Written by Pat Johnson, Fluvio consultant
There’s no sugar-coating it; product marketing is a challenging job. At their best, PMMs are the internal bridge between product, sales, and marketing, driving messaging and positioning for the entire go-to-market strategy. It requires stellar communication, creative, and executional prowess.
But for all the importance placed on Product Marketing’s internal expertise, a similar level of attention must be paid to the wider industry and, specifically, the competitive landscape surrounding your business. This component of the Product Marketer’s job description is known as Competitive Intelligence (CI), and is often overlooked as a springboard to grow your company’s market share within your chosen industry. It’s one thing to gain expertise on your own product, but without the bigger picture of competing solutions, industry trends, and user feedback, you run the risk of creating messaging and value propositions with tunnel vision. Calling yourself “the best-in-class solution” without fully understanding the competition does your sales, marketing, and product teams a disservice. Simply put, it’s impossible to position yourself above the competition without deep understanding of what the competition is up to.
Luckily good CI doesn’t require an obscene budget, dedicated resources, or spies – just a solid plan, a bit of creativity, and time. The following checklist should get your CI operation off the ground (or strengthen it) without headaches.
Prep
Audit and prioritize the competitive landscape
Do you really know who you’re competing with? Sure, it might be easy to identify your top one or two competitors, but what about up-and-comers? Is a product you thought wasn’t in your space bumping up against your value proposition? Has your sales team noticed a formerly-unknown name pop up in more conversations? Casting a wide net to identify anyone who might be competing for the same prospect dollars is the reasonable starting point for any CI endeavor.
Once that list is compiled, it’s time to stack rank and determine where your research efforts are best spent. Depending on your company and industry, this may not be as simple as ordering competitors based on how often you go toe-to-toe. Your sales team will be the judge here; if they already have enough intel to face off against your biggest competitor, they may ask that you place your attention on a smaller - but growing - challenger.
It’s also worth keeping an eye on any major product announcements or industry acquisitions. If a competitor’s narrative changes, so should your intel. With your prioritized list in hand, it’s time to put on your detective hat.
Put yourself in the competitor’s shoes
With your top-priority competitor identified, it’s now time to get deductive. Before you start barrelling down the research rabbit hole, it’s important to ask “what does my competitor think about?” Imagine yourself as the head of marketing for your competitor – what differentiates you? What deals do you want to show up in, and which are outside of your wheelhouse? Do you have a defined ICP? Are you headed for an IPO, or an acquisition? It sounds hokey, but starting with the 10,000-foot view of your competitor provides necessary context for any product-level findings you identify. Typically this is found through their own messaging – try their website, social presence, and press releases. After gaining this executive-level understanding, you can begin getting granular in your research.
Gather
Leverage forums, communities, and reviews
The good news: there’s an endless amount of information on your competitor. The bad news: there’s an endless amount of information on your competitor. Where should you start? What resources provide the most bang-for-your-buck with finite time and energy?
Beyond the initial review of their website messaging from the last step, review their case studies, highlighted industries, and key stats. Also, get familiar with review sites like G2 and TrustRadius, which offer current users the opportunity to review the strengths and weaknesses of both the product and their general experience with the brand’s services and pricing.
Keep in mind, very little of what you’ve gathered so far will directly help your sales team – they’ve likely already reviewed these sources themselves. This preliminary work is intended to help you paint the picture of where you overlap and differ from your competitor at a high-level, which will help you look for the nuanced differences of the product that will help your sales team move the needle.
Don’t forget your sales team
You’re creating much of your CI to serve your sales team, but it’s crucial to remember that sales is also your most important resource for that intel. Few sources are more rich in anecdote, competitor differentiation, and the market’s impression of the competitive landscape than those spending their days in conversation with prospects.
So why make competitive intelligence for your sellers if they’re the ones you’re sourcing your intel from? Isn’t that redundant?
Well, no two salespeople are having the same conversation, and it’s your job to aggregate every seller’s intel and democratize it across your business. It’s worth your (and their) time to speak to each seller individually and listen to their stories from the field, identifying commonalities among their ideas and flagging pieces for further research.
