually make sense for to go through the sales job, the journey, and it gets harder. I mean, we’ll have and sometimes, and that’s why we have so many different ways to get this primary intelligence doesn’t always make sense. So for example, if you are trying to sell medical equipment to massive hospital systems, the massive hospital systems already know that medical equipment reps, they already know what that looks like, and the medical reps already know probably all the conversation people that they need to have, because these are very, very long sales cycles, like buying a CAT scan machine takes years. It’s not just a pick up the phone and call on your clothes in 12 or 12 hours to four weeks kind of thing. And so depending on the sales cycle of the product or service or offering or whatever it might be. There are certain ones where B2B, mystery shopping just makes no sense whatsoever. And then there’s certain ones where it really does. And so depending on what you’re trying to solve, there’s other ways to get information, if we have to, but when it makes sense, it’s one of the best ways to do it, because it’s as real of an experience you can possibly get an insight into your competitors sales process, into how they position themselves, into their sales reps skill set, and into their pricing, of course.

Christian Klepp 29:48

And quite frankly, Layton, like, which marketing team wouldn’t want that, like, which marketing team wouldn’t want to have that insight into what their competitors are doing, so that they could have that they could be one step ahead, right?

Layton Cox 29:59

Exactly, and that’s and there’s a lot of ethical rules and legal rules about what can and cannot be shared throughout those journeys. But I would say the vast majority of the time, price data is usually captured relatively freely and easily, positioning data of how they go about positioning themselves against competitors, including who could be our end client when it’s all said and done, or just inside the market in general. And of course, any kind of differentiators that they’re trying to really emphasize during that sales process, of where do they plant the flag, and what do they keep coming back to over and over and over again as we’re asking them these questions. And of course, those can be ways that you understand as a marketer, where you can attack them if you think they’re really not as strong as they say they are, or where you should steer away, because maybe they do beat you in that spice but, or they do beat you in that space, but you can beat them somewhere else along the way. And so all of it really helps marketers get a much better understanding of what does that environment look like, and then how do you win.

Christian Klepp 30:56

Exactly? Or you can spice up the space to use your word, right?

Layton Cox 31:01

Exactly, exactly.

Christian Klepp 31:02

All right, my friend, we come to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips and latent man, I’m looking at the time now, and it’s been 30 minutes, and you’ve given us a ton, you’ve given us a ton of insights and ton of tips and recommendations. But just imagine that there’s a B2B marketer out there, or, I hope, a marketing team that’s listening to this conversation and there were based on the advice that you’ve given three to five action items, or three to five things that you want them to take action on right now, after they listen to this interview, what will those things be?

Layton Cox 31:38

I’ll do four. And so I’ll split the difference there. One is build a framework. Build something that allows you to store all this information in a common language that, at the minimum, your team understands, but hopefully the entire organization can kind of get behind. You’ll be blown away by how many times we come into situations where any past work is just lost into the ether because no one understands where it’s saved or how to name it, or where it could live. Or is this competitor intel? Is this market intel? Is this customer intel? But some kind of tagging system of some way, shape or form, fantastic. That’s number one, figure out how to store information.

Layton Cox 32:16

Two, leverage internal data, as mentioned earlier, that’s gold. Your competition doesn’t have that they can’t make decisions based on that data. You can. So leverage that. Go out, collect it, organize it, make it useful.

Layton Cox 32:32

Three then go try to find your competitors internal data. That’s the conduct primary research in some way, shape or form, so that you can go find out the stuff that only your competitors know as of right now. Market research, competitive intelligence, all that kind of falls inside that space. And of course, talking to customers helps a lot, too, customers and prospects.

Layton Cox 32:53

Then the fourth one is, once you actually have all that stuff, share it with other people. Share it with sales. Share it with product. Share it with strategy, move it up the chain, move it down the chain. And of course, as you do that, and this is something that we get a ton of value out of in all of our projects, is we start every project with stakeholder interviews, where we talk to various different departments inside of our clients, just to figure out, hey, what do you know that we should know? And then what are you looking to learn that we can go get for you? And if you have that same attitude whenever you share this information, to say, hey, here’s what we know. Do you know? Anything else can you add to our data? And then all of a sudden, if you end up being kind of source for that one, your common framework ends up being extremely helpful across the entire organization, and your internal data set just gets so much more powerful. And so share what you know, because you never know what anybody else might know, and that can be just exponentially helpful.

Christian Klepp 33:44

Information is power, as they say, right?

Layton Cox 33:47

It is, but only if you can all speak the same language and understand it the same way. If everyone’s running their own ship and they’re running all different directions, ends up being kind of a spider web of nausea, yeah?

Christian Klepp 33:59

Hot Mess, essentially.

Layton Cox 34:01

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 34:02

But no, no, fantastic, fantastic. Let me just quickly recap your tips here. So one was build a framework. The second one was leverage internal data. The third one was find competitors internal data, and the fourth one, which I couldn’t agree with more. Share with internal teams, get everybody on the same page, because the it’s so important to get alignment right?

