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Meghan Keaney Anderson

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

April 6, 2023 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What are the top documents you create when working on Competitive Positioning programs?

    Meghan Keaney Anderson
    Meghan Keaney Anderson

    Watershed Global Head of Product Marketing & Communications | Formerly HubSpot • 3y

    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.
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  2. Relying on narrative differentiation is obviously essential when products are essentially the same across you and your competitor set, but it's also a tough thing to do? Any advice?

    Meghan Keaney Anderson
    Meghan Keaney Anderson

    Watershed Global Head of Product Marketing & Communications | Formerly HubSpot • 3y

     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. "d ...Read More

    644 Views
    1 request

  3. How do you create competitive intel that is really beneficial to sales (i.e. they actually read and use it)?

    Meghan Keaney Anderson
    Meghan Keaney Anderson

    Watershed Global Head of Product Marketing & Communications | Formerly HubSpot • 3y

    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) ...Read More

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  4. What metric, goal or KPI can you put on providing competitive intelligence to the company or product teams?

    I work in a company that measures the impact of all projects, but admittedly this is a difficult area to track. Would love to any suggestions/thoughts.

    Meghan Keaney Anderson
    Meghan Keaney Anderson

    Watershed Global Head of Product Marketing & Communications | Formerly HubSpot • 3y

    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.

    1,025 Views
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  5. How do you systematically organize & update your competitive intel when there's so much new information that can flow in every day?

    Meghan Keaney Anderson
    Meghan Keaney Anderson

    Watershed Global Head of Product Marketing & Communications | Formerly HubSpot • 3y

    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 l ...Read More

    709 Views
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  6. How does competitive positioning relate to general positioning? What frameworks do you use to help the company understand the difference?

    Meghan Keaney Anderson
    Meghan Keaney Anderson

    Watershed Global Head of Product Marketing & Communications | Formerly HubSpot • 3y

    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 ...Read More

    1,451 Views
    2 requests