AMA: Pendo VP of Product Marketing, Jackie Palmer on Competitive Positioning
December 14 @ 10:00AM PST
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Pendo VP of Product Marketing, Jackie Palmer on Competitive Positioning
Top Questions
What metric, goal or KPI can you put on providing competitive intelligence to the company or product teams?
I work in a company that measures the impact of all projects, but admittedly this is a difficult area to track. Would love to any suggestions/thoughts.
Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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 ......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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 ......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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 c......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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 ......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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 - the......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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......Read More
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Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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......Read More
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Is competitive positioning an output of a feature or a marketing story?
I see a lot of battles between start-ups about similar features/products; I myself have tried to position our product with a differentiated story not always backed by features.
What's the ideal approach? Where does one draw the line?
Jackie Palmer
Pendo.io VP Product Marketing • December 13
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 ......Read More
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