What actually goes into a competitor database

"Competitor intelligence" sounds like it needs a data science team and a legal review. Most of the time it needs neither — it needs someone to sit with the sales team for an afternoon and write down the questions they actually ask each other in Slack.

The pattern I see every time

It's rarely "gather everything about every competitor." It's a short, repeating list:

• "What does [competitor] charge for this, roughly, right now?"
• "Have they announced anything new this quarter?"
• "What do we say when a prospect brings them up?"

Those three questions, answered reliably and kept current, beat a sprawling database nobody updates after month two. The tool's job is to make updating it easier than not updating it — a form, not a spreadsheet with forty columns.

Keep humans in the loop, deliberately

I don't build these as automated scrapers pulling live competitor data unattended — pricing pages change, legal grey areas exist, and stale scraped data that looks current is worse than an honest "last checked: three weeks ago." A small internal tool where a real person adds a note when they spot something, tagged and searchable, is more reliable and a lot less likely to get anyone in trouble.

Boring, current, and actually used beats impressive and ignored. That's true of most sales tools, not just this one.