AMA: Atlassian Head of Core Product Marketing & GTM, ITSM Solutions, Daniel Kuperman on Competitive Positioning

The best advice I can give is to not throw everything including the kitchen sink into a competitive battle card. I've seen competitive intel of 5+ single space pages given to sales teams and you can guess how many people actually read it. When preparing competitive intel for sales, keep in mind that sales teams are typically looking for the following: Why is this competitor participating in the sale in the first place? How does the competitor address customer needs? What do they do well and what ...Read More

Talk to customers: they will tell you why they evaluated different vendors and what they liked/disliked about them; Talk to channel partners: they have a deep understanding of the market and the other vendors; Talk to analyst firms: they have seen all the major players and know them well and can help you identify their strengths and weaknesses. You noticed that I did not mention "do internet research" but that's a given... competitor websites, support portals, and more can be great sources of co ...Read More

In the traditional B2B Tech world, my experience has been that you need several ways to disseminate your competitive positioning: Sales battle cards for your field sales teams and channel partners easily reference; Training sessions to go over key competitive differentiation and review your value prop; Self-service short videos where you go over competitors and how you win; Create a dedicated competitive channel in Slack or MS Teams where field teams can come for information and ask questions; R ...Read More

Good question. In my experience, the best way to prioritize competitive insights is to show there's a clear connection between the work and business results. This often comes in the form of improved win rate for the sales team, better messaging for the marketing team, prioritization of product features, and higher ranking in analyst reports, to name just a few. Something to consider is creating a table in a Google Doc or similar in which you list all the deliverables or types of insights you wil ...Read More

The biggest mistake is to focus on what the competitor does versus what the customer cares about. Don't start with what the competition is doing or not doing, start with what specific customer needs are not being met by the current players, and find better ways to serve them. Another common issue is to be too reactive to the competition and following competitors into whatever new shiny thing they believe will give them an edge. Again, looking at what the customer wants and why they want it will ...Read More

The key rule of thumb is to always be truthful. Don't lie about who you work for, your role with the company, and what you are looking for. For example: When filling out an online web form to download content from a competitor's website, use your real name and business email address. When approaching a competitor's booth at a trade show, disclose who you are and who you work for. Don't ask anyone else to misrepresent their intentions so that you can get eyes on a competitor's product or get insi ...Read More

For me the term 'market intelligence' is more broad, signifying not only what your direct competitors are doing but also where the market in general is headed. For example, in a market intelligence report, I would expect to see information about customers' priorities and needs, new technology entering the market, and changes in behavior by geography, to name a few. In competitive intelligence, you focus more on the specific vendors in your market and how they are moving, what they are planning, ...Read More

This is tricky, especially if you are a startup or strapped for cash. I have reached out to people via Linkedin asking for help to validate a specific product or feature and have also seen other companies to the same. If you have the budget, hire an outside market research firm to help with it. Another good way is to leverage your channel partners (if you have any) because they can put you in touch with people that match your ICP and who might be more interested in helping because a trusted part ...Read More

Competitive differentiation is, first of all, a positioning exercise that means finding ways to influence the customer's perception of your company and product versus existing alternatives. This means not only what your direct competitors (other vendors) are, but what other ways of getting the customer's job done there are. You might have a powerful new financial app but if the customer is used to Excel and, well, it's kinda free if you have MS Office, then are you considering Excel a competitor ...Read More

We are always looking at the competition and assessing their moves. Having said that, we don't obsess about it. This means there's gotta be a balance between what the market is doing vs what your own plans should be. Too much outside focus and you are just copying and following someone else, but only internal focus means you lose touch with reality. Each market is different, so the amount of time you spend on competitive analysis will vary a lot. I've been at startups where the market was very n ...Read More

The first source I would go for is your own customers. If you have a CAB (customer advisory board), that's a perfect forum for finding competitor intel. It is likely that your direct competitors are all still marketing to your own customers in hopes of winning them from you. Your customers could share which vendors they are hearing more from, and which ones have been quiet lately. Your customers can also share if they have seen competitor demos and what they liked or disliked about what the comp ...Read More

Most of my experience has been with SaaS but I did work for a software company in the backup and disaster recovery space which had a hardware component as well and so did competitors. In that case, we leveraged our channel partners, who were very familiar with the industry and had previously sold competing products to get intel on what other vendors were charging. We also reached out to customers and asked about their experience with competing products and how our solution was priced comparative ...Read More

If you see different competitors by industry, then yes. At a previous company we realized that when we expanded into different industries (e.g. going from Tech to Healthcare), the competitive landscape changed somewhat. By doing a win/loss analysis we figured out that most deals that we lost, were 80% of the time going to a vendor we had never heard before. As we dug into it, we realized that the vendor had its origins in the healthcare space and since inception had never ventured out of that in ...Read More