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

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 examples (both wins and losses) * Customer quotes/testimonials * Positioning/messaging * Analyst intel (if available) * Pricing (if available) * SWOT analysis * Company overview * How they go to market * Market share and financial info for public companies * M&A activity (if any)

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 pose as a prospect and ask one yourself, that can verge into the ethical gray zone * Marketplaces like the Salesforce AppExchange etc. * Win/loss interviews with your customers and prospects * Industry analysts like Gartner, Forrester etc. * Sales calls where prospects mention the competitor * Public filings like S-1s, earning reports, earnings calls etc. if applicable There are certainly gray zones but a clear no no is proprietary information people might have if they've left a competitor and come to work for your company. Make sure you do not ask to see any documents they might have taken with them.

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 positioning materials that relate to these UVPs. But the UVPs should come first. One framework I've found helpful especially for sales is the MUD framework - what is meaningful, unique and defensible. Your UVPs can then be placed side by side with some competitive positioning in the defensible column. The MUD framework can go into your battlecards or a cheat sheet or whatever else you use to train sales on how to position against competitors. That way the company will be able to talk about your UVPs but also have talking points on how to position those against competitors.

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 hopefully on their website) to make sure that my solution's packaging gives it a competitive advantage. You should also monitor sales deals to ensure that you are not pricing yourself out of the market quarter over quarter. There may be some new change to a competitor's pricing that might start to impact your competitive deals against them. You should ensure you track opportunities won or lost with a reason of pricing throughout the year to see if you need to make a possible pricing change or offer an incentive or discount. Sometimes you have a pricing or packaging advantage over a competitor and you should be sure to call that out prominently and clearly in your battlecards and competitive training materials. Especially nowadays with everyone so price conscious, it is critical to highlight every competitive advantage in your battlecards.

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 directionally correct. I do track win rates as part of my overall product marketing dashboard but I use a rolling 3 or 6 month window to try to minimize data issues or seasonality. I don't have a specific percentage to share in terms of how much of overall competitive intel comes from win/loss data but I do use win/loss interviews to validate competitive intel I want to double check like features they have or don't have, pricing, what messaging they are using etc. It is helpful to use win/loss info to confirm things you already suspect or that you've read about on their website or in other sources like analyst evals. As you probably know, vendors sometimes stretch the truth and so win/loss info can be good ways to try to confirm competitive intel!

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 consistently, they are more apt to remember! But beyond always closing with that ask in large group settings like scheduled trainings, I also always ask when I am speaking with someone 1:1, whether that be discussions with product managers (who might be doing their own research), anytime I am chatting with reps or CSMs, or even if I run into someone in the hall. Keep asking for intel and they will remember to come to you in the future!

The top three ways I recommend researching competitors are: 1. 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. 2. 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 the competitor was mentioned by the prospect or customer, etc. 3. ANALYZE all the data you have. Look at win/loss data, compile lists of features, prices, messaging comparisons etc, track mentions of them and then compare all that data to your own information. Put together analysis docs of this data ideally quarterly or biannually.

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 monitor mentions of those battlecards in sales calls. Battlecard usage is a decent proxy for measuring use of competitive intelligence across the Revenue org. It's certainly harder to measure the impact of competitive intelligence on product development but you could monitor features that your customers have requested and tag them with competitor names if you think those requested features would help you compete better against a particular competitor. Then you can track delivery of those features.

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 handle). Forums like Reddit, Quora, and other industry specific community sites (Pavilion for sales and marketing for example) are also valuable sources of information. You can also conduct win/loss interviews with your customers and prospects. You'd be surprised at what competitive information you can get from a recently closed customer or sometimes from a prospect who is willing to talk to you or a third party about what they liked or disliked about your competitor during the sales process. You can also try to do some "secret shopping" by asking a friend at another company to go through a sales pitch with the competitor. Analysts, even if they don't produce a Wave or MQ, can also often be willing to answer questions about competitors, though they may not have as much information as if they had gone through a full evaluation. This is all in addition to attending competitor events (both live or virtual) and deep diving on their websites of course. There are always ways of finding out pros/cons of your competitors!

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 competitors at a high level. * Individual competitor training - build out short training classes that reps can take on their own time. Include a review of the competitor battlecard, why you win/why they win, any FUD they should expect to hear, how to handle objections, pricing, and reviews of any recent deals you have taken from them. You could also show a recorded demo of the competitor's solution if you have it. Update this training at least 2x a year. * Competitor deep dives - take the opportunity at sales all hands meetings or dedicated training sessions to choose a competitor to do a deep dive on. You could rotate through your top competitors so you are hitting all of them at least once per year. * Trainings after an analyst evaluation is published - after every analyst eval (MQ, Wave etc) is released, I always recommend putting together a sales response document that outlines the key talking points sales will need to both tout your position on the eval and answer questions about competitor's positions. Include the strengths and weaknesses the analyst has published about your competitors with ways the reps can combat those points. Hold a live session around the publication date to alert the sales team of these evals and show them how to use your sales response doc. Another way to get information out or gather questions from sales is to create tiger teams for your top competitors. These can take the form of Slack channels, email aliases, and/or bi-weekly or monthly standing office hours for reps to bring up questions and talk through deals. These tiger teams can function as places for time sensitive info sharing. You can also set up a general competitive Slack channel for overall questions and to capture questions on lesser known competitors.

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 better position in the market and doesn't leave you constantly repositioning if a competitor comes out with a new feature. As I mentioned in one of the other answers, once you have your unique value props or UVPs, you can then apply the MUD framework (what is meaningful, unique, defensible) and start to layer in your competitive positioning there. Features should never be the only part of your positioning, competitive or otherwise. Your approach with a differentiated story is a good one. Set up your story, surround it with both features and non-feature based UVPs. Then take that story and map out where your competitive differentiators lie (the defensible part of MUD) and you'll be in good shape.