AMA: Airtable Market & Competitive Intelligence Lead, Alex McDonnell on Competitive Positioning

- 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 competitive positioning to customers. - Product deep dives: Visual packages for Product teams to help them determine where our opportunities are. 

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 don't quite accept the view that we just have to cope with a world where our products are the same as competitors :) For sure, things move fast and no product differentiator can last forever... but we should be looking to take market positions and build capabilities that are unique and not rely only on narrative. 

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 market vs other categories of tools, and a deeper view of the specific capabilities that make us unique. Enabling sales is a constant function of updating self-serve resources, delivering training, and sharing major intel. good luck!

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. But what holds it all together and prevents it from feeling overwhelming is having our durable view of our competitive differentiation. We have a specific set of capabilities + a surrounding narrative that we believe cuts through the competitive noise. Once you've defined that clearly, minor pieces of competitive intel start bouncing off of you. :) good luck!

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 survey, which often have competitive insights. For win/loss, I've taken both approaches. Currently we only use that research type for specific burning questions. 

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 Positioning. And for good measure, Copy: exact words that appear on marketing assets, informed by Messaging.

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. Not necessarily the same solution. Even if a customer could feasibly use both, we might still be "competing!"

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 over time But for the Product teams or overall company distribution of intelligence, it's tough, because it's not as close to a specific outcome. May need to look at more qualitative measures like positive feedback from your Product teams, saying that your CI helped them make a specific decision faster or more confidently. Good luck!

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 showing that the competitor doesn't do what they say. good luck!

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 on which competitive deals we should help with).