Do you have a favorite "stack" or go to tools for staying ahead of competitors?

My approach to competitive intel is pretty basic, but for the most part it works well. I setup Google alerts for named competitors, and a Slack channel for sellers (or anyone really) to drop in stuff they're hearing in the field. I find that clues you into most of what you need to stay on top of.

I've also used Crayon before, and found it helpful for tracking a broad set of competitors/competitive products.

From a tool perspective, I've been leveraging Crayon to get up to date insights on our competitiors and shifts in the competitive landscape. Doing win/loss interviews is also incredible insightful, and we leverage Clozd for that. But the best way I stay ahead of the competition is actually using competitive products, free or paid versions, to really understand their feature set and how it compares to ours. I also study their website, blogs and press releases to get an understanding of how they message and position themselves.

There are several departments who currently share "ownership" of competitive intelligence at Momentive, but we have plans to hire someone dedicated to this in the PMM org. Some of the top sources, tools, and vendors we use for competitive intelligence are:

- Crayon.co for our comprehensive competitive intel database/repository & news feeds for specific top competitors

- Clozd.com for Win/Loss and competitive intel related to specific deals we've lost to competitors (and also where we've beaten the competition)

- As I mention in another answer, we also use Salesforce and Gong to track when we're running up against specific competitors 

- Our bi-annual brand health tracking study (we use our own solution: momentive.ai/en/solutions/brand-tracking/ ) keeps tabs on our own brand + competitor awareness & perception

- Competitor websites & PR newsrooms for product naming intel, competitive messaging, etc; their YouTube channels can be a good source for product demos as well

- Industry reports, including Gartner MQs & Forrester, to assess overall market trends and dynamics

We actually just implemented Klue for competitive intel. It basically gives you a single source for all competitive intel and then allows you to build real-time battlecards based on that data. The product marketing team has been really happy with it so far.. and more importantly, our go-to-market teams are loving it too. During our buying process we also looked at Crayon, but ultimately went with Klue.