AMA: Pendo VP of Product Marketing, Jackie Palmer on Competitive Positioning

Win/loss data can be a great source of competitive intel. Obviously it is ideal if you have the budget for a third-party to do some win/loss interviews or secret shopping, but even if you only leverage in house resources, win/loss analysis is huge. Most companies do track their overall win rates against competitors as part of their quarterly or annual KPIs. While we all know that those metrics are sometimes suspect due to inaccurate entry or inaccurate info, they are usually at least directional ...Read More

The top three ways I recommend researching competitors are: READ as much as you possibly can about them online. This includes the competitor's website and published content, peer review sites like G2 and TrustRadius, communities and forums like Reddit and Quora, analyst write-ups, etc. WATCH/LISTEN to as many things as you can. This would include live or virtual presentations by the competitor (at conferences, on webinars, etc), online demos self-guided tours they've released, sales calls where ...Read More

You're right this is difficult to measure but I would suggest two things. First, if you have created battlecards for each competitor, you should be able to measure views of those battlecards, both individually per competitor and overall. If you are using a competitive analysis tool like Crayon or Klue and you've integrated your CRM, you should also be able to measure closed won opportunities by reps who have viewed your battlecards. If you use a call intelligence solution like Gong, you can also ...Read More

It depends of course on your market position. But assuming you are in a competitive market, your sales team should be very aware of your competitive positioning. I would certainly include competitive positioning in the following training opportunities: New hire onboarding - make sure to show new hires where they can find resources like competitive battlecards, training decks, one pagers, analyst reports etc. You should also spend some time reviewing the overall competitive landscape and the top ...Read More

While you never want to price or package your solution based solely on what your competitors price or package theirs at, you certainly do need to monitor your competitors' pricing and packaging. Your pricing and packaging should be based on what actual value add your solution has but you do want to make sure you monitor sales deals to ensure you are not charging way more for some feature that your competitors give for free for example. I always try to research a competitor's packaging (this is h ...Read More

You should always be researching your competitors even if there is no officially published report like an MQ or Wave. Nowadays there are so many peer review places to find competitive information. You can look at sites like G2, TrustRadius etc to find information that might be valuable for your company. You may need to read individual reviews which can be tedious but could surface valuable swords (places where you can attack them) or shields (areas you need to have talking points on how to handl ...Read More

There are plenty of tools out there to gather competitive intel and you don't technically even need a tool - you could just set up Google alerts or search yourself. That said, here are some of the things I think are critical to gather when conducting competitive research: Strengths/weaknesses (sometimes called swords and shields) with talking points for each Product(s) overview Feature comparisons including gaps Questions for prospects to plant (landmines) Track record against you with customer ...Read More

As mentioned in some of my other responses, there are lots of places to gather competitive intelligence that are ethical and fair. Some key ways include: Competitor websites (pricing pages, online demos, self-guided tours, other content, etc) Competitor webinars Competitor social posts Peer review places like G2, TrustRadius etc. Forums like Reddit, Quora, and other industry specific community sites (Pavilion for sales and marketing for example) - read existing responses but don't pretend to pos ...Read More

This is a great point! Competitive intelligence is definitely a team sport and should not be solely produced by Product Marketing! I always try to reinforce that Product Marketing's intelligence is only as good as what we are given. Oftentimes, sales or customer-facing teams hear about new things quicker than PMM can. So at all training interactions with those customer-facing teams I always close with a "help us help you" message asking for their help with gathering intel. If you say it consiste ...Read More

Ideally you are not basing your overall positioning based solely on how your competitors position themselves. That said, you (or more likely sales) will inevitably be asked for comparisons. The best approach to this is to have a solid set of unique value propositions (UVPs) for your company - these can be product related or include other things like services only you offer or industries you specialize in. Once you have these UVPs agreed on, then you can start to create some competitive positioni ...Read More

I think you've taken the right approach! I would never recommend only building out your positioning based on features or products. You need a full, compelling story which should include non-product things as well as product-related things. Non-product things could be services you offer, training classes or certifications you give, industries or personas you specialize in, etc. Building out a full story including all of your unique value propositions and differentiators allows you to have a bette ...Read More