AMA: Narvar Head Of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Competitive Positioning

It's incredibly important! Not just the individual win/loss/churn reports, but aggregate data as well can be a foundation or validation for decision making.  In past roles I've used this data to focus programs around: Competitive Intelligence - This one is obvious, but one key output has been more intense focus around how to win against specific competitors. Content - Hearing why some prospects chose a competitor and the picture they paint can be exteremly useful. It shoudl spur ideas for positi ...Read More

A few key documents that you should have: Research Document - For me, this has always been internal and been a way for me to store insights, data, or any resources on a competitor -- or aggregate set of competitors. This doc is never shared broadly and is just used as a starting point to collect information. Competitive Battlecard - This should be the central resource where everything your sales and CS team need lives. Competitive Messaging Spreadsheet - I like to create a compettiive spreadshee ...Read More

First of all, it needs to be rooted in the day-to-day realities of sales and the conversations their having. If Product Marketing is coming up with competitive intel in a vacuum without input from Sales, then it will naturally fall flat.  As you should do with positioning, make Sales a key part of how you create competitive intelligence and what it needs to include. Most great sales reps and managers will already be doing some of this themselves, so start by learning what their doing. If you hav ...Read More

There are ton's of different templates available, a quick Google search will turn up dozens of positioning templates. This is a pretty good one I've used as a foundation previously. What's most important though is adapting any template to the needs of your organization. The example I linked above lacks a tie-in to mission and vision, which can be useful components -- especially if you are a part of a multi-product company. Overall, I think it's important to include some key pieces such as: Missi ...Read More

This is arguably the hardest part of positioning. In my experience, it has to start before you really start drafting positioning and as you're doing research.  First, talk with a few folks from your sales and CS teams and get a sense of any pain points they're hearing in the market. Gaining early buy-in from Sales will pave the path to making adoption a whole lot easier once positing is written. Next, once you have positioning drafted get feedback from the same group of individuals from Sales an ...Read More

Love this question! I'd think about it in terms of outcomes, and effectiveness.  So I'd look at metrics like: Competitive Win Rates Usage - To be clear, I like to look at this through the lens of whether the usage of a particular piece of competitive content is impacting the sales cycle and not just pure usage of content.  Product Feedback/Usage Retention Depending on the size and stage of your company, you may also have things like: Competitive SEO - If you use a tool lke SEMRush then you'll be ...Read More

Put in a place that's easy for them to find, and be consistent. While that's oversimplified, it really comes down to that. Sales will look for competitive positioning as they need it, so having the materials in a place they can easily access and consistently get updates is the central part of ensuring it's used. There are of course a whole bunch of things we can layer on-top of this -- internal competitive newsletter, closed won/loss data sharing, and more. The internal newsletter can be a great ...Read More

Yes, I believe in tieing positioning up to overall company positioning. The way I've described it before to other team members is it's a scaffold -- the foundation is the company positioning and messaging, and stemming from that is platform positioning and messaging, and then product positioning and messaging. These all should latter up to the overall company positioning. As with everything, there are caveats -- if you're a part of a company that is making a huge shift, or entering a completley ...Read More

I think competitive is one aspect of overall pricing and packaging, but it shouldn't solely dictate how you price or package your product. There are exceptions of course, and if your competitor is the defacto market standard then aligning it more closely to competitors is likely necessary.  Overall, focus your pricing and packaging on your customer, target segments, and unique differentiation. Then ensure it's not wildly off from competitors. A tool like Klue or Crayon can also help you track wh ...Read More

Great question. First of all, make sure you set expectations up-front that results will take a while to see. Overall count the incremental wins, and show the milestones your crossing as a way to share that progress. Have a great conversation with an analyst where they told you a key piece of insight? Share that amongst your executives and PMM team.  Also, make sure you -- or your executive team -- are regularly talking with analysts. If you're responsible for AR, or have an AR team, you should b ...Read More

I think there's a few different aspects of this: 1. Alignment -- There needs to be alignment between your feature and overall product positioning and messaging. If you are sprinting towards a major launch of a notable feature then it should focus on how that capability naturally solves key challenges in the market for prospective buyers. That said, launch and core product positioning shouldn't be different (for the same product line). A launch is an opportunity to drive momentum -- and you can u ...Read More

Great question! I'll start with saying Klue has a phenomenal blog post on this topic I'd encourage you to read. But to your question, most will try to differentiate off features. In most cases this will lead to a conversation about value -- and in a crowded market is really difficult to truly differentiate in this case. There are some tactical things you can pursue to drive differentiation: Social Proof Lean-in to aspects of your solution that customers rave about! I've seen this be everythign f ...Read More

Good question. As with everything, a lot of the answer is it depends. If you have a customer marketing team, I hope they're doing some level of "air traffic control" and have a sense of which customers are being reached out to with specific asks (i.e. beta requests, market research, company speaking opportunity, etc). If not, I'd work with Sales and CS to ensure you're talking to the right customers, and on the right cadence. Come-up with a list of customers you're going to reach out to and coll ...Read More

There's a lot to look at, but here's an overview: Company & Product Insight: Company Stage/Size/Growth - This speaks for itself, but where is the company, what size, and how quickly are they growing. Ideally you should have a sense of the company size you prefer so you know where you fit. Social Proof - Case Studies, and reviews on sites like G2 and TrustRadius are priceless Analyst Reports/Position Product Usage & NPS Values & Culture - Not only what the company itself says their va ...Read More

Oftentimes the day-to-day of changes can be "noisy", so try to not get too caught-up in the everyday changes. If a competitor is having a major product launch, or doing a complete rebrand -- then absolutely spend time digging in and processing the news and how it impacts your company/position.  But overall, I'd carve out regular time weekly and monthly to digest the noise -- and ensure you earmark time in your calendar for any of those high-profile announcements. That way you don't get pulled in ...Read More

There's so many tools out in the market today, so here are a few recommendations of categories: Surveys - SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, Qualtrics Dashboards - Looker, Sisense, Etc Market Data - Statista, MarketingCharts Analysts/Review Sites - Gartner, Forrester, IDC, G2, Trust Radius There's plenty of others -- but these are a great foundation to build market research. Beyond these, there are programs you can gain a ton of additional data like closed won/loss interviews, competitive intelligence, pro ...Read More