AMA: GitLab Vice President of Product Marketing, Dave Steer on Competitive Positioning

My team and I use a Message House framework that covers the following elements: Solution/Product Naming Tagline Positioning Statement Short and Long Descriptions For the Positioning Strategy, we use a modified version of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome positioning canvas. The canvas, we have found, invites us to be more critical and thorough in our positioning strategy. It includes: Competitive Alternatives Unique Attributes Value Who Cares A Lot We inform the messaging framework with the posi ...Read More

The market is littered with really bad examples of competitive messaging, unfortunately. They usually make their case on technical details that are irrelevant to the prospective customer.  The best competitive positioning doesn't mention competition. After all, why give them air time? Rather, it uses competitive insights to guide positioning strategy -- and the positioning strategy, in turn, guides salient messaging that is relevant to your customers.  Make the messaging about the problems they ...Read More

I think of competitive intel like product managers think about their product.  The first step is to listen to your stakeholders (or internal customers) from sales, product, customer success and marketing to understand what they want and need in competitive intel. What are their gaps in intel? In content? How do they best consume the information and content you develop for them? What form factor(s) should it take? What cadence do they want it in? Once you have those insights, you can develop cont ...Read More

Terrific question! A few metrics that are key to competitive intel: Competitive Intel 101 Metrics 1. Sales engagement -- Is your sales team using the competitive content that your team is developing? If you use a sales enablement platform (we use Highspot), getting this data is much easier. Set your OKRs on increasing sales engagement with this type of content. 2. Sales satisfaction -- This is a more qualitative measure, but very important. Find out whether your sales team feels more confident i ...Read More

I have a few lenses that I look through for competitive differentiation: 1. The Positioning Canvas -- I mentioned this in an earlier question, but it's worth repeating the effectiveness of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome positioning canvas (must reading for any Product Marketer). With this methodology, you and your team will go through an exercise of defining 'competitive alternative' -- the task here is to identify what customers would use if you did not exist AND to look inwards at what uniq ...Read More

You're right: competition never stands still. And when you capture competitive information, it's likely that you are seeing the result of what they put into motion weeks, months, or quarters ago.  I've approached the flow of information coming from the competitive landscape differently from company to company. Here are a few guideposts that I've used:  Time-based: Find a cadence -- like 1x per month, 1x per quarter, etc. -- to update your competitive intel, including content like Competitive Car ...Read More

Be resourceful! Even when there's little public-facing marketing, there's always a ton of other public resources that you can look to. Here are a few: 1 - Audit their social media, press coverage, and press releases -- Companies like to talk about their products and the success they are having in market. This is a great resource for intel. Another great resource is LinkedIn. You'd be amazed about how much information you can glean by looking at the background of people who work for your competit ...Read More