Competitive Positioning

I think it’s hard to showcase messaging in an interview unless you’re specifically bringing up documented work. At HubSpot, we like to give candidates an exercise before an interview that typically ties into positioning and messaging. Oftentimes this exercise will tie back to a recently released product or feature, and we’ll ask the candidate how they would position the product and bring that positioning to life through a launch campaign. This approach has actually worked really well and taught us some new ways of approaching messaging that we hadn’t considered before. Once a new PMM comes ...

Love this question!  Obviously, always protect your employer’s confidential information. However, if you have done your work correctly, your messaging will inform all of the material and content you’ve developed. It would be reflected on your website, on your datasheets, on other public-facing content (press releases, blogs, etc.) But far more important than showing what you have produced is proving the impact that it had. Showing success metrics for messaging is one of the most difficult challenges for product marketers. One problem is that messaging success depends on the collective a...

The success is positioning is about proving that your work made your employer known for something in the market.  One of the most common ways PMMs do this is by showing how they get the company a top quadrant or wave leader spot with Gartner of Forrester respectively. Nowadays, G2 reviews and or even reviews by influential developers can help - as long as they buttress your product's differentiators.  You can also demonstrate by showing how your work let do growth in a certain business segment. For example, did your repositioning help the company move from a nice tool to more of a pla...

When I am looking for messaging and positioning validation from outside the org, I find that people engage more with a story than with a static framework. And as far as stories go, everyone much prefers pictures to reading dense Powerpoint slides! To that end, putting together a solid "marketecture" is a great place to start. This allows you to paint the picture of not just your product, features and functions, but you can also start assigning value and differentiated messaging to each of them. I find this especially helpful with current users/customers. They know the technical details (i....

There is a process to messaging and I think many folks are overly focused on the last step which is the final translation to words. I actually think this piece is the simplest of all the steps so I don't spend a lot of time looking at documented work when I interview product marketers. What's really important to me is understanding how a candidate thinks about and navigates the process itself. How does someone internalize the needs of the customer and market dynamics. In many ways, this is more about understanding how someone synthesizes data (both qualitative and quantitative) and builds e...

Make sure you talk about the process! That includes:  * What was the existing state when you started (i.e. messaging didn't exist, it did exist but it was falling flat / was outdated, etc.)?  * How did you go about developing the messaging (i.e. what inputs did you use)?  * How did you test and/or validate it with customers / prospects? * How did you socialize it and get buy-in internally? How did you roll it out?  * How was it received in the market? (Can be anecdotal if needed, but of course ideal to have actual quantified impact)  * What was the most difficult aspect of i...

This is a great one! It's also something few people do well in an interview setting. It's a bit challenging to do verbally, but if you think it through in advance, you can be prepared when the opportunity presents itself. The first thing - the success of your positioning in an interview setting is best shown through anecdotes and specific details. Just like in real life, it's very hard to say "my positioning increased our pipeline by 15%." That's a complex calculus, and not easily justifiable. Instead, tie it to a story. For example, "we made this adjustment to the message for this audie...

This is such a good question There are many ways to demonstrate success of messaging/positioning work 1. Talk through the process - Explain your approach to developing messaging and positioning. Talk about the customer interviews you did, the drafts you wrote, the messaging pillars you discarded and why, the frameworks you followed, the internal sales validation you did, the product deep dives you sat through, the brainstorming sessions and workshops you led, the customer testing you observed and the internal roadshows you led. Talk about how your brought stakehol...

I’ve had the best success with easy to digest “competitive battlecards” for sales. The simpler, the better. They should give basic company info, pricing, and how to handle objections. For larger sales teams, these are a great reference point for them to use on the phone.   The ultimate goal of the battlecards should be for any salesperson - new or experienced - to be able to quickly articulate how you are different from the competition. If it doesn’t meet that goal, you’ve missed the mark.   The design of this is important. I’ve used a Google doc with a grid and also a vertical PPT slid...

This is a little meta, but the best advice I have is to treat your sellers as your customers.  What would you do to try to understand how to get a customer to use your product?  Do some research - via interviews, observations, surveys, etc, and learn their workflows, their gaps, their pain points, etc when it comes to how they use content to prep for sales calls (and for inside sales, while they’re actually on calls).  Then prototype (if appropriate), and get them to walk you through how they’d use it or not.  Only when you land on a format that’s useful should you cascade to multiple compe...

