AMA: Product Marketing Leader, Paul Rudwall on Competitive Positioning

As with everything, the playbook here is being rewritten in real-time, largely by AI-native companies that are more nimble and therefore compete differently than SaaS incumbents. I'll try to walk through both new and evolving playbooks, because if you're in SaaS the traditional playbook will work, meanwhile the AI-native playbook is relevant to both AI and SaaS companies who have to compete with them. Traditional SaaS Playbook My first piece of advice is to pay attention to copycats, but don't o ...Read More

The short answer is "Yes." You can fight a price war with positioning. That said, it's really hard. And, if you're already in a price war you've lost the high ground your messaging was meant to protect. First, you need to diagnose why you're losing. "We're losing on price" is arguably the most dangerous win/loss analysis datapoint to take at face value. While it very well could be the case, you should also look at whether it's a different problem: ICP Problem?: Are you in deals you were never go ...Read More

There are actually three questions here. I'll focus mostly on how to weave AI into your existing narrative, before coming back to the others at the end. 1: Start with a narrative that's built to evolve: Whatever narrative you write should have enough staying power to evolve with your product (and its AI capabilities). Anchor it in the fundamental problems you solve and the principles of how you solve them and don't focus on features that may change quarter to quarter (or week to week if you're m ...Read More

Managing competitive at a company that's scaling can be difficult. At scale, you should have someone who owns the function (if not a full team). But, until that point you need to think about who owns it, how much time to dedicate, and how to do it well if it's not your specialty. This is a bigger question than can be answered in one post, so I'll focus on some of the bigger points. Practice > Projects One mistake you can't make is not doing it because someone doesn't own it. Whether you have ...Read More

There's no one right answer here. Every company and industry is a little different. But, there are a few things I always come back to. These aren't ranked, because they're all important and in theory should all be happening in parallel. Frame the problem and solution toward what you're uniquely capable of delivering. In many respects, this is the core job of a PMM. But, it's especially important in competitive messaging. Calling out functionality as important when competitors can do it too is an ...Read More