The Infrastructure Gap: How Competitive and Market Intelligence Platforms Change Team Performance 

“How many employees at your company?”
 

“Thirty thousand.”
 

“And how many people on your competitive intelligence team?”
 

“Three.” 

Recently at CiMi.con Berlin—Europe’s largest gathering of competitive and market intelligence professionals—we had this exchange dozens of times. Three analysts monitoring competitor moves for 30,000 employees. Five people tracking six industries. Two specialists covering EMEA. 

But then we’d talk to another team: 

“Do you have the resources you need?”
 

“Actually, yes. Leadership sees intelligence as their strategic partner; they make sure we have what we need.”
 

Same conference. Same “unprecedented market complexity.” Worlds apart. 

Valona’s 2026 Global Intelligence Report, based on 196 CMI professionals across 29 countries, confirms the anecdotal with hard data: most intelligence teams are stuck at intermediate maturity. They’ve moved past basic competitor tracking, but they’re too busy collecting and organizing data to shape important decisions. 

Meanwhile, a smaller group—what we call World Class teams—operate in a world where intelligence shapes strategy, budgets reflect their value, and analysts have time to analyze. 

So what’s fundamentally different about how these two groups operate? 

The gap isn’t talent. It’s not effort. It’s impact. World Class teams shape decisions before they’re made. Everyone else documents what already happened. The difference? Infrastructure that enables influence instead of just information. 

So we did what seasoned intelligence analysts do: we isolated one variable. Teams using dedicated market intelligence platforms versus teams that weren’t.* About half our respondents fell into each group. The differences were clear. 

How competitive intelligence platform users perform differently 

Teams using dedicated competitive intelligence platforms operate differently across the metrics we measured. Not radically different—but consistent enough to matter. 

It all starts from creating deliverables that guide decisions. 24% of teams without platforms regularly provide conclusions about impactions or specific recommendations for action. For platform users, that jumps to 36%. 

This isn’t about marginal improvement. It’s the difference between intelligence that informs and intelligence that guides. When leadership actively promotes intelligence-driven decisions, teams aren’t fighting for a seat at the table—they’re already in the room where it’s happening.

When processes are clear rather than ad hoc, intelligence arrives during planning cycles instead of after decisions are made. 

The universal bottleneck: Where competitive and market intelligence platforms make the biggest difference 

The Global Intelligence Report tracks six success factors that separate high performers from everyone else: Focus, Organization, Process, Tools & AI, Deliverables, and Culture. Think of these factors as your KPIs for measuring market intelligence success.

Platform users score higher across all six factors. 

Tools & AI is where everyone struggles most—even the highest-performing teams. But notably, it’s where platforms create dramatic performance lifts.  

Non-platform users average 2.6 on Tools & AI. Platform users score 3.3—a 27% improvement that compounds across everything else intelligence teams do. 

Why tools are the universal bottleneck 

Without purpose-built infrastructure, even talented teams hit the same three walls: 

Collaboration happens in chaos. Intelligence work scatters across email threads, shared drives, and Slack channels. Platform users rate their collaboration infrastructure 36% higher (3.4 vs 2.5) because intelligence lives in a shared system where everyone can contribute. 

Intelligence sits with gatekeepers. Without self-service access, insights wait for the next briefing cycle. Platform users score 35% higher on accessibility (4.2 vs 3.1). Whether it’s analysts quickly pulling data to answer urgent requests or stakeholders checking dashboards between meetings, the right information is available without bottlenecks. 

Tools fight against you instead of for you. When systems are clunky, people avoid them. Platform users rate their tools 29% more intuitive (3.6 vs 2.8)—and the data shows it: they produce more diverse deliverables and reach stakeholders through more channels. 

These operational improvements create a foundation for something bigger—a fundamental shift in how teams actually spend their time. 

What competitive intelligence platforms do
(and don’t do) 

As a provider of CMI platforms ourselves (surprise!), we would love for the statistics to show unequivocally that all platform users are top-performers while non-users are left running to stand still. But we want to set realistic expectations about what platforms can and can’t do.   

