How Gusto’s Product Marketing Team Established a Formal Competitive Intelligence Program to Improve Win Rates

About Gusto

Gusto helps businesses take care of their hard-working teams, no matter their size or stage. Our all-in-one HR platform helps businesses hire, pay, and manage their teams with easy-to-use tools that streamline everything from payroll and benefits to hiring and talent. Gusto serves 300,000+ customers and has a team of 2,500 FTEs and 50 marketers.

The Need for a Formal Competitive Intelligence Program

In the Spring of 2021, we embarked on a significant project prompted by feedback we were hearing from our sellers. They started receiving more questions from prospects who were considering competitors that we historically hadn't focused on. The pool of competitors in our space was broadening, a trend also reflected in our brand-level research. Prospects were no longer only considering traditional payroll providers, but also people platform providers.

These two data points led us to reconsider the competitors we had been focusing on. The sales team, facing increased competitive pressure, was in need of more sales enablement assets. We needed to evaluate whether we were equipping our sellers with the right assets against the most relevant competitors. We also had to assess whether we had compelling competitive differentiation against these competitors, and whether we knew what our talk tracks should be.

What Competitive Intelligence Looked Like Previously

Here is what we were doing prior to formalizing a competitive intelligence program.

• One of the most effective tactics was a Slack channel where people across the company would share random competitive intelligence. While this was effective in real-time surfacing of market trends, it wasn't comprehensive or detailed.

• We also had a system in Salesforce where sellers would indicate why a deal was won or lost. We could see trends from this quantitative data, but it was filtered through a seller's lens and not directly from the customer. 

Key Goals

Our goals were to:

1. Gain a solid understanding of our position and perception relative to our competitors in the market.

2. Get a stronger understanding of what was appealing to customers in our competitors’ offerings, and enhance our products and services.

3. Understanding pricing and services and how they were valued in the target market.

4. Provide Sales with updated assets such as battle cards, competitive one-pagers, top tracks, and objection handling resources around relevant competitors. 

Framework

Competitive Intelligence is a Company-Wide Effort

One of the core philosophies I've always advocated for as a product marketer is that we're better together. I've found that successful programs are born out of strong cross-functional partnerships. Establishing trust and positive working relationships up-front is crucial—as is aligning everyone on the overall objectives we're striving to achieve. The idea is that we're all here to support one another's success, and collective success will invariably make the company better and enable us to serve our customers more effectively.

In theory, everyone agrees with this philosophy, but in practice, it can be challenging. For instance, you might have a good relationship with your sales and go-to-market counterparts, but your product relationships could wobble, and vice versa. Yet, a high-functioning team that can fire on all cylinders collaboratively across the board delivers more customer value.

Competitive intelligence, then, is like a team sport, and should be owned by the company. It's not something that one person does; it's about bringing everyone together because differing perspectives and perceptions are valuable. This process demands everyone's involvement and ownership in translating efforts into the work they do.

Everyone must have skin in the game. You might start by deciding to collect certain information about your competitors, but upon talking to your sales and product counterparts, you might find they want to add more to that. Some of these additions might not directly contribute to product marketing’s success or your ability to do your job, but it is undeniably valuable for others, so it’s key to be a good partner and create space for that. 

It's a collaborative process and a discussion. Keep a prioritized list and get alignment on what's most important. Not everything can be above the cut line, but you need to figure out what's going to make everyone collectively the most successful, and then hold everyone accountable. If you hear that something is really important, be willing to support it in order to incorporate it into the competitive intelligence. Being flexible, meeting people's cross-functional needs, and asking them to be accountable to the results. If they ask for it, they need to be ready and willing to act on it to improve team or company performance.

Position Value, not Just Features

Another key to competitive intelligence efforts is to maintain a balance between focusing on the feature checklist and selling based on value. We don't necessarily want to be drawn into a feature checklist war with our competitors. But at the same time, we need to be aware of whether we're leading from the front or playing catch up.

An essential part of this is meeting our customers where they are and ensuring that our sales team has the tools they need to handle objections. For instance, if a customer asks if we have a feature that a competitor has, our sales team should have that information readily available. But it goes beyond just confirming that we have the feature.

We also need to position the feature in a way that highlights its value. So, if a customer says, "I heard this competitor has this feature, do you have it?", then we should be able to respond, "Yes, our product has that. We often find that customers find X particularly valuable about the feature. Would that be valuable for you as well?"

In essence, it's about how we position the product and its features against our customer needs and expectations rather than a focus on competitors. We redirect the conversation from a feature comparison to a discussion about the value the solution provides with the customer’s use case in mind. This approach requires a deep understanding of our product, our customers' needs, and the competitive landscape. When done right, this allows us to differentiate our product based on value, not just feature parity.

Tailor Your Approach to the Needs of Your Go-To-Market Teams

Competitive intelligence is not a one-size-fits-all operation. While templates and proven strategies can serve as starting points, it's imperative to adapt these to your company's unique situation. You have to be ready to examine strategies that have worked for others and figure out how they need to be adjusted to fit your company's needs and competitive landscape.

Let me share an example from my experience at Gusto. We started with a template, but we were open to making adjustments to accommodate our own unique circumstances and team dynamics. In particular, we looked at how and where our competitive intelligence information was stored and accessed.

Gusto, being a company with significant growth, has a large sales team with various roles. We realized early on that if we didn't place these tools where the sales team naturally operated during their day, they wouldn't use them — which would render the entire competitive intelligence exercise pointless.

The ultimate purpose of gathering and analyzing competitive intelligence is to equip your go-to-market teams to be more successful and provide customers more value through your offering. For us at Gusto, it was critical to adapt our approach to meet the specific needs of our internal teams. So while templates are useful, they must be adapted to a specific context to truly deliver value.

9 Step Competitive Intelligence Program Building Process

Our competitive intelligence program-building process consisted of the following six key steps, and each one was crucial in shaping our success:

1. Define the Problem to Solve: We identified the agreed upon initial problem as the need for a scalable way to quantify the competitive threat, investigate it more deeply, and understand why we were winning and losing.

2. Scope and Outline the Project: We analyzed our CRM data to identify who we were losing to most often, interviewed their sellers for qualitative insights, and got agreement on the initial scope of our investigation.

3. Get Alignment: We aligned various teams and stakeholders by getting input on their vision, developing a RAPID decision-making framework, and developing OKRs that were aligned with the overall objectives of this project.

4. Set Expectations: We set clear expectations on the overall project by clarifying the end deliverable and setting clear timelines.

5. Collect the Data: We collected data on our competitors by conducting thorough internet research, bringing a customer-centric lens to the process.

6. Conduct Check-ins: We kept everyone updated on the project's progress by holding a weekly check-in live sync and providing status updates via Slack.

7. Readout Findings: We performed readouts to distill all the insights they gathered, identify opportunities, and plan our next steps to seize those opportunities.

8. Create the Project Plan: We had each team share how they would implement the insights gathered from the competitive intelligence research and then we created a project plan used to ensure implementation.

9. Track and Measure Impact: We tracked and measured progress by employing the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework and setting up the necessary systems to track and report out on progress.

Diagram: 9 Step Competitive Intelligence Program Building Process