How to write a competitive intelligence report that actually gets read

The competitive intelligence report is one of the most reliably ignored documents in business, and the reason is that it is almost always written in the wrong order.

The wrong order

Here is how most people write it, and it makes complete sense from the inside.

Background and context. Methodology, briefly. Competitor one profile. Competitor two profile. Competitor three profile. Analysis. Implications. And then, at the very bottom, on page eleven, the recommendation.

That is the order you discovered things in. It is not the order anyone wants to read them in.

The person you are sending this to has four minutes and a full calendar. They open it, see a wall, skim the headings, and close it. Not because they are lazy. Because you buried the only part that matters under ten pages of work you are, understandably, proud of.

The right order

Decision first.

What changed, and what should we do about it. Two sentences. That is the top of the document.

Then the evidence, briefly, for the person who wants to check your reasoning.

Then everything else, if it must exist at all, underneath, where the two people who genuinely want detail can find it.

This feels wrong to write. It feels like you are giving away the ending and skipping the work. That is exactly the point. The reader does not want your journey. They want the destination and a way to verify you got there honestly.

One screen

Hard constraint. If it does not fit on one screen, it is not finished.

The long report is not evidence of thoroughness. It is usually evidence that you have not yet decided what matters, and are therefore including everything so that nobody can accuse you of missing anything.

That is not rigour. It is defensive writing, and the reader can smell it.

Cutting is where the thinking happens. When you force yourself to one screen, you have to decide what the actual story is, and deciding that is the entire job. Everything you cut was something you were including because you did not want to make a call.

Kill the sections that never change anything

Go through your last report and ask, section by section: has this section ever changed a decision anyone made?

The competitor overview that repeats the same background every month. Has it ever changed anything? No. It is there because the template has that section.

The funding news roundup. Has anyone ever done anything differently because of it? No.

Cut them. Every dead section teaches your reader that this document is mostly padding, which trains them to skim, which means they will also skim the one section that mattered.

You are not being penalised for the sections you cut. You are being penalised for the ones you kept.

The honest test

A month after you send a report, ask what changed because of it.

If the answer is nothing, every month, then the report is not intelligence. It is an alibi, produced so that when something goes wrong somebody can say we were tracking that.

That is an expensive way to be blameless and a bad way to be useful.