Timeliness and accessiblity are also key to providing value to your team.  * Providing a list of month-end/ quarter-end killshots speaking to the most up-to-date intel and positioning you have on focused competitors (maybe trending that month) is not only going to be acknowledged, but can boost morale and (product) confidence in your team.  * Creating a Slack channel or Salesforce group for competitive intel can be a great way to get new intel in front of people as it appears—and can be contributed to by CX, Sales, etc. not just PMM.  * Ensure you have one central locat...

Getting sales buy in on what type of information they want early on can be really helpful (it can also be useful if they change their mind later on). Starting with a proof of concept then circulating the first battlecard among sales leadership before you start building out other competitors.  Set a standard of how battlecards will be used. Normally battlecards are a strickly internal only resource. I would highly recommend you don't make the assumption that sales or other parts of your organization won't be tempted to share this information directly with a prospect or a partner. Word o...

Real time competitive insight direct from buyers. Easy way to collect this information is via a win/loss interviews. Simply ask questions regarding who else they considered and why. Dig into areas such as brand, product, sales experience, pricing, culture. Sales teams always perk up when the data has been collected from the very buyers they are selling to. It gives them a strong frame of reference for how the market views their solution versus the competitition. It also may help to shed light on why a deal was won or lost. Good luck!

Agree w/ comments above. Easily digestible chunks of data presented in a battle card format (2 pages) is very effective. Remember to keep it brief and concise (e.g. 3 bullet points per topic). There's a conference in October that is focused on competitive marketing, including sessions on content and battle card creation. www.competitivemarketingsummit.com  

Great question and one that really hits home for me since I used to do competitive intel while sitting in the sales organization at Medallia. The best approach I've seen is first identifying the top content needed by the sales team by actually sitting in sales meetings and in front of customers. It's a great way to see where the gaps are in the messaging and content bill of materials that PMM needs to produce for Sales.  After getting some first hand knowledge, I typically work with Sales Engineers and Account Executives to build and test the content (1-pagers, demo videos, competitive b...

As with any other sales content, find out how your specific sales team likes to consume content. This will give you an idea of the format, as well as the channels in which to share this information. This will also depend on your company culture. In my personal experience it's important to do the following: * Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point people to. * Share the links, and share it again, and again over time. * Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitive intel docs (but also keep detailed documentation if anyone wants to dig into s...

This is a great question and one that generally takes refinement over time based on feedback from sales.  Here's what you can do to make sure your competitive intel is beneficial and leveraged by your sales team: 1. Conduct in-depth Win/Loss research - identify the key lost and won reasons that come up from your deals from the notes that reps are inputting into salesforce but also from win/loss interviews. You can hire a win/loss vendor to do this. I've personally worked with Clozd and Primary Intel and they've been great in accelerating these competitive insights.  2. Survey reps, liste...

Competitive Battlecards are the best asset for sales but remember to KISS (keep it stupid simple). Sales are often pressed for time so how can you clearly pick apart your differentiators (vs the competitor), give the rep a compelling reason it matters, and even lay some trap setting questions. Depending on how competitive your market is, you may also want to add some more detailed resources: 1. An objection handling doc. If you have a lot of new reps or a more junior team, you may consider writing out scripts for each of the objection points. 2. Win library. Have a library of wins a...

Love this question, because if sales doesn’t use your competitive intel then what’s the point of investing time at the expense of your other competing priorities. A few things I recommend: * Work with your sales leaders and sales enablement (if you have sales enablement) to determine the best format, channels, and cadence for competitive intel. Make sure it’s easily accessible since reps won’t waste time searching for it. What works best depends on your sales team and their preferences. * Make it actionable and easily digestible. For the most part reps don’t need in-depth ...

When gathering competitive intel, I find the most important thing is to have the goal for it clearly mapped out. Why does Sales (or product) want the competitive intel? What will they use it for? If you start from a clear understanding of how the intel will help, it is easier to provide useful information. I recommend being as prescriptive as possible with regard to how the info can be used to help your team achieve a goal. Assuming you have intelligence that achieves your stated goals, you may need to "market it". How can you drive awareness of new info? A newsletter? A webinar? Is ther...

