AMA: Culture Amp Director of Product Marketing, Ambika Aggarwal on Competitive Positioning

This is a great question and one that generally takes refinement over time based on feedback from sales.  Here's what you can do to make sure your competitive intel is beneficial and leveraged by your sales team: 1. Conduct in-depth Win/Loss research - identify the key lost and won reasons that come up from your deals from the notes that reps are inputting into salesforce but also from win/loss interviews. You can hire a win/loss vendor to do this. I've personally worked with Clozd and Primary I ...Read More

Here's what I like to put into a positioning doc:  1. What market are we in ? How big is this market (TAM)? What's our serviceable obtainable market (SOM) ? 2. What does the competitve landscape look like?  2. Who are our customers? (buyer personas) 3. What challenges do they face? (key pain points)  4. What is our solution? (description of your offering) 5. How do we solve their problems? (solution/benefit statement)  6. What makes us unique (differentiators)  From what it sounds like you'll ne ...Read More

The key to getting adoption is to make sure you first get executive alignment along with bringing those teams (sales, marketing, product) along for the journey . As you're creating your positioning and messaging make sure you're getting sales, product, and marketing feedback. That way when you roll it out they will feel much more compelled to use it since they were part of the process.  Some other ideas: 1. Do an official " internal roadshow" where you roll this out to each team. Join team meeti ...Read More

1. Sales confidence - While not a metric measured in SFDC, you can work with enablement to craft a pre and post sales confidence metric to assess how confident reps feel in navigating competitive conversations.  2. Competitive win rate - You're likely already measuring win rate, but competitive win rate will give you a direct KPI to measure the improvment in closing competitive deals.  3. [ Product specific] Reduction in lost deals due to product capabilities - To measure this metric you'll need ...Read More

You'll want to create materials that you can package up and disseminate via a central hub like Highspot, Seismic, Showpad, Confluence etc. When you roll this out make sure you lead with "what's it in for them?" (faster deal cycles, higher ACV, etc)  It depends on who you're trying to enable (AEs, AMs, technical sales engineering) but typical effective competitive positioning materials include: 1. Battlecards 2. Swords and Shields (offensive/defensive plays) supported by customer stories and proo ...Read More

For smaller teams that may not have a built out CI team or CI PMM it can get tough to manage competitive research, positioning, creation enablement and dissemination of assets on top of everything else that you're doing as a PMM. This is why my philisophy is to really prioritize your top tier competitors and maybe even limiting it to the top 2 or 3 max. That doesn't mean you shouldn't stay on top of your industry and trends and what other players are doing, but that does mean that you aren't goi ...Read More

This is definitely tricky since getting in-depth product intel requires intimate knowledge about your competitors products. One technique some companies employ is mystery shopping research where you hire a researcher to pose as a buyer, but your organization may have a stance against this type of research. You can always look through review sites like G2 to see how your products are compared against top competitors products. But what I've found to be most effective is actually spending time talk ...Read More

You'll need to have both 1) Your core positioning and messaging doc at the overall company and product level and then 2) Your GTM plan for the new feature which includes messaging and positioning for that particular launch.  For any launch, you'll also need to come up with a tiering structure and then let's say it's a Tier 1 product launch that changes your positioning or messaging in some way you'll need to update your core positioning and messaging doc to reflect that change if the launch is b ...Read More

Competitive differentiation should make up the pillars of your messaging and value proposition. The reason being is that most markets are crowded and customers can choose from many alterntatives, so your differentation needs to be clearly articulated across the buyer's journey. To understand your competitive differentiation you can conduct buyer persona research, closed won research, analyze Gong calls with high ACVs, speak to reps and customer success teams, and really hone in on determining 1) ...Read More

The goal of competitive positioning is to own a space in the market that's yours by focusing on differentiated value. In order to fully be able to answer the question of what your differentiated value is or should be, you'll need to do some analysis. The following are key buckets that you'll need to dive into: 1. Market Analysis/ Profile: Market Size, Market Trends, Market Competitors, Market lifecycle stage 2. Segmentation& Personas -Determine your segmentation strategy and create a detaile ...Read More

Honestly, with the rise of tools like Gong you don't even need to necessarily ask your reps to join in on customer calls. If there are specific questions you want to ask you can always ask your rep to weave it into the call, or ask your AM or CS rep to schedule a call with an existing customer to aid with the market research. As long as customer calls are recorded in Gong you can always use that as a vehicle to go back and listen (and take advantage of some of the cool analytical features that G ...Read More

There's no silver bullet here because this really does involve setting aside time, especially when CI is not the only part of your job. You can set aside 1-2 hours once a week to do deep dives into your competitors website, PR/news, social media, etc.  There are a few automated ways to do this leveraging sophisticated tools like Klue and Crayon that will track your competitors every move (from news, PR, website changes, social media) and alert you to those changes. They can integrate with slack ...Read More