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

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 v ...Read More

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 bu ...Read More

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 o ...Read More

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 vend ...Read More

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 p ...Read More