Hah! You kinda answered your own question here. Create competitive intel that is easy to read and applicable to how Sales will use it! Sales doesn't want a novel about each competitor. They want high-level bullets that help them understand how to put their own company in context of that competitor if it comes up with a prospect.  And most likely, competitors come up in sales conversations when a buyer is evaluating multiple options or if you're trying to replace an incumbent. Consider including some critical information that would help a sales person in these situations: where you're ...

This is a fun one. An aphorism we could coin here is that "Competitive battlecards are just like datasheets. Every salesperson desperately wants a new one, but nobody ever uses them."  The challenge is that most competitive intel and content is boring, too detailed to use in the moment, hard to find, and usually out of date. What that means is that great competitive intel is a content marketing problem at heart. It has to be relevant, it has to be interesting, and it has to be easy to consume. The most dependable way to figure out what works is to try a number of different things earl...

I first start with really solid positioning, which should clearly identify how your offering is differentiated from other competitors in the market and lean into that. Second, I listen and shadow sales to see how often/why competitors come up in conversation. Then I can create appropriate messaging. Depending on your position in the market and how competitive the space is, you may go head to head in a more visible brand campaign, or if you're a category leader, you may keep an eye out and handle objections in sales scripts or through battlecards. 

First of all, it needs to be rooted in the day-to-day realities of sales and the conversations their having. If Product Marketing is coming up with competitive intel in a vacuum without input from Sales, then it will naturally fall flat.  As you should do with positioning, make Sales a key part of how you create competitive intelligence and what it needs to include. Most great sales reps and managers will already be doing some of this themselves, so start by learning what their doing. If you have a tool like Gong, go through calls to see what they're saying and using and talk with rep...

Like any good marketer, it's about knowing your end customer and how they would like to consume information. All sales teams are different and finding the right communication methods (format, frequency) is important to align on up front so that you can focus your energy on being efficient and effective. Here are some tips: 1. More is not always more - sometimes we might over correct for a lack of data/deliverables by creating information overload. Sometimes teams like sales might not "actually read and use it" because it's 1 of 100 things they are trying to absorb. Take a look at what piec...

Get them involved. Interview them to learn about their encounters with competitors. Here are things that I regularly ask my sellers. * Which competitors are coming up most in conversations with buyers? * What are buyers specifically asking about? * What assets would help you win more competitive deals? * Here's something that I put together. Is this helpful to you? When you build a genuine relationship with your sales team, you'll notice that adoption will rarely be a problem. They'll see their contribution to the intel that you're bringing forth and they'll see that you're working...

In my experience, the best way to communicate with sales people is to speak with them. They are so busy, and I find they don't read emails from PMMs, especially emails not directed to them personally.  In my opinion, the best way to share competitive materials is in a short team meeting, through the sales engineering/solution consulting teams and by directly responding to questions they have (where you can send links to prepared materials).  It also helps to be very clear about your competitive differentiation, and have sellers share stories of how they've won. Hearing best practices ...

One practice we had to inform competitive positioning strategy and enablement was analysing Closed Lost reasons in deals where we lost to a competitor. Here's an example (sorry some details need to remain high level):  * We did a CL analysis and saw we were losing to our competitor for 1 of 3 reasons - a unique feature they had, pricing, and brand awareness/loyalty. * We then partnered with Account Managers and CS to find customers who had used us and the competition. We did customer interviews to get appraisals of each of the areas where we tended to lose deals. We also unco...

This is tricky, and the answer may depend on the nature of your product. In B2B software, I find that there is a lot more information in the public domain today. That may include documentation, product reviews on sites like TrustRadius or G2Crowd, posts on public fora, and even job descriptions. You can get creative and stay within the bounds of competitor ethics.

Even if you don't have access to the product:  - See if you can find their product documentation online  - Similarly, look for API documentation   - Speak with your Sales people regularly - prospects give away tons of secrets - Stay in touch with HR - ex-employees also have a lot of information that they ARE allowed to share and can be helpful; and when they join your company, conduct a recorded debriefing with them whenever possible 

These aren't different things. Competitive is part of overall positioning.  Product positioning should include evidence, details and decisions based on:  - Competitive intelligence  - Pricing decisions  - Market need - Market potential  - Your product and, based on the above, its differentiators - The value proposition and mission that your teams establish, based on the above 

I think the only correct answer here is not as often as we'd like :) We typically rely on good old fashioned interviews and questions can vary depending on whether it's for customer references, beta product feedback, or buyer research. So, generally point in time. Customer inputs are critical across the board, here are a few examples: 1) informing the product roadmap (some feedback may not be shared in a PM interview context), 2) informing messaging for your website (use the words your customers use), 3) defining your buyer journey and decision-making criteria for sales enablement.

