AMA: Jasper VP of Marketing, Meghan Keaney Anderson on Competitive Positioning

I try to create competitive intel at a couple of different levels of abstraction: * High-level: Usually in the form of a 2X2 which demonstrates the biggest difference between us and the rest of our field. The point of this is to give sales teams a highly memorable soundbite at a categorical level, e.g. "Unlike point solutions, we are comprehensive." "Unlike clunky enterprise platforms, we are easy to use." * Detailed: For the most frequently encountered competitors (we're talking 2-3 here not 8-10) we do more detailed one-pagers for training and to be pulled up when reps encounter questions from buyers. * Breaking news: As our top competitors or new entrants with high-overlap announce major updates, we send summaries to the sales teams and update positioning.

I'm a fan of tracking closed-won rates against a top competitor. It's a good long-term trend to tell if your positioning is working and your product is growing stronger in the areas where it had been weak. I don't track that monthly, but rather quarter over quarter or even year over year as a health barometer.

Much like with target audiences, you have to choose a heirarchy of competitors. This should be informed by the alternatives you come across most often in sales calls. This can be tough when alternative companies are getting a lot of media attention, but my rule generally is, until we start seeing a competitor on calls, we don't build a profile. This is partially for focus and partially because without hearing directly from your buyers why they are considering another provider you are putting a lot of weight on your competitors marketing materials. For updates - we do so on a rolling basis as we learn updates and whenever we review and update our positioning.

 I think there are loads of ways you can differentiate outside of product features. * Features: You offer something valuable that others don't within your product (e.g., automation) * Customer experience: You have invested in UX and UI or for non-tech products the in-store or customer policy experiences deeply so that you provide a more frictionless user and customer experience. * Audience: There are alternative options on the market, but none that were built specifically for your audience (e.g. "designers", "small businesses", "The real estate industry" "diverse body types"). * Community and Brand: Perhaps your product is similar to alternatives, but you've built a better community around your product or a more engaging brand. 

Here are my go-tos for competitive positioning: * A competitive overview deck that speaks simply and directly to our positioning in the field and our most defensible differences between categories of competitors. * More detailed internal wiki pages for our most frequently seen competitors. * Closed-lost analysis and theme summaries to inform objection documents * Public comparison pages on the website to help buyers decide. These should be fair, objective, and serve as guidance not defense.

Competitive posititioning is a core element of product positioning. The primary architecture of brand and product-level positioning comes down to this: * Audience: Who are you primarily building for and marketing to? * Pain/Enemy: What is their biggest pain point or problem? * Solution: How do you address this problem? * Differentiation: What makes your approach to solving this problem different and better? * Urgency: Why is now an important right time to address this issue? Competitive positioning lives under that differentiation bullet and it's the why behind your whole brand. The sharper and more defensible that is the better. You should not tackle specific competitors in the positioning doc, but you can broadly categorize them. For example, "Unlike clunky enterprise platforms, our platform is built for the way people work today."