On Tuesday, September 28 at the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Shally Steckerl gave an interesting presentation at SourceCon, one that covered competitive intelligence.

As an example of how competitive intelligence can be gathered over the telephone, let me tell you a simple story of a job I started upon my return from the conference.

On Thursday morning, I began sourcing sales reps for a paper manufacturing company in Canada. About two hours into my efforts I was talking to a receptionist in a company that was a supplier of industrial paper products to the Canadian marketplace.

There were a few names on LinkedIn at the company, but there were no sales reps listed. There was someone listed as “sales” but no other identifying information was contained on the person’s profile.