Knowing a competitor’s strategies, in advance, can be the difference between success and failure, and yet most business owners, marketers, and sales teams are stretched too thin just “doing their job” to spend much time really analyzing the competition.

In this presentation Cascade Insights, a competitive intelligence firm, will walk you through 20 web-based tools, that anyone can use, to quickly get the kind of information on your competitors that you won’t find through a simple Google search.

CEO, VPs of Marketing and Sales, Product Marketing Managers, Product Planning Managers

You’ll learn fast and free ways to keep an eye on the competition that go way beyond Google.

This presentation will walk through 20 free web tools that will let you:

• Determine if the competition has been hiring your people
• Monitor their site for changes, and spot new products, customer wins, etc.
• Monitor for all news related to the competitor
• Get information about a private company’s revenue, profitability, and employee count
• See what conferences they’re participating in through speaking or expo space
• See if their job postings are exposing their future moves
• See how their messaging, positioning, and products have changed over time
• Get a sense for the morale and culture at a competitor
• See their actual slide presentations on their products and positioning

If you’d benefit from knowing more about your competitors strategic and tactical moves, and don’t want to spend a lot of money to find out.

Participants will receive a copy of the presentation materials in electronic format.

Review your own organization’s comptitive intelligence activities.

1. Do we know what our competition is up to?
2. Does our competition know what we're up to?
3. What could we be doing better?

Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell have decades of experience in the development of hardware and software technologies. They began their careers writing code, then progressed to delivering training and authoring books and articles on best practices in the technology industry.

Today they use their hands-on knowledge of technical details and their rich understanding of the tech field, from hardware to software, to deliver deep-dive competitive intelligence and qualitative market research for their clients.

They advise established industry software leaders in the Fortune 500, as well as start-up or niche players.

Sean Campbell, Principal, Cascade Insights (left)

Sean has built two different businesses in the technology marketing arena. He founded 3 Leaf Solutions, a technical consultancy working for some of the largest companies in the software and hardware field, and grew it from $0 to 2.5M in three years.

After 3 Leaf, he went on to found Cascade Insights which combines deep technical and software industry expertise with on-the-ground diligence. Cascade services include competitive B2B market research (through in depth interviews, focus groups, and custom research studies), competitive product analysis, in-depth and ongoing custom reports and analysis on technology and market trends, sales intelligence projects, and more.

He's also been the lead author of three different technical books (two on programming and one on virtualization), is currently the Chair of the Oregon Chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, and is also an active participant in the Qualitative Research Consultants Association.

Scott Swigart, Co-owner, Cascade Insights (right)

Scott has a wide array of experience in the technical world as well. He was an owner at 3 Leaf Solutions (along with Sean), an advisor to GoLife Mobile (in the wireless space), an interviewer for How Software Is Built (a blog covering people in open source and closed source), co-authored two different technical books, and more.

He is currently a co-owner of Cascade Insights.