I think every PMM benefits from talking to customers. In some cases, it helps polish what you already know. In others—like in my case—you’re marketing to an audience you do not belong to, and talking to customers helps you see the world in a way you normally wouldn’t. I’ll speak to my preferences, but please note that this is specific to someone who markets a technical product to developers without necessarily being one myself. I think it’s important for me to never stop learning how developers think, so every quarter I assign myself OKRs that force me to stay connected to customers. ...

This is a fantastic question! In my experience, for competitive research/marketing, it is critical to spend time with your customers and frontline sales teams. In my previous roles, I've built voice of customer programs to help support quant and qual research. This has come in a number of formats - a win/loss VoC program for enterprise sales deals, an annual customer survey and a churn surey. I've typically used survey tools like Medallia, Qualtrics and Gainsight. The key is being able to build a repository of these insights and operationalize them across the organization so people take act...

Frequency: Marketers (not just PMMs) should aim to be their company's experts on their target customers. That means you should talk to customers as frequently as you need to. If you need a measurable benchmark, aim for a weekly conversation. You'll naturally find projects and time periods where you far exceed that frequency. Campaign design, refining segmentation, conducting win/loss following a product launch, and onboarding marketers all create a greater need for this customer insight, so expect the volume of customer research activity to spike. Tools: I stick to interviews. I haven't ...

The language of love at Udemy is Data. As such, we're always looking for more, and consumer insights are a constant. Research is conducted on an ongoing basis by our incredible User Research group. This includes longitudinal research where we would like to track progress over time such as for upper-funnel brand metrics like recall and awareness, as well as campaign specific research related to things like message testing and feature promotion. We use a combination of survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualaroo, and host in-depth interviews 1x1 with prospective and existing customers via U...

Staying in touch with customers/propsects directly is not an option for product marketers, IMO. There are passive ways to do it by being a listener - listen to sales/CS calls, attend talks by your audience on relevant topics, follow notable people on linkedin and read the content they are posting or engaging with. In my experience the best insights come from the most unexpected conversations involving customers and prospects. So my team always invests in time engaging with our audience every chance we get. That said, we definitely plan conversations for specific campaigns like early acce...

All the time! It is so critical for PMM teams to talk to customers to understand their pain points, their jobs to be done, their delighters, motivations, etc. It's also important for GTM teams to have a pulse on customer feedback via customer success, sales and account management in order to understand potential barriers or blind spots that you may have from a PMM perspective. But it's not just enough to have a consistent flow of insights and information - it's really important to synthesize all of these datapoints into the "so what" -- the key themes that inform either product improvements...

All the time, through a mix of continuous and specific pointed research. Our Research teams owns some always-on research work such as our NPS survey or Brand Tracking survey, which often have competitive insights. For win/loss, I've taken both approaches. Currently we only use that research type for specific burning questions. 

Multiple times per month. It varies though, depending on bandwidth as a one-person CI team.  The most important thing is that, as a whole, ClickUp's Product Marketing team speaks to customers all the time for different reasons. I focus my conversations more around competitive intel, or win/loss info. Our persona PMM directors speak with customers that fit our ICP so we can better understand our strengths, weaknesses, and what their jobs-to-be-done are. Our Customer Advocacy leader speaks with power users and champions to make them feel great + excited about working with us. And then w...

Ideally, I think this should be systematic and conducted on a weekly basis in order to keep research fresh. Something Shopify does amazingly well is setting up time with the merchants and listening to support calls. We also enjoy connecting and meeting in-person with local merchants to hear about their experiences directly. In fact, we have a program that allows us to connect with merchants locally and learn more about their experience with Shopify first-hand. At our last team offsite we were able to spend a half day with a merchant and really get to know her and her business. We also liste...

There are many stakeholders when it comes to competitive intelligence and aligning messaging and product strategy with competitive differentiation. I have found an effective model where PMM is the the driver, although any of the contributors could also drive. Regardless, it is a joint effort across at least PMM, PM, Presales and Sales Enablement (some larger enterprises like IBM have dedicated, centralized competitive program offices). As the driver, PMM can focus on arming the sales team with up-to-date tools (e.g. battle cards) to win, ensuring marketing can land us in competitive eval...

