AMA: ClickUp Head of Competitive Intelligence, Andrew McCotter-Bicknell on Competitive Positioning

Don't use corporate jargon and you're already 90% ahead of everyone else (if I had a nickel every time I read a company referring to their product as "industry-leading" or "robust"...). How do your happiest, most successful customers describe your product? Use those words. Don't use different words for the sake of being different. Be CLEAR about what your product does, the pain points they solve, and show screenshots. Talk to customers, read product reviews on G2, TrustRadius, etc. You'll notice ...Read More

Multiple times per month. It varies though, depending on bandwidth as a one-person CI team.  The most important thing is that, as a whole, ClickUp's Product Marketing team speaks to customers all the time for different reasons. I focus my conversations more around competitive intel, or win/loss info. Our persona PMM directors speak with customers that fit our ICP so we can better understand our strengths, weaknesses, and what their jobs-to-be-done are. Our Customer Advocacy leader speaks with po ...Read More

Get them involved. Interview them to learn about their encounters with competitors. Here are things that I regularly ask my sellers. Which competitors are coming up most in conversations with buyers? What are buyers specifically asking about? What assets would help you win more competitive deals? Here's something that I put together. Is this helpful to you? When you build a genuine relationship with your sales team, you'll notice that adoption will rarely be a problem. They'll see their contribu ...Read More

Competitive win rate is a great north star goal. But it can be challenging to accurately impact that in a positive way in a short amount of time. A couple other KPIs I've used in the past and that I recommend: 1. Competitor confidence (from the sales team) 2. Project-based contribution If you can increase the confidence of your sales team when it comes to competitors, you can infer that it will positively impact your competitive win rate. So every 6 month, I send a survey to my entire sales team ...Read More

There are two directions to answering this question: Frequency of delivery Content Frequency is important because Sales is constantly bombarded with info. You have to get in front of them consistently with different materials like presentations, documents, customer-facing assets, etc. to really get them to latch onto competitive positioning. And then there's the content piece. I try to think of competitive assets like a website and my sales team like its visitors. If you get too granular and use ...Read More

1. Revenue impact 2. Product innovation I used to only focus on the first point. That's an important one—and if you have limited bandwidth, I'd recommend you start there first. These are the vendors that are impacting your sellers' win rates. They're likely the more well-known vendors in your category, are easy to discover, are brand names, and are the largest in size (headcount, annual revenue, etc.). The second point is important, as well, though. Especially for businesses that are wanting to ...Read More

Most Competitive Intel functions begin as siloed efforts within organizations. Product, Sales, Marketing, executives... they're all interested in competitors and conduct their own research for different purposes—with or without a formal CI program. But by implementing a formal CI program, the research goes deeper on the things that matter most, and wider across the company so that everyone can access it.  But on its own, CI is just one person grasping at what they think is important for an entir ...Read More

First, there is no one magic tool that will do your Competitive Intel program for you. All of the tools below require a strategy before using. But they can be extremely powerful when you use them correctly. For competitive alerts, battlecard creation, and win/loss reporting, try looking at Klue or Crayon. For third-party agencies that conduct win/loss interviews and surveys on your behalf, take a look at Clozd, DoubleCheck Research, or Iceberg IQ. For review mining, check out G2, TrustRadius, or ...Read More

Yeah, there's a lot of new info flowing every day. But a lot of it is noise. First make sure you understand what's important to the company. What are the big goals you're trying to hit? What's the direction that your product is going in? With those things in mind, you should be able to filter out a lot of garbage that isn't worth your time. In terms of channels to put the GOOD stuff in... I have two: 1. A Slack channel dedicated to competitive intel (open to everyone in the company) 2. A monthly ...Read More

I had one gut reaction when I read this question. "Why isn't there much public-facing marketing around it?" A few thoughts come to mind: 1. They discontinued the product (try checking publicly-facing knowledge centers, if they have any, to confirm) 2. They rebranded the product (this happens all the time) 3. The product was in beta, got a bad response from users, then went back into stealth 4. They're bad at marketing (in which case, you probably don't need to be too worried about this competito ...Read More

To be 100% honest, I only have experience in SaaS so I'm probably not the best guy to answer this question. But I would venture a guess that win/loss could still help here. You'd be amazed at the info you could access if you have a great relationship with prospects, buyers, customers, etc. I'd also recommend hiring third-party consultants, like GLG, to dig into this for you. They can help you get in contact (anonymously) with customers of your competitors, or your competitors themselves. It soun ...Read More