What is a BtoB watch?

Monitoring means keeping informed about a defined subject and keeping an eye on it. It is a tool used in particular in economic intelligence.

There are two watch techniques:

The "pull" watch, which consists of going out and looking for information. This is the historical technique, where you can miss a lot of information.
Push monitoring consists in automating monitoring via curation tools and thus saving time.

Watches "yes", but which ones?

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the main families of information monitoring that can help you to feed your reflections and your approaches:

Business intelligence: detection of new partners
Marketing intelligence: detection of new partners, forums, publications, product recalls, patent filings, on and offline advertising expenses ....
Financial watch: score, risk of default, IPO...
Competitive intelligence: product recalls, new product releases, customer and employee feedback...
Technology watch: detection of new partners, patent filings, product launches, product recalls.
Legal watch: lawsuits, mergers, company creation.
Economic watch: stock market listing, situation of a company in a macro environment, financial results...
Sector watch: detection of new partners, activity of a company in its sector, mergers and acquisitions...
Human resources watch: executive movements, recruitments, entries and exits...

As you can see, the key is to know what information you want and how you want to be informed.

How to choose a monitoring solution?

For several years now, the BtoB information market has seen an increase in the number of monitoring tools, accessible to all, such as Google Alerts, newsletters, LinkedIn, Twitter... However, there are also more relevant tools embedded in your daily tools, either through specialized applications or connectors, or more simply through files.

How to get organized in your daily life?

3 main principles to respect:

Set time slots for monitoring
Select relevant information sources
Balance your push-pull watches

By being well informed about your market, your competitors, your prospects, your targets, the trends of your market, you will be more efficient to boost your commercial opportunities while addressing the right interlocutors with the right messages related to the service or the good in adequacy with their expectations.

Monitoring also contributes to developing collaboration within sales teams by better sharing business opportunities identified by monitoring. In addition to the day-to-day management of customers and prospects, a sales force fed with relevant information can contribute to the social selling process by highlighting their expertise on social networks.