AMA: AlertMedia Vice President Product Marketing, Harsha Kalapala on Competitive Positioning

Keep it simple and practical. We use a simple battle card format to pull together the most essential details you need at your fingertips to enable competitive conversations. We host it on Seismic so it is easy to search for keywords and find the battle cards. We also do specific training sessions for tier 1 and tier 2 competitors (described above). I’ve also used slack channels to create a conversation around competition and tackle fringe situations effectively with group input. Again, those people on the frontlines are often the best source of insights.

I am assuming this is sales, account management, or customer success teams. It is an understandable concern - especially in large enterprise situations. There seems to be too much at stake to risk with someone you aren't familiar with. It can also be a factor of company culture - which is unfortunate when that creates a blocker for information flow. The first step is to build a relationship with those stakeholders. Let them trust your judgment and align with your motives - which, in the end, should benefit them as well. I'd pair that with executive support—get buy-in that the benefit from getting you in touch with the customer is worth the effort and risk. Be careful with this, as you don't want to appear to triangulate - it can make the resistance worse. Important to communicate this with execs so it is delivered in an effective way. Start small and show evidence of you holding your own with these kinds of conversations. It gives you the confidence to work up to the big dogs as well.

Staying in touch with customers/propsects directly is not an option for product marketers, IMO. There are passive ways to do it by being a listener - listen to sales/CS calls, attend talks by your audience on relevant topics, follow notable people on linkedin and read the content they are posting or engaging with. In my experience the best insights come from the most unexpected conversations involving customers and prospects. So my team always invests in time engaging with our audience every chance we get. That said, we definitely plan conversations for specific campaigns like early access product feedback, launch campaigns, positioning testing, case study development, etc. There are some great tools I used in the past and planning to use to help with user research. Wynter is a great tool for positioning feedback from a similar target audience.

Competitive positioning is a key component of defining core messaging. If we sit down and come up with copy on how to best describe our offerings, a key step is to compare that against how competitors describe themselves. You’ll likely be hit with an unpleasant surprise that about half your copy has already been used directly or indirectly by competitors. Some words might be well-adapted lexicons that prospects associate competitors with. Developing your positioning and messaging without this key insight would lead to bad outcomes. I always try to find words we can “own” in the prospect’s mind when associating the value to our products and brand. These words should be unique from the competitor’s identity and still be aligned with the prospect’s language. We try to stay away from feature differentiators and focus on how we help customers solve the problem in a better way. The most effective forms of training for sales are role play sessions combined with learning materials as everyone learns and retains information differently. Salespeople in different segments (SMB, MM, Enterprise) may need different forms of enablement to drive meaningful results. Testing your messaging with potential target buyers from interviews or tools like Wynter is the best way to confirm if your positioning is on-target.

There are a few types of competitors to think about: Tier 1: Prime Competition - Those who compete for the same dollars for a very similar product. You often end up in feature battles with them and eat each other’s lunch. They look very similar to your offering in the eyes of prospects. They end up copying your features or vice versa. Tier 2: Patrial overlap - They have one or more similar products, common verticals, or solve the same problem in different ways. They are sometimes point solutions if you have a more comprehensive offering, or maybe your product is the point solution - which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Tier 3: Budget stealers - These are typically distinct products that may solve part of the problem, but you are essentially competing for the same budget. In many situations, they end up being complementary products. The challenge ends up being how to convince the prospect to spend their money on your product first. Alternatives - These are other ways to solve the problem without buying a product at all… like using a spreadsheet, or having an intern do it. Or they could choose to simply endure the pain and going BAU (business as usual). Noise tier - These providers use similar words and positioning, talking about the same problem, but your product offerings couldn't be more different. In some cases, you could be partners. This causes confusion for the prospect, which can typically be cleared up quickly.

I dont think we should ever mention competitors directly in our messaging. Sure, you can address it directly in response if a prospect brings them up. But proactively naming competitors puts you in a defensive position and gives them undue attention. This usually doesn't work to our advantage. You could position it more generally like: Unlike (category descriptor) platforms, (our product) helps you solve for x. There are a handful of good frameworks out there. But I found that none of them perfectly fit your need for a particular company and product portfolio. So I build my own custom one inspired by other frameworks. My own previous custom frameworks at a different company often don't work at a new company entirely. The best frameworks are customized to your need, and the time spent on those is well worth it, in my experience.

There are many ways to stay on top of competitive intel. If you have the budget and a clear use case, use a tool like Klue to help gather intel, and disperse it in your existing channels. Other ways I always used are the following: * Use your frontline teams - open up communication channels with your sales and customer success teams. They can gather invaluable information every single day from direct conversations. * Use gong - we live in unprecedented times of access to data and insights. Set alerts on gong for competitor names or lexicons indicating competitors. Have someone on your team monitor those conversations for usable intel. We get a ton out of this. * Hack together a slack channel - You need a go-to place fort conversation around this topic. Otherwise it never gets out or gets lost in private conversations. Encourage people to ask questions or post in the channel for record keeping or discussion. * Google alerts - Set google alerts for keywords and phrases involving your competitors. This makes sure you dont miss critical public information. * Be their audience. Subscribe to all their comms - newsletter, webinars, email nurtures, etc. Use a private email as many companies reject @gmail, etc. Domains are cheap to buy. * Hop on their live chat, and ask them anonymously without giving yourself away. Tow the line of honesty and ethics here. Use your best judgement. Finally, I like having ownership of gathering intel distributed across product intel owners even if you have a central person owning the intelligence consolidation and distribution.