Layton Cox 34:23

Exactly, exactly. If you just do those four things, you’ll be head and shoulders above most of the marketing organizations that we come up against, and you will have a legitimate competitive advantage when you’re making decisions.

Christian Klepp 34:36

Right? Fantastic. Okay, we get to the part with the I call it the love it or hate it question, but you know what we’re talking about, CI and MI. We got to talk about metrics too, right? And I appreciate Layton that you can go down a very deep rabbit hole with that question. But like just top level, what are some of these metrics that you from a top level perspective, that marketing teams should be paying attention to?

Layton Cox 35:01

So, I know everyone loves metrics like all the time, especially like anything quantitative, I would say, unfortunately, CI and MI is hard to metricize. If that’s a word, there are certain metrics that I think everyone should know no matter what. What’s the size of your market? How is that segmented? What competitors own what percent of that market and of those segments, and that can be your core competitors, that can be your emerging competitors. If you can do it by competing products, that’s even better. But that, by itself, can give you a lot of information. But beyond that, I think everything else is qualitative. When it comes down to making these large strategic decisions, you decisions, the quantitative stuff is extremely valuable. I have an accounting undergrad degree and so like, that’s all I knew for a very long period of time, was the math, and it’s extremely, extremely helpful.

Layton Cox 35:02

But as I’ve kind of gone through this process more and more with clients and pieces like that, the qualitative parts of what does it feel like? Like, what’s the sales journey of our competitors feel like? Have we actually touched our competitors products like, and you’d be shocked, even in non B2B, but in like B2C, how many people have never tried their competitors products? If you’re working for Toyota, you probably don’t drive a Ford. Maybe you should just to see what it’s like, those kind of things. And this goes on the B2B side too. You can do the exact same experience and actually physically figure out, what does it feel like to play with it? What’s it feel like when they give you the offering? What’s it feel like to buy it? And then, of course, how do they differentiate themselves from you? All that’s qualitative, and all that’s extremely valuable too. And it really gives you the difference between just looking at a number and saying that number looks pretty good to actually saying, Oh, no, like, I can make a decision, because that number is good, and because I’ve had this experience, I now know exactly what we should go do to fix this.

Christian Klepp 36:50

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely, no. I mean, I’m actually not that surprised. I’m actually more surprised by the marketing teams that don’t actually know their product very well, because they haven’t actually, like, tried it out, right?

Layton Cox 37:04

Not uncommon, I will say. So don’t give them too hard of a time, because it’s we, it’s relatively rare, especially in the B2B world, where we come up and say, Okay, what do you know about your competitors products? And they’ll say nothing like we know its name and we know the website it lives on, and that’s about it. And so we’re, we’re saying, hopefully, we’re hopefully trying to influence this as well. You should try your best get your hands on competitors products as much as possible.

Christian Klepp 37:27

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It’s absolutely right. Okay, sir. This is the part we’re going to ask you to, like, get up on your soap box, because I’m going to ask you about your area of expertise and what status quo there is in that area of expertise that you keep hearing that you passionately disagree with and why?

Layton Cox 37:50

So area of expertise, I would say what we most likely do for most of our clients is help them make decisions using data in some way, shape or form. And data, of course, is a very broad term, what that usually means and what we usually come across, and what we’re trying to fix for most of our clients is that the data they are using is that free, publicly available secondary research, they are making large bets, millions of dollars based off of Gartner report from 2022 and while I’m sure that was extremely valuable in 2022 it’s just not today. The world changes so fast. You really have to be constantly talking to your competitors. You have to be constantly talking to customers. You have to be constantly evaluating your market that you’re in and leveraging old data, publicly available data for these large decisions that you’re saying this will be a differentiator for us. This product is going to revolutionize our industry. If you’re leveraging the same data set that your competitors have access to, it’s not going to do any of that you really if you really want to build something special, you have to go get special data. The only way to get special data is to do kind of special efforts, and that’s around primary research.

Christian Klepp 39:04

Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. I’m over.

Layton Cox 39:08

It takes time and effort, but that’s the only way to do it, and that’s why you see so many products that really aren’t differentiated, is their teams didn’t actually go out there and didn’t actually try to find special information. They just kind of said, Hey, one of the executives thought this was a good idea. We read a Gartner report who said this was going to be a hot topic, and so we went and built this product, and now we have no traction. It’s like, yeah, like, because you didn’t actually talk to anybody on the competitive side who was doing the exact same thing, because their executive went to the same executive brain storm that yours did, and they read the same Gartner report that you did or you didn’t talk to any customers. They don’t really want this. They want this little feature over here. And so being able to actually go out and talk to people, whether it’s competitors or customers, but in a perfect world, talk to both, that is just so much more valuable.