A platform alone won’t move your team from average to advanced performance. Platform users still face the same strategic challenges around focus, stakeholder alignment, and delivering recommendations instead of summaries. 

What platforms do is remove infrastructure barriers that prevent teams from executing their strategy effectively. They don’t replace analytical talent. They don’t automatically improve stakeholder relationships. They don’t solve all organizational alignment issues. But they do create the operational foundation that makes other improvements smoother, leading to higher scores across all aspects of intelligence excellence. Most importantly, they buy back teams’ most valuable resource: time.  

Bottom line, it all comes down to time  

Everything we’ve shown you so far—the performance gaps, the collaboration improvements, the accessibility differences—points to one fundamental shift: 

Most intelligence teams spend 80% of their time on the grunt work: tracking down sources, copying data into spreadsheets, reformatting reports, organizing files so they can find things later. The actual analysis—the “what does this mean for us?” work—gets squeezed into whatever hours remain. 

World Class teams have flipped this ratio. They spend 80% of their time interpreting what matters, building strategic recommendations, and advising leadership. How? Intelligence platforms handle the collection and organization that drowns everyone else. 

Competitive intelligence teams: More scope, same headcount 

Remember those teams we met at the CMI conference? Three people for 30,000 employees wasn’t the exception, it was the norm. Team sizes have stayed flat (or shrunk) while the list of things to monitor keeps growing: more competitors, more markets, ESG, geopolitical risks, supply chain vulnerabilities. 

The obvious answer is to hire more people. Except even World Class teams operate lean—67% have 1-5 people. The difference isn’t team size. It’s what those people actually do all day. 

Three analysts drowning in collection work will still drown with five analysts. But three analysts who spend 80% of their time on analysis instead of hunting for data? They can handle scope that would break a larger team still stuck in collection mode. 

Building intelligence infrastructure that scales to 2030 

By 2030, intelligence teams predict that they will need to monitor competitive threats, market trends, ESG compliance, geopolitical risks, regulatory changes, technology disruptions, and supply chain vulnerabilities. You can build a functioning intelligence operation on an unstable foundation—just like you can build a house on one. But try adding a second story and watch your architect show up with a warning sign. 

Which brings us back to the original question: 

What actually separates high-performing competitive and market intelligence teams from everyone else?  

World Class teams aren’t working harder— they’re working on infrastructure built to keep up with an increasingly complex world. When average teams are formatting PowerPoints, World Class teams are delivering strategic guidance. When other teams are left explaining why they couldn’t get the analysis done in time, they’re walking leadership through the three scenarios that matter. 

The question isn’t whether your team needs a dedicated platform. The question is whether your current intelligence infrastructure lets you focus on interpretation rather than collection, make intelligence accessible when stakeholders need it, and deliver recommendations that shape decisions rather than trailing in their wake.  

If your infrastructure handles these fundamentals, you’re building on solid ground. If it doesn’t, every new monitoring requirement, every scope expansion, every leadership ask becomes another story on an unstable foundation. The gap keeps widening while you’re stuck maintaining systems instead of delivering the insights that change outcomes. 

The teams breaking through to strategic impact understand this. They’re not betting on technology alone—they know that infrastructure which scales with complexity frees them up to concentrate on the work that actually matters: guiding the business through an increasingly complex competitive landscape. 

The gap between intermediate and World Class isn’t permanent. Teams close it by making deliberate infrastructure choices—not by working harder, but by working differently. 

Your next step depends on where you are in that journey. 

Depending on where you are: 

Just starting to think about this? Download the full Global Intelligence Report to see detailed benchmarking data and understand where your team sits on the maturity curve. 

Solution shopping? Our CMI Platform Buyer’s Guide covers the full evaluation process—business case development, vendor assessment, change management, and success metrics. 

Want to talk it out? We’re here for a straightforward conversation about what it would take for your team to move up the maturity curve. No pressure, just honest discussion. 

*or more precisely, teams that selected “dedicated intelligence platform (e.g., Valona)” as their storage solution versus teams that didn’t. With this isolation as the base, for the purpose of this article, we make the assumption that this group use a dedicated platform for their competitive and market intelligence work.