John Pepper, Chairman at Procter & Gamble, said it best, "I can’t imagine a time in history when the competencies, the skills, and the knowledge of the men and women in competitive intelligence ... are more needed and more relevant to a company being able to design a winning strategy and act on it." 

Pepper said this in 1999 when the World Wide Web was just beginning to revolutionize the business world, and his words are more true today then ever before. Companies that aren't taking advantage of the intelligence available through online sources are at constant risk of falling behind competitors and losing key positioning in their market. 

If you aren't planning to use competitive intelligence to drive your business strategy in 2018, then here are 10 statistics that should change your mind about that.

1. 90% of Fortune 500 companies practice competitive intelligence (at that rate, it's gotta offer some kind of value, right?). (source)

2. 70% of large enterprises believe that having competitive intelligence in the past would have increased the effectiveness of previous campaigns (think about your past campaigns? Could they have done better with external data driving the strategy?). (source)

3. Over 73% of businesses are investing more than 20% of overall technology budgets on intelligence and data analytics (what are the odds your competitors are in this group?). (source)

4. 56% of CEOs see cross-sector competition on the rise, and plan to enter new markets in the next three years (do you think your organization will too?). (source)

5. When it comes to informing senior-level decisions, 70% of executives consider predictive intelligence the most critical data insight, followed by trend insights (could your decision-making process benefit from predictive data and market analysis?). (source)

6. 72% of business leaders say that their organizations will be susceptible to threats from digital market disruptions in the next three years (think yours could be too?). (source)

7. 80% of CEOs say that mobile technology and analytics are key to their strategy (how much of a role do they play in your upcoming plans?). (source)

8. On average, businesses are only analyzing 12% of their data, leaving a lot of untapped opportunities and critical insights (how many threats and opportunities do you think are missed in that 88% difference?). (source)

9. 69% of organizations that have used an external partner to gain better data insight report positive results from that decision (don't have time to do CI on your own? This could be a good alternative). (source)

10. Only 35% of CEOs say they are very confident about their business growth prospects in the coming year (how confident are you?). (source)