Market Intelligence
Turning a hunch into a forecast.
Competitor and trend tracking paired with financial modelling that turned a hunch into a revenue forecast: the analysis that made a bet an informed decision.
What changed
Intelligence was only worth gathering when it changed a decision. Competitor and trend tracking fed one thing: a model that tested what a move was worth before anyone committed. The discipline was discarding signals that were interesting but decision-irrelevant, which was most of them.
The diagnostic
Before adding a signal, name the decision it could change and the threshold that would change it. If neither can be stated, it is a subscription, not intelligence. Most tracking survives because cancelling it feels like losing information, which is the same reason it was never read.
The method
Four moves, in order.
Watching the few real signals
Competitors, pricing, demand shifts: the handful that actually moved a decision.
Modelling the money
Turning the signal into a revenue and cost picture someone could argue with.
Stress-testing the bet
What had to be true for it to work, and what would break it.
Making the call
Translating it into a recommendation, with the uncertainty left in.
The question that remained
Discarding decision-irrelevant signal turned into a harder discipline: checking whether the number everyone repeats was ever measured at all. Several had not been.
Further reading
- The incrementality illusion Why attribution dashboards can report phantom returns while holdout tests find little or no lift, and how to size causal measurement.
- Evidence over anecdote: what a number has to survive. What a doctorate in cross-border growth teaches about proof, and how to hold the numbers in a commercial call to the same bar.
- A vendor page supplied one tested source path for the 5x retention rule In three counted runs, an assistant named Bain and Frederick Reichheld. A search of the cited works found neither reporting the figure.
- What peer review deleted, the web kept. Four assistants returned a figure the published paper does not contain; most cited material that did contain it when asked for the figure and its source.
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