AMA: Airtable Market & Competitive Intelligence Lead, Alex McDonnell on Competitive Positioning
September 20 @ 10:00AM PT
View AMA Answers
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
- Market Map: Overall visual landscape of our competition. Where does everyone play, where are they moving? - Battlecards: Tells Sales/CS what to say when delivering comp...
5054 Views
4 requests
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
The narrative is a huge part of positioning. That's what frame your product's actual capabilities and determines which criteria are relevant or irrelevant. That said, I d...
1071 Views
4 requests
What's your approach to competitive differentiation?
How does this inform your core messaging, how do you enable sales to understand what makes you different/better, how do you know if it's working with your target buyers?
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
Our competitive differentiation is central to our overall company/product positioning. They're almost the same thing. We have a high-level view of our position in the mar...
1749 Views
2 requests
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
Web tracking tools like Crayon and Klue help us curate intel from the web, and Slack gives us a constant feed of discussion where people around the company share insights...
1966 Views
3 requests
How often do you talk to customers, or do qualitative + VOC research?
Is it continuous or at specific campaigns?
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
All the time, through a mix of continuous and specific pointed research. Our Research teams owns some always-on research work such as our NPS survey or Brand Tracking sur...
1637 Views
3 requests
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
For me: Positioning: overall strategy of who we serve and how we do it better than the other major options Messaging: language and themes we use to communicate Positionin...
589 Views
2 requests
What constitutes a competitor, and what is the goal you have in mind when you conduct competitor analysis?
What is your philosophy when it comes to competitors?
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
The goal of our work is to help our company build and express our competitive differentiation. A competitor is anyone who has a similar value prop for the same audience. ...
515 Views
2 requests
What metric, goal or KPI can you put on providing competitive intelligence to the company or product teams?
I work in a company that measures the impact of all projects, but admittedly this is a difficult area to track. Would love to any suggestions/thoughts.
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
For the Sales side, you can look at: - competitive win/loss rates - win rates of deals that used competitive support or resources vs. did not - ultimately, market share o...
1019 Views
5 requests
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
Use "trap setting questions." Craft a question for the customer to ask your competitor that will expose the lacking functionality. In extreme cases you could send a video...
1701 Views
1 request
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing • 3y
Win/loss interviews have consistently been one of our richest sources. Also, plugging into active deals where we support the sales team (we use Gong and CRM to get alerts...
2175 Views
2 requests