In my experience, a lot of B2B product marketing effort hinges on a good competitive intelligence (CI) program. However, with fast-growing and/or large-ish companies with 50+ sellers or a 400+ headcount company, there are many common issues that can slow down or hinder the effectiveness of a good CI program, no matter how deeply you know the competition and your customers. In this blog, I will outline a few of these common issues and what has helped me to think through solving for these problems.
Challenge #1. Scoping out your CI program
Before you even begin to compile competitive information, it’s useful to first outline a few aspects of your CI program.
Defining goals for your CI program
- Are you using this to help sales teams win more deals?
- Are you using this to inform the product roadmap?
Depending on your target market, primary GTM motion, and your product marketing team’s influence in the product planning, these answers can vary.
Defining success metrics for your CI program
How will you measure the effectiveness of your CI program?
A thumb rule for any PMM effort is to try and find metrics (or proxies) to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. PMMs are usually stretched too thin among various projects and responsibilities, and if your CI program is not helping the business, this will help you either improve or deprioritise to accommodate another project or tasks that may be higher in priority and impact.
- Metrics like win rates (for specific competitors) for sales teams, seller confidence ratings and seller feedback surveys are incredibly helpful in measuring the impact of sales-facing CI work.
- For product teams, I have often used qualitative feedback from my product counterparts to do the same thing. I don’t prefer any quantitative metrics (like features prioritised) because they don’t make any sense until they actually do. You don’t want your product team to become a feature factory.
Defining competitors to research
Defining what competitors to research is obviously an important question to answer. But it’s important to acknowledge some nuances versus our other product marketing projects and work.
It’s important to keep CI programs more focused to some competitors. Why can this be ignored? Well, two reasons:
- When we usually do any positioning work, we are advised (and we should) look at a broader field of competitors based on the context of our customers. We include both direct and indirect competitors. Indirect competitors often means solutions in adjacent categories, status quo, etc.
- Also, leadership teams and sales teams can often push you towards including every competitor. Usually, this is a symptom of a lack of well-defined ICP or lack of discipline in focusing on the ICP.
Here, sales and marketing teams are your best friend. To define this, PMMs should look towards their sales and marketing GTM teams, or even recently converted customers, to understand who are your MQLs and SQLs comparing you to?
While this may eventually include some indirect competitors, you will eliminate a lot of less important competitors (even if direct) because often you are not competing with them for your specific ICPs. This helps keep the number of competitors to a more manageable level, and helps you optimise towards your success metric.
Challenge #2. Researching with a framework in mind
Once you have narrowed down the competitors and your end goal, one thing I have found useful before going out to source any intelligence is to create a framework in Excel or Google Sheets to outline what dimensions you want to collect intel on.
This is important because once you start collecting intel, you will trawl through a mix of both structured and unstructured information. For many SaaS products, a lot of structured information is already available on sites like G2 and Capterra, but there are many spaces where the product benefits and nuances are not readily available publicly, and definitely not in as structured a format as is usually found on reviews websites.
What I have found helpful is to have a framework, typically in line with your strategic narrative – that hopefully you have already validated with your customers – and then compare competitors against the dimensions in these frameworks. For example: The number of seats (users) is an important point of the value proposition for collaboration tools, and not so much for many Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products.
This also helps you have more structured conversations with sellers if you are relying on them for information not often publicly available (because they have previously heard this in customer conversations or have worked at or with your competitors before). Trust me, all sellers I have worked with have appreciated how the framework helps them provide inputs to me efficiently and quickly, and it helps me turn around CI projects much more quickly.
Challenge #3. Synthesising information in the required formats
A third aspect that PMMs can often find challenging is to synthesise this in the required formats for the teams you are intending to help. While it’s obvious that sales teams prefer a more crisp, concise battlecard-style format, even product managers won’t often have the time to go through your entire Excel.
It’s important to consider:
- What is your target audience looking for? Sales teams prefer battlecards that outlines some basic facts about the specific competitor, where your product wins/loses/ties with the competitor, what messaging lines to adopt when trying to position your product against the competitor, etc. , but product teams will look for more feature comparisons and positioning differences.
- How can you make it obvious? Can you make it graphical or tabular without losing readability?
- For teams (especially product teams) who want to deep dive into specific dimensions, you can always link them back to your more detailed excel.
Another pitfall to watch out for is teams asking for public-facing battle cards. Many times, this may not be possible because the information cannot often be publicly verified. In cases like this, it’s important to qualify if there’s a need for a public battlecard at all. It often makes more sense for a marketing-first GTM, as opposed to a sales-first GTM where you can simply rely on internal battlecards for any more details the sales teams need aside from what you have included in your pitch deck. If you do conclude with your stakeholders that a public battlecard is necessary, you might have to create a public version of your battlecard.
Challenge #4. Disseminating it efficiently
This one has a simple rule, but not often easy to keep up because this is where PMM teams will rely on participation from their stakeholders to make use of all of the CI outputs.
- If you are building it for sales teams, go put it out there in your sales enablement stack. Use solutions like Seismic and Highspot to surface these battlecards.
- Bring it up in your internal newsletters or digests.
- Bring up the latest battlecards in your periodic catch-ups with your teams.
- If you are building it for your product teams, understand from them when is a good time for them to review this. For example, would it make sense for them to go through this at the start of every quarterly product planning exercise?
Challenge #5. Planning for what’s next
This is the hardest challenge of all.
Once you have shipped out a v1 of your CI project, there are many challenges especially in fast-growing companies where new people join, people churn out, and processes are continuously evolving.
Despite putting out all your work in your sales tech stacks, you will often get free-form queries, mostly in the form of a DM or a Teams/Slack channel. As frustrating as it is for a PMM, it’s often understandable especially when your sales team is sometimes fielding queries and fishing for more information in real-time while talking to a customer.
Another challenge is to find a way to keep updating your battlecards and internal research document with the latest information. Sometimes it’s easy – when you hear about competitors launching products and features in their blogs and press releases. And especially so, if you are using the likes of Klue or Crayon to compile all of this information in real-time. However, many of the PMM teams don’t often have the budget or the time to do this. Sometimes, even this information is not always released in public, and we get to hear from sales teams on new developments and releases from our competitors.
Apart from having a quarterly cadence to update the research document and battlecards, it’s useful to also build out a Teams or Slack channel with your sales teams – either repurposing one for all information and queries, or one just for competitive intelligence. One idea, that I haven’t got around to yet, is also building a Slackbot to address some questions with canned answers (e.g. Do we have any battlecard for competitor X?).
This channel can be really effective as a way to not just make your work more accessible to your stakeholders, but also leverage this relationship to fish for more intel about your competitors, new competitors you should add to your CI project, and so on.
Summarising…
To summarise, I just want to highlight that like most projects, it’s really important to outline what your CI project aims to solve for, how you’ll measure it, and how can you solve for your most important stakeholders – in terms of content, format, accessibility and freshness.
A lot of this will sound obvious in hindsight, but I hope tying this back to some examples and hypotheticals gives you a few points to consider as you plan for your next CI project.
Utkarsh's Blog 