WRITTEN BY John Emmitt, Fluvio CONSULTANT
How to Build a Competitive Program: Competitive Intelligence + Competitive Enablement
What’s the Point of Competitive Intelligence and Enablement?
If your business is selling technology solutions such as hardware, software or Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, you live in a highly competitive world. As such, it’s important to understand who your competitors are and what differentiates your solution from the others.
Competitive Intelligence (CI) involves uncovering your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, their positioning and messaging, as well as their pricing and packaging. It requires you to take the raw data and extract competitive insights that inform your business. Having this information allows you to win more deals, strengthen your product roadmaps, and improve your positioning and messaging to the market.
Competitive Enablement (CE) is all about communicating your CI information to the rest of your organization, especially the product and go-to-market teams, including sales, marketing and customer success.
The most successful competitive programs have the following components:*
Objectives: Clearly establish business and CI program objectives.
People: Get full executive support and ensure that CI content is used across the organization.
Processes: Set up repeatable processes that ensure that you are regularly collecting competitive information and distributing it throughout the organization. Have a central location with up-to-date information.
Technologies: Utilize tools to help with collecting, analyzing and disseminating the CI data.
KPIs: Establish key metrics and report on them regularly. For example, track revenue performance improvement to see if your CI program is having the desired impact.
Where to Start– The Market & Competitive Landscape
A good place to start on your CI journey is to develop an overview of your market, key market trends and the competitive landscape. Ask yourself the following questions:
Market Overview and Trends
What’s the size of your target market and what’s the growth rate (CAGR)?
What major trends are happening in your market?
Who are your primary competitors and how do they position themselves?
Sources of information– where can you find this data? Here are a few ideas:
Google and other search engines (of course!)
Social media
Your sales team
Your sales Win/Loss data
Peer review sites like G2, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights, PeerSpot, etc.
Competitor websites and press releases
ZoomInfo, Crunchbase, etc.
Competitive Battlecards & Key Differentiators
Competitive battlecards are commonly used to help the sales team win more deals. Battlecards should highlight competitor strengths and weaknesses. This allows your sales team to set landmines for the competition that expose their weaknesses and position your solution based on your strengths relative to this vendor. Your battlecards should tell your teams how to win using the key competitive differentiators of your solution.
Here’s an example of a competitive battlecard template:
Competitive Positioning – The Positioning Matrix
It’s important to communicate to your teams how your company and products are positioned in the market against your primary competitors. Having a good, consistent understanding of your competitive positioning helps your marketing team create better messaging and content. And, it helps your sales team increase their win rate.
A great way to illustrate your company’s competitive positioning is with a positioning matrix. This matrix uses 2 key metrics that are most important to a given market segment, to position your company and products against the competition.
Here’s an example positioning matrix template:
Competitive Enablement
The success of your CI program hinges on your ability to effectively communicate the information and related insights to the rest of the organization. First, your competitive intel must be up to date! If your sales reps go into battle with stale information, they could be toast and will never use your CI data again.
Here are a few other key competitive enablement considerations:
The information you provide must be easily digestible by your sales and other teams
If a certain set of stakeholders like visuals, create charts and graphs that tell the CI story (see the Positioning Matrix above)
Make it easy for everyone to find the information
Have a central repository for CI data
Put it where they spend their time– if they’re in Salesforce all day, make it accessible there. If you use a sales enablement tool like Highspot put it there.
Send out a regular email summary of new CI information with tips on how to use it
Have a solid content management system to ensure that you maintain fresh CI data
Train your teams on how to use the CI data and provide regular tips and how-tos to ensure that the organization is consistent and effective– win more deals!
Select, track and report on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to make sure that your CI program is meeting your goals
CI/CE Tools
One way to accelerate your journey to CI nirvana is to use a product built for this purpose. There are many competitive and market intelligence tools on the market. Fluvio works closely with Klue. They offer a competitive enablement SaaS solution that allows you to “collect, curate and deliver competitive and market intelligence to the teams that need it, and stop losing winnable deals.”
Klue is highly ranked on G2 in 3 different categories: Sales Enablement, Competitive Intelligence and Market Intelligence. Contact Fluvio or Klue to find out more.
Competitive Intelligence is a product marketing function in many organizations and is critical to the success of your business. If your company needs help setting up an effective CI program, get in touch with Fluvio. Our product marketing consultants are experts in CI.
*Source: Klue Competitive Enablement Maturity Model