Christian Klepp 39:58

You know, like the way that you’ve laid it out so beautifully. It sounds so simple, but it’s, it’s surprising how many people don’t do it, right?

Layton Cox 40:08

And that’s, this, is other soapbox rants, is a lot of people do it once, and they’re like, Oh, perfect. We have the data. We’re done one of them, and it’s a shot. It’s, yeah, we took a snapshot of what the world looks like today as of this report getting handed over to you, it’s easier actually, to do it on a reoccurring basis, because your research team, whether it’s us or internal, builds relationships with customers that way. And we can say, Hey, I know we talked about this last fall. How’s things changed? I know we ran out an update. What do you think of this update? And those kind of conversations, those kind of relationships, are just something you can’t build on a one off study, whether you’re doing it internally or externally. And that even goes on competitor side. If you’re using someone to talk to competitors for you, we can build relationships with competitor resources on a ongoing basis. And we can say, hey, we just saw this in your latest earnings requirement. Can you give us some more information about what this kind of new initiative means? And they’ll say, Oh, yeah. Like, this is about this, this and this, but if we only have one conversation with them, one time out of their entire life cycle of being at that company, then all of a sudden we only know that one thing that they knew that day, and sometimes it’s the next day they get a memo that changed everything that they told us. And so being able to do a ongoing kind of monitoring program is really powerful, and it’s honestly easier once you get it up and running.

Christian Klepp 41:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. It is something like, you know, to your point, it’s something that has to be done on a regular basis, or at least frequently, right? Because what was valuable or relevant two years ago probably is obsolete now.

Layton Cox 41:40

Especially the way everything’s moving. Everything is so fast nowadays between economic circumstances, regular regulatory environments, technology world, yeah, it’s just blazing.

Christian Klepp 41:51

Absolutely, absolutely okay. Two more questions before I let you go. The bonus question. So if you were to go, well, not necessarily back in time, but if you were to go back and learn a new skill, what would that be? And why?

Layton Cox 42:08

That’s a good question. This is going back to like a top of mind one off study here? So when we filmed this, I think just few days ago, the news broke that all the open AI employees got a $1.5 million bonus. And so I don’t know what skill requires me to go work for the open AI organization as of August 2025 but whatever skill that is, I wish I would have gone and done that one, because I think that bonus would have been very nice to have, and so very selfishly focused. But I think looking back at it, that’s a skill set that would have been helpful. What that skill is. I don’t know if I need to go conduct some more research to figure out what that actually would be. But 10 years ago, instead of studying finance and accounting and then marketing, I probably would have studied whatever the hell I needed to to do that one.

Christian Klepp 42:53

Ask ChatGPT.

Layton Cox 42:57

I probably should do exactly, yeah, reverse engineer my way back into that.

Christian Klepp 43:01

Yeah, yeah. No. Fantastic. Fantastic. Layton, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise. This has been a great conversation, so please quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you, especially if they’re looking to up their CI and MI game.

Layton Cox 43:17

Yeah, of course. So my name is Layton Cox. I am the Senior Director of Business Services Group at Sedulo Group. Sedulo group is a competitive intelligence, market research and strategy consultancy firm. We’ve been around for about 20 years now. I think 2005, 2004 is our first year of operations. We’ve been doing this for companies in every industry across the globe for that kind of two decades of experience. As you’ve heard through our conversation so far, we really specialize in finding that hard to get information that allows you to make big decisions. So if you’re looking to enter markets, looking to launch new products, looking to kind of gain market share in a way you have not historically, or you’re looking to figure out what competitors are doing that might be all those things as well, and you’re trying to figure out what you can do to protect your market share from new product entry, from new competitors entering your own market. All that kind of falls inside of our purview, and we love what we do. A lot of it’s talking to people, which is kind of the hard thing to do, but it’s also what kind of empowers us, and then getting insights out of those conversations, and then kind of making sure that the strategy and the big decisions based off those insights actually are data backed.

Layton Cox 44:26

And then, of course, helping our clients set up systems that allow them to do the exact same thing over and over and over again. So it’s not a flash in the pan report. It’s not just a PowerPoint deck that sits there and collects dust. It’s a legitimate operating program that you can run inside your marketing organization, inside insights, inside strategy, inside product, or all the above, hopefully, as we mentioned, all your silos are broken down, and everyone’s sharing that same information. And that’s what we’re hoping to build for all of our clients when it’s all said and done, if you want to learn more about myself or Sedulo Group. Sedulo Group is https://sedulogroup.com/ and I’m on LinkedIn, Layton Cox.

Christian Klepp 45:05

Fantastic, fantastic. And we’ll be sure to drop all those links in the show notes so people can reach out to you.

Layton Cox 45:09

Sounds like a plan.

Christian Klepp 45:11

Layton, once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Layton Cox 45:16

Will do Thanks, Christian.

Christian Klepp 45:18

All right. Thanks. Bye for now.

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