How do you set up competitive intelligence as a mission?
Competitive intelligence with a Research Analyst FTE is set up as a recurring mission with three inputs: the competitor list, the approved sources, and the cadence. Sources are typically competitor websites and public pages, pricing pages, press and news, job postings, public filings, and any research-firm reports you hold.
The FTE reads those sources each cycle for the questions you set, such as pricing changes, product announcements, hiring signals, and positioning shifts, and produces the brief. You approve the source list, and it does not go beyond it.
What structure does the brief use?
The brief uses the same structure every cycle: what changed since last time, per-competitor snapshot, cross-competitor trends, implications for you labelled as interpretation, and open questions. Because the structure is fixed, a reader can compare this week with last week directly.
The changes section comes first, because that is what a busy reader needs. A brief that buries the one thing that moved under a full re-description of each competitor wastes the reader's attention.
Why does citation matter here?
Citation matters in competitive intelligence because claims about competitors travel fast inside a company and are hard to walk back. A claim that a competitor raised prices should point to the pricing page and the date it was captured; a claim that they are entering a market should point to the job posting or announcement it rests on.
The Research Analyst FTE cites every claim and marks inference as inference. A sentence like this hiring pattern suggests a push into enterprise is labelled as an inference from cited postings, not presented as a fact.
- Pricing claims: the page and capture date
- Product claims: the announcement or documentation
- Strategy inferences: labelled, with the evidence they rest on
- Absence of evidence: stated, not converted into a claim
What does it refuse to do?
It refuses to speculate beyond the sources. Competitive intelligence tempts everyone toward guessing what a rival is planning; the FTE reports what the approved sources say and labels any inference, and it does not fill gaps with plausible-sounding narrative.
It also stays within the sources you approved. It does not attempt to access anything non-public, and the remit can restrict it to a specific list of domains and documents.
How should the team use the brief?
Use the brief as the shared fact base for competitive discussion. When someone in sales says a competitor is doing something, the brief either has it cited or it becomes an open question for the next cycle, which is a better outcome than a rumour becoming a belief.
Review the source list quarterly. Competitors change where they publish, and a source list that is never updated slowly loses coverage. The FTE can propose additions when it notices a competitor referenced in an approved source that is not yet on the list.
What does the weekly brief look like in the workspace?
The weekly competitor brief appears as a completed mission run in the Missions tab and as a document in the Library, in the same structure every week. Its first section lists what changed since last week: a pricing page captured on a stated date that differs from the previous capture, a job posting that suggests a new function, an announcement, each with the source cited and any inference labelled. Per-competitor snapshots follow, then cross-competitor trends, then implications marked as interpretation, then open questions.
The morning brief on the day it runs points the manager to the changes section and to any detection the FTE thinks needs a decision, such as a competitor's price move that touches your own pricing assumptions. The source list is visible in Setup and can be edited; the FTE proposes additions when an approved source mentions a competitor not yet on the list, and the proposal waits for approval. Each brief consumes tokens in proportion to the sources read, shown against the FTE's budget, and the quarter's briefs together form a dated, cited history of the competitive landscape that a sales team can rely on.