AMA: Replicant Head of Product Marketing, Raymond Hwang on Competitive Positioning

Great question! Two that come to mind: Slack vs. Email: I've always like how Slack positioned themself vs email as an overall category (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQsA2oiD_xA). They didn’t directly attack email vendors by name but instead hit on highly relatable pain points for anyone who's ever worked via email and highlighted the strengths of their platform. Zoom: Zoom's "Video conferencing that doesn't suck" campaign is a great one (https://www.zoom.com/en/blog/video-conferencing-that-do ...Read More

A comprehensive competitive intelligence program has to tap into a bunch of different sources across your organization. Below are some sources I've found valuable in the past. Sales Team: Your AEs/AMs are on the front lines day-in and day-out. They'll often have up-to-date insights on competitor tactics, customer objections, and lines of attack that have worked in the past. Listen to Gong/Chorus calls regularly, scour salesforce data, and directly speak with sales people for important info. Cust ...Read More

There's a few documents I've found consistently valuable for CI programs. Competitive battlecards for customer-facing teams Product deep dives: typically done for product teams to show them competitor capabilities and where there are strengths/gaps compared to our own offering. Win/Loss reporting: data-driven and shows trends such as win rates by competitors, industry, region, etc. and reasons behind key losses Messaging deep dive: more for a marketing audience to analyze competitor positioning ...Read More

Yeah that's a really important step. Nothing is more frustrating than putting together a great battlecard and competitor deep dive that then goes unused. Your sales enablement counterpart and sales leader will be your best friends in this area. Sales Training Sessions: Goes without saying, but live training sessions are the first step. Beyond just sharing your findings, you should include role-playing exercises where sales reps have the chance to practice pitching against competitors, handling o ...Read More

Even without a Gartner MQ or Forrester Wave, there are a lot of ways to understand the competitive landscape. Take a look at some of my answers around getting competitive intel ethically and good sources of competitive intel. I've also worked in product areas where Gartner/Forrester/IDC were not yet investing significant resources, however there were other very influential analysts and research groups that produced high quality analysis of the competitive landscape. So all to say, take a look at ...Read More

There are plenty of ways to do this! Competitor published info: Websites, press releases, annual reports (for public companies), whitepapers, blog posts, and social media profiles are all fair game and can tell you a lot about a competitor's product offerings, features & functionality, support models, target market, and overall strategy. Industry reports: Analyst reports, review sites, Glassdoor, etc. are all great as well. Events and trade shows: Observe competitor booths and attend their p ...Read More

Really important question - competitive intelligence is more likely to be utilized if other functions are helping to source it and are brought in early in the process. A few tips to ensure it's seen as a team effort: Establish a cross-functional team: Include representatives from sales, rev ops, sales enablement, PMM, marketing, product, customer success, and other relevant functions. Define clear roles & responsibilities. As an example, Rev Ops could handle win/loss reporting, product could ...Read More

It's always a balancing act, isn't it? I've also had trouble overburdening customers in the past. Here are some things that have worked for me: Get market research into regular convos: If your sales and customer success teams are having daily conversations with clients, arm them with questions so they can naturally get it into their existing convos. e.g. they can ask clients about their experiences with competitors or what additional features they'd find valuable. Frame your ask to appeal to the ...Read More

Good competitive positioning IMO has to do both. Grounding your competitive positioning in features as the tangible, objective capabilities of your product is important. However, the marketing story is how you translate those features into a narrative that resonates with your target audience and taps into their painpoints, desire, and emotions. To be more concrete, take Company A that primarily appeals to buyers based on a comparison list of features/functionality and what they have that their c ...Read More