Ideally, your brand positioning pillars are unique enough individually or in combination with each other that competitive positioning is baked in. Effectively enabling sales is about educating them on the landscape and competitive buckets (read answer above re: putting all your competitors into distinct categories you can more generically position against). Then when it comes to your Tier 1 competitors, it's all about training the sales team and making battlecard content super easy to find. Bring the energy, show them a side-by-side demo if you can to give them confidence, and persona...

I believe competitive research should always be part of the process when you develop your core messaging, but it’s important to not get too hung up on your competitors, you can easily lose sight of what your own customers care about. (Also, who is to say that their messaging is better than others?) I usually build a competitive positioning matrix where I will have at least 2 rows for each competitor: “We help you”, and “so you can” (But use what version works best for you)--- and then go through competitor websites/content/materials to gather what statements they use to answer each of thos...

Competitive differentiation should make up the pillars of your messaging and value proposition. The reason being is that most markets are crowded and customers can choose from many alterntatives, so your differentation needs to be clearly articulated across the buyer's journey. To understand your competitive differentiation you can conduct buyer persona research, closed won research, analyze Gong calls with high ACVs, speak to reps and customer success teams, and really hone in on determining 1) What pain points are you solving for your buyers and 2) What makes you the "only" one? (see only...

Competitive differentiation is what forms your positioning and what you build your messaging around. With how crowded every market category is now its essential to nail your differentiation and then communicate it through your messaging and the rest of the go-to-market. Enabling sales effectively requires making the competitive information actionable and easily digestible. Whether you’re creating battlecards, sharing competitive updates in Slack, or leading a competitive play sales training distill it down to the key points and bring it to life with examples with what worked in deals. Fin...

The answer here is in the question. My approach to differentiation starts with understanding why the product or service you're responsible is uniquely suited to a specific customer. And then focus on what makes you great, not what makes others less good. Too many companies (including a few I've worked with) focus too much on the question of "how do we compete against X competitor?" This creates a backwards-looking mentality and you're always in reactive mode. I will say it's my favorite thing to compete against someone who's more concerned about me than I am about them... they can chase ...

Competitive positioning is a key component of defining core messaging. If we sit down and come up with copy on how to best describe our offerings, a key step is to compare that against how competitors describe themselves. You’ll likely be hit with an unpleasant surprise that about half your copy has already been used directly or indirectly by competitors. Some words might be well-adapted lexicons that prospects associate competitors with. Developing your positioning and messaging without this key insight would lead to bad outcomes. I always try to find words we can “own” in the prospect’...

Great question! I'll start with saying Klue has a phenomenal blog post on this topic I'd encourage you to read. But to your question, most will try to differentiate off features. In most cases this will lead to a conversation about value -- and in a crowded market is really difficult to truly differentiate in this case. There are some tactical things you can pursue to drive differentiation: * Social Proof * Lean-in to aspects of your solution that customers rave about! I've seen this be everythign from the sales team/process, to customer support team, implementation, educatio...

Our competitive differentiation is central to our overall company/product positioning. They're almost the same thing. We have a high-level view of our position in the market vs other categories of tools, and a deeper view of the specific capabilities that make us unique.  Enabling sales is a constant function of updating self-serve resources, delivering training, and sharing major intel. good luck!

With messaging, the one thing that I always push my team to think about is what’s unique to Shopify that no one else can own. Can someone slap their brand on top and say the same things? If so, the messaging and positioning is not good enough. We want to ensure that we are sharing what is most valuable to our business and that no one else can claim.

I would say it's time to get scrappy! Calling them (or even having a consultant do so) can be tricky because most companies that are secretive or demo-shy screen for this. But it's amazing what you can find online. Look at YouTube, often there are past speaking gigs or presentations that can give you more information. Check out upcoming conferences in the industry - is anyone from their company speaking there? Follow their social media - often you can get product screenshots from that or blogs they post. The thought leadership they post may also give you some good clues. I would also search...

Capterra is another good review site.   Along with YouTube, check out SlideShare for the same reason, often times there are presentations from conferences etc. that have been posted.  And speakingof conferences, often time the presentations from a conference can be downloaded by attendees, so check out where they were conference sponsors or speakers. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can view the employee count, employee distribution and new hiring breakout to give you an idea of how fast they are growing (or not). Crunchbase is a great site to get all the funcding information. ...

