AMA: Momentive (SurveyMonkey) Director, Product Marketing, Scott Monroe on Competitive Positioning

I've found that there's a tendency in B2B SaaS to have some people in the org get concerned over every new "competitor" in the market. You can't allow this to affect your strategy because most SaaS tools and solutions today have a lot of competitors. When I think about who my true competitors truly are, I look at a few metrics or types of data: * How often does this vendor win deals from us? * What is our win rate compared to this vendor? * How many of our existing customers are leaving for this vendor? * What is their growth rate? Number of enterprise customers? Annual revenue? (These are just a few of the metrics you can analyze to see what kind of momentum they may have). Ultimately, you can't be worried about every company that may be in your space. You either believe in your product strategy or you don't. Find the 4 or 5 who are actually winning deals most often, taking customers from you, or growing like crazy and focus on them as your primary competitors. The others are secondary and shouldn't be viewed in the same way. I'm not saying ignore them, but don't get too caught up in worrying about them too much.

I totally agree that narrative differentiation is a difficult thing to do, especially in B2B SaaS markets that are crowded and when the tools do essentially a lot of the same things and accomplish the same goals for customers. In these situations, I usually come back to a very simple question: why do people buy from us? There has to be at least one reason your customers buy from you over your competitors, or you wouldn't have a viable business. * Figure out what those specific reasons are and build your narrative and positioning from that foundation * If it's your customer experience, find customer quotes, case studies, Gong calls, etc. that will help you build that narrative. * Find the right balance between using phrases and keywords that will ensure you're found when people are searching, but still staying true to your key reasons why you are different. 

There are a few things that have worked for me and my teams at various places in my career: * Having a dedicated Competitive Intelligence team or lead makes a massive difference. When they are creating and distributing insightful content about competitors, it really enhances (and simplifies) the process of positioning products, solutions, or brands relative to competitors. * Creating a robust messaging framework for your product/solution/service is key. I've seen these be both short and sweet, and very in-depth. Either way can work, they just need to be useful for your internal audiences (content, brand, sales, etc). There's no use spending all that time creating a messaging framework if other teams aren't going to leverage it. * I'm sure it's not the case everywhere, but in my experience, sales teams still love one-pagers. For competitive positioning, having succinct, but useful comparisons between your products and top competitors are fairly easy to create and useful for sales teams. * Go-to-market or launch plans should absolutely include your competitive positioning, messaging, and strategies for how you are going to bring them to life. Evangelizing them internally with your partners is key. Even if you have to talk through your strategies in smaller groups, rather than one big training, it can go a long way in getting buy-in from the right people.

There is certainly an overlap between market and competitive intelligence, but they serve very different purposes. For me, market intelligence is more about understanding customer trends, preferences, behaviors, buyer personas, and even micro-economic forces in your particular industry. Competitive intelligence is truly focused on your competitors--what they are building, understanding their strategies, analyzing their metrics, finding the "why" in their customer stories, and evaluating their product-market fit and unique offering in the market. So if you are building an intelligence team, make sure you have market and competitive intel roles either split out entirely or at least ensure the goals of the two are differentiated and clear to your teams (especially sales). 

The old debate of prioritizing existing customers vs. new ones...a tale as old as time. I think this one can depend a lot on the stage of your company or product. If you have a lot of existing customers already, consider that happy existing customers tend to spend more money with you. I saw a stat recently that showed existing customers spend 67% more than new customers. If your product marketing or customer marketing teams are large enough, have some people focused on new growth, and others on expansion. If you are going to focus on expansion, here are a few metrics to consider for success: * Customer retention rate * Upsell/cross-sell revenue added * Product adoption rates * Customer Satisfaction Score * Net Promoter Score * Customer Effort Score But I don't suggest that to say you should NOT focus on new growth. if you have a brand new product, you're obviously going to focus on new customers. And to do that, you'll need to create new inbound and outbound pipeline (not a news flash, I know). There's no right or wrong answer to which is more important, it's just situational. Figure out where your company or product stands at the moment and build a strategy from there.