Section 2: Competitive Intelligence

Prompt: How do you go about competitive intelligence - how do you organize it so everyone can access what they need and how does it inform your messaging?

Bobby Caruso

For competitive intelligence to best serve a product marketing and sales team, it needs to hit three marks: (1) Understand the landscape; (2) Serve as a one-stop Shop; (3) Deliver within the workflow.

1) Understand the Landscape:

To create a sustainable and scalable solution to understand how often competitors are surfacing during sales meetings, I have implemented a system in partnership with sales ops where the CRM has a required field for stage 2 opportunities that include any known competitors. While AEs can, of course, write "N/A," or “None,” this extra step helped create a reliable stream of competitiors. This allowed me to understand which competitors are coming up most often for each segment and industry vertical.

On a similar note, if any sales listening software (like Gong) is in use, I monitor for mentions of competitors to both further illuminate our landscape and to understand how these competitors are being referenced (are prospects speaking highly of competitors or highlighting pain points). These messages must be then delivered back to the product team to inform their roadmap.

2) Serve as a One-Stop Shop

While I strongly believe that CI is best actioned upon when it’s delivered directly into an AE’s workflow, there must first be a hub of competitive intelligence that allows for asynchronous research and new seller onboarding. Depending on the documentation tech stack at CareerPlug, I would create a hub for competitive intelligence in Confluence, Coda, Notion, or Google Docs.

One of the key first steps is centralizing the resources that exist. Different departments (Product, RevOPs, Enablement, Sales leadership) likely have different information in silos around the competition. While PMMs don’t have to override or replace this information, we should be able to provide a central resource to access it. A “Competitor: Acne” page should be able to serve up the most important key info while also linking to any product breakdowns, sales tip sheets, and other research that has been compiled internally.

Below is a redacted template that I have found success with in my current CI practice.

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3) Delivery and Execution

A research hub is great...for when stakeholders want to do research. But the most important way to make sure that CI is actioned upon is to serve it directly into the AE workflow. Below are some of the ways I recommend doing so:

Regular review by PMM of CRM Report: Once the competitor field is added to the CRM, the PMM should do a bi-weekly review to help understand new competitive trends to support AEs with objection handling for upcoming opportunities.

Email alerts for priority news: For major news on a top competitor (acquisitions, major partnerships, new case studies, white papers), an email should be sent from the PMM to relevant stakeholders (sales leadership, interested execs, product leadership, enterprise marketing) to help kick off planning to market against and get ahead of these updates.

A Slack Channel for each competitor: Using the format of #competition-Acme creates a predictable engine where sellers and other GTM stakeholders can receive and share information they find about a competitor. The PMM can share minor updates in this channel and make sure that contributions from other team members are incorporated into the research hub.

Escalation of releases that unblock sales blockers: In the launch tiering I have created, if a feature creates parity or a unique differentiation between a competitor — it should be treated as an “L” launch. In doing so, we can ensure the Product Manager gives the release the attention it deserves, and the release and rollout of the product can be done in a way that ensures proper sales enablement and collateral creation to promote this feature against those of a competitor.

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