Competitive Intelligence Report Template

Write down the decision the report serves before you collect anything: a price change, a positioning question, a kind of deal you keep losing, or a question from the board. The decision picks the fields. A pricing question needs list prices, packaging and named customers. A board question about the market needs ownership, revenue and leadership.

Then pick the players: usually four to six, the ones that actually appear in your deals rather than everyone in the category. Each player adds facts to recheck, and a recheck list nobody works through is how these reports go stale.

Build a comparison matrix with one cell for each field and player. A US government tradecraft primer for intelligence analysts suggests keeping information stored by source type and date¹, with notes on each source's strengths and weaknesses. In your matrix, each cell holds four things:

• The claim: "$39 per user a month, with self-serve checkout"
• Where you read it: "their pricing page"
• The source type: primary if the company published it, secondary if a reviewer, reporter or analyst did
• The date you read it, which may not be the date it was published

A March press release read in November is a November observation of a March event, so note both dates. If you can't source a fact, leave the cell empty and note how you'd close the gap, such as a filing lookup or debriefs from deals you won. A marked gap is safer than a plausible guess, since nobody can later tell which numbers were guessed.

Facts decay at different speeds. A price can change overnight; a founding year never will. Give each field a recheck interval, and set each fact's recheck date as the date you read it plus that interval. Staleness then becomes arithmetic, not a feeling.

For a rival that's a US public company, SEC deadlines tell you when to look. Its annual report on Form 10-K is due 60 to 90 days after its fiscal year ends³, depending on its size, so recheck revenue just after that. Major events, including a new CEO or CFO, go on a Form 8-K, generally within four business days⁴.

A fact is what a named source said on a date. A conclusion is what you inferred from facts, such as "we beat them on price below 40 seats." Keep conclusions in their own list. Beside each one, write the facts it rests on, when you last tested it, and everywhere it has been used.

The US intelligence community's analytic standards (ICD 203) say products should clearly distinguish underlying information from assumptions and judgments⁵. Hold to that line, because beliefs are sticky. Richards Heuer, a CIA veteran, wrote that impressions tend to persist even after the evidence that created them is fully discredited⁶. A conclusion that doesn't name its evidence outlives it.

The same primer warns that without periodic checks, analytic judgments can become anchored to weak information¹, and caveats attached to them can be forgotten. So work the recheck list on a schedule:

1. 1

   List what has expired

   Sort facts past their recheck date by days overdue. Start with any that hold up a conclusion already in use.

2. 2

   Go back to the source

   Read the same page or filing again. If nothing changed, reset the date and note that it held.

3. 3

   Keep the old value

   If it changed, keep the old value beside the new one. A switch from per-seat pricing to a platform fee says more than either price.

4. 4

   Retest what rests on it

   Pull up every conclusion that names a changed fact. Each one still stands, narrows or breaks.

5. 5

   Withdraw it everywhere

   Correct a broken conclusion everywhere it was used, or the battlecard keeps repeating it.

Between rechecks, log anything new in a signal list before it touches the matrix, then promote it, park it with a note on what would confirm it, or discard it. A partner quoting a rival's price is a parked signal, not a price.

Watch for facts that move together, too. A new headline aimed at bigger buyers, a burst of enterprise sales hiring and a new head of sales all point upmarket, though no single fact says so.

Open each edition with what changed since the last one. ICD 203 says products should state how their major judgments are consistent with earlier analysis or a change from it⁵. Put withdrawn conclusions first, with every place each one was used. A retraction in an appendix rarely reaches the people repeating the claim.

Next come new conclusions and the state of the evidence, in counts with denominators: "19 of 48 facts were past their recheck date," not "some data is old." Then add a short profile of each player and the open gaps. If you include a competitive positioning map, compute its axes from facts in the matrix, so you can redraw it when they change.

Close with a watch list: the few changes worth catching before the next recheck. Give each one a threshold that can fire, such as "any per-shipment price on their pricing page," and name the conclusion it would move.

For a deeper look at one rival, run a competitor analysis from public sources. To help sellers facing one player, turn its column into a sales battlecard. The template on this page sets up the matrix, registers and report, and River can sort your existing material into them.