It’s also critical to ask what information they don’t already have and take it upon yourself to find for them. Few (if any) people or resources can position your product better than your sales team, but even they have blind spots on the competitive landscape that you must task yourself with finding. It’s hard work, but it’s critical to your organization’s ability to close new and existing business.
Consolidate
Refine - but not too much
After weeks – or months – of aggregating intel around your chosen competitor(s), it’s time to prune the raw inputs down to its essential points. While we may initially believe that “more intel” is synonymous with “better intel”, remember who your audience is: busy salespeople, who won’t have time to ingest everything you’ve gathered. Casting a wide net during the research process helps you sift the meaningful from the “nice to have”.
With that said, don’t throw out what isn’t used. As products and markets evolve, findings that were once considered non-critical may become sales-relevant. I suggest housing your raw data in an internally available repository (a Google Sheet is fine), then creating a shortlist of topics to cover in your delivered collateral.
Distribute
Identify the most useful mode of delivery
The way you package and distribute your key CI findings must match your organization’s needs. As mentioned, sales won’t read a textbook on your competitor, but they also likely won’t find a basic slide deck useful (they’ll already have the high-level material a short deck covers). The CI owner must toe the line between “appealing” and “thorough” to ensure their findings are being used to their utmost potential. Ask your sales team what types of collateral they would prefer and establish a plan and cadence for those assets. Some options include:
One-Sheets/Battlecards: Brief walkthroughs of the competitor’s value prop, their biggest/most relevant customers, how they beat you in competition, how you beat them, and areas of opportunity to gain the advantage in prospect/customer calls.
CI micro-site: If your company has the infrastructure, an internal website devoted to competitive intelligence can allow you to go more in-depth in your reporting, as long as the page is well formatted with an intuitive and searchable layout. These can easily be updated, but do require constant housekeeping.
Sales Enablement Trainings: dedicated training sessions with your market-facing teams allow for a more nuanced conversation and offer real-time feedback on your intel. Be sure to revolve around 2-3 main points the team should walk away with, and be able to answer any questions that follow.
Who needs to know?
Should your assets or trainings be split by new-business and existing business teams? Are your findings relevant to particular verticals, but not others? It’s important to treat your CI as you would a marketing campaign: make sure you have the right audience, and provide the information that they need to be successful, while leaving out the irrelevant.
Create an open-door policy for intel
Launching your collateral to field-facing teams is just the start of your CI journey. Markets evolve, competitors get acquired, and much of what you’ve worked so hard on needs to be updated to keep your sellers informed and confident. You’ll be able to identify many market updates on your own (first-party research, press releases, etc), but product-specifics are likely to be flagged by your sales team. This makes an open door policy not just advantageous, but mandatory to uphold the veracity of your competitive intel.
To pull this off, you have to make intel submissions from your sellers as frictionless as possible. Ensure your organization has a universal method of submitting recent market news and competitor updates to you that they (A) won’t forget about and (B) don’t hate using. Remind them of their importance in keeping the organization up to date on the industry’s developments, and gain their trust by continually refining and optimizing your deliverables. At its best, this loop is symbiotic, helping both PMM identify the organization’s optimal positioning in the market and lending sales a hand in fierce competitive deals.
Have an update plan in place
With or without a feedback loop from sellers, your CI has an expiration date. Eventually (but often very quickly) yesterday’s findings are no longer true, leaving you responsible for updating your collateral before a seller uses it in a customer call.
To minimize this risk, it’s important to establish a standardized cadence of updating all competitive intelligence that matches your business and industry. A highly-innovative industry like SaaS may require a CI refresh quarterly, while less volatile spaces like Utilities or Finance could get away with six month or yearly updates. It will vary from business to business, but it nonetheless must remain a priority. Not to mention, the more often you update, the less drastic the updates have to be.
It goes without saying that an keeping an eye on your competitors is a non-negotiable for companies of all size, and by streamlining the process with thorough research, organization-wide feedback, and continuous collateral updates, you can help ensure your team doesn’t ever get flat-footed in the race to increased revenue and market share. Competitive Intel is not always easy work, but it is always worthwhile.