Although @Mary (Shirley) Sheehan and @Mark Officer already posted great answers, I would like to add two other great sources. 1 ) A source of data is reading what their employeers are posting on LinkedIn (through posts, summary or job descriptions). From those descriptions, you can learn: - Projects: which projects are they prioritizing? What could be rationale behind it? - KPIs: which metrics are they reporting (or bragging about)? Usually, those are the metrics the leadership is pushing their employees to track/improve - Organization structure: by looking at roles, you can see which ...

Two questions about the lack of public-facing marketing that I think can help guide the search: 1. Is the lack of public-facing marketing in fact part of their narrative (secrecy) or marketing ineptitude (which in itself says something)? 2. Does lack of public-facing marketing equate to lack of public-facing discussion (initiated either by the company or the market)? Knowing the answers to these questions will help direct the search for information. 

This is a really great question. For stealth products that are competitive in your sales cycle, it's worth asking your sales team to try to gather information from prospects that are evaluating your competitors.  Alternatively, you can dig around the internet - suprisingly, Twitter threads and Reddit forums can be just as useful review sites like G2. I'll go back and say - this is why it's so important to do thorough market research and define super sharp brand positioning pillars with truly unique claims. Makes playing defense so much easier.

I'll start with the assumption that this isn't a product you can personally go out and procure on your own. Hands-on is always great.  Review sites are good, and can often generate a list of targets to call for more qualitative research. My biggest piece of advice here is to always do compete research above board. Don't hide who you are or who you work for. Tell them you want to learn more, and be open about your goals. Honesty is truly the best policy.  The other thing that can work (though it takes longer) is to employ the field. Give them discovery questions that can uncover users ...

I had one gut reaction when I read this question. "Why isn't there much public-facing marketing around it?" A few thoughts come to mind: 1. They discontinued the product (try checking publicly-facing knowledge centers, if they have any, to confirm) 2. They rebranded the product (this happens all the time) 3. The product was in beta, got a bad response from users, then went back into stealth 4. They're bad at marketing (in which case, you probably don't need to be too worried about this competitor at all) To answer your question though, you could find out for sure with a formal ...

We typically begin by looking at their financial information, social media channels, and forums like Reddit to get a sense of what their customers are saying. We sometimes call competitors directly, acting as a customer. We can also get some great insights from our own customers about why they left a competitor. Partners who know the ecosystem are also vital in providing additional benchmarks and insight into where the needs, gaps, and opportunities are. There are a variety of third-party services that conduct interviews and offer valuable intelligence as well. The information’s out there; ...

The part I am most experienced with is the business case justification. Indeed, I tend to build business case justifications and personas into a single narrative in order to make my story lines speak to the issues most important to each stakeholder. Primary market research (1:1 interviews) is the best way to build personas (that inform what stakeholders think about most/most often, and the incentives they're responding to). The resulting personas/profiles are by far the greatest driver of the ultimate business case. The information in those personas can also inform my colleagues in Conte...

I think with anything you do in Product Marketing, you first have to understand what your goals are to avoid being completely consumed by the task at hand. This includes understanding who your audience is, how the information will be used, and most importantly how you will measure success. The same goes with market research. Doing that little bit of prep work and reflection beforehand can really help focus your efforts so you're getting the most out of it. When I am approaching market and competitive research throughout the GTM process, another question I ask early on is, "Who else has a...

Tactically, you can apply the learnings in pretty much any way - from sourcing to targeting. However, in many case, you'll want to make sure other teams are aware of this information so that they can use it even if you personally aren't involved. With that in mind, think about how you can socialize important information that you collect broadly. Some tactical ideas: * Make the doc easily accessible - keep the doc on 'open' view access to everyone in the company * Post it on your internal wiki, if one exists.  * Share on relevant team slack channels and invite questions * Host intern...

Here is where market research can and should fit into the GTM life cycle: Exploration / business case justification: * Market sizing; TAM analysis * Market trends analysis * Usage & Attitudes study (incl identifying use cases) * Competitive intelligence Product development: * Shopper insights * Persona development * Idea screening * Feature prioritization * Concept testing * UX research * Price optimization Launch / introduction: * Package testing * Name testing * Message testing * Campaign creative testing Adoption & growth: * Brand & product awareness tracking *...

From my, Patti (Head of Consumer PMM) and Bonnie’s (Head of Market Insights) point of view, a successful GTM launch requires early PMM/market research involvement in the product development lifecycle. 1. At the pre launch stage, and ideally during product development: 1. Talk to your target audience 2. Validate product/market fit based on the market research conducted; be sure to get clarity on who you are solving for and what their JTBD or Pain Points are. 3. Once validated, go into message testing/value prop testing to ensure you’re putting your be...

Google did a great job with this as they are rigorous when it comes to alphas, betas, and general availability. They conduct regular market research through the different stages. To get the signal that we were on the right track with an early alpha, we met with customers regularly to see if the product was a good market fit and tweaked the product accordingly based on that feedback. Beta involved a larger cohort for feedback, looking more broadly at regional product market fit. Post-GA, we received feedback on performance. Ideally, this process is a 3-phased approach where feedback allows y...

This is a great question because without a framework for competitive intel you’ll get overwhelmed and lost in the noise. Here’s a few tips to get started: 1. Define and tier your competitors. Every industry is saturated and you can’t track every competitor or alternative that your sales team comes across. Bucket your competition into tier 1 (who you’re always going head-to-head with), tier 2 (other common players you come across in deals), and up-and-coming competitors to keep an eye on. Keep the tier 1 list short and manageable since that’s where you’ll focus most of ...

Web tracking tools like Crayon and Klue help us curate intel from the web, and Slack gives us a constant feed of discussion where people around the company share insights.  But what holds it all together and prevents it from feeling overwhelming is having our durable view of our competitive differentiation. We have a specific set of capabilities + a surrounding narrative that we believe cuts through the competitive noise. Once you've defined that clearly, minor pieces of competitive intel start bouncing off of you. :) good luck!

Yeah, there's a lot of new info flowing every day. But a lot of it is noise. First make sure you understand what's important to the company. What are the big goals you're trying to hit? What's the direction that your product is going in? With those things in mind, you should be able to filter out a lot of garbage that isn't worth your time. In terms of channels to put the GOOD stuff in... I have two: 1. A Slack channel dedicated to competitive intel (open to everyone in the company) 2. A monthly newsletter The Slack channel acts as a real-time repository for me and anyone else in...

We’re able to stay organized and updated on competitors largely due to crowd-sourcing information. We have a Competitive Intelligence Slack channel that extends across teams throughout the entire company so that individuals and groups can contribute any notable findings or insights. Updates, press announcements and feedback from customers is all shared in this one central location so that others can easily access it, as well as contribute. Additionally, new information is added into a grid or spreadsheet to organize the latest and greatest in a more detailed way, with links to the source of...

A few key documents that you should have: * Research Document - For me, this has always been internal and been a way for me to store insights, data, or any resources on a competitor -- or aggregate set of competitors. This doc is never shared broadly and is just used as a starting point to collect information. * Competitive Battlecard - This should be the central resource where everything your sales and CS team need lives. * Competitive Messaging Spreadsheet - I like to create a compettiive spreadsheet that tracks all the key H1s and messaging for homepage and/or core ...

Some key documents that my teams have implemented for competitive positioning are starting with data gathering on points such as: key value props, feature set, target customers, pricing, strengths, customer perception. Partnering with brand and demand gen teams on creative campaign insights and media spend are also helpful to coordinate on. These inputs can then be inputs into frameworks like SWOT matrixes and battlecards for Sales/AM teams or internal one sheeters that can be good alignment collateral across product and marketing.  

- Market Map: Overall visual landscape of our competition. Where does everyone play, where are they moving? - Battlecards: Tells Sales/CS what to say when delivering competitive positioning to customers. - Product deep dives: Visual packages for Product teams to help them determine where our opportunities are. 

There are a few documents that I maintain over time: 1. Competitor product releases for the Product team (updated monthly) 2. Competitive battlecards for the Sales team (updated as needed) 3. Win/Loss reporting (updated quarterly-to-semi annually) Each of these docs helps a specific audience within the company and make sure that they have the knowledge they need to make decisions.

When we do competitive positioning, we try to take a holistic approach, examining companies across numerous areas. First, we put together a general overview focused on their overall positioning and messaging from their website. Second, we dive a little deeper to look at specific product features and the company’s size to better gauge their offerings and available resources. We also look at their social surfaces, pricing, top clients and existing customers. We also dive into their press, both good and bad, to gauge how they’re viewed publicly and what the overall sentiment is toward them. Th...