What is your approach to building, managing, and using competitive intel for product/ sales/ marketing strategies without dedicated resources?

This is a great question too. Competitive is one part of the “swiss army knife” of skills a product marketer needs in their skill belt (others being, storytelling/narrative building, relationship building, public speaking, data analysis, etc).

My approach is that every product marketer needs to have a pulse on what is happening in their competitive environment. At Twilio, we currently don't have dedicated resources for competitive so we started at the macro-level and worked our way down.
1) Competitive landscape. How is your company/product positioned vs the competitor? Build a high level presentation that shows your key differentiators vs your key competitors in your market. If you have a defined set of market segments, then also make sure you cover differentiation by segment.
2) Objection handling and FUD against top competitors. You should know who the main competitors you face are and it's likely that there are some specific questions that you can focus on to both educate your sales team on how to handle objections as well as get your prospects/customers to focus on what matters and why your solution is more favorable.
3) Ad-hoc requests. Things come up like new product announcements and acquisitions and you need to act a bit like a journalist writing your hot take when these things happen. Quickly document your thoughts on the announcement and get some objection handling to your sales team before they ask. If you do, you will be crushing it on your trusted advisor goals!
4) Battlecards. These are awesome if you can carve out the time. If you don't have dedicated resources it can be tough but for major competitors that come up a lot in sales discussions it is likely well worth your time to build a detailed battlecard (including feature comparison matrix) so that your team has a full picture of what you do vs the competitor.
5) For extra credit - a point person. We had a product marketer put up their hand to say they really like competitive and they wanted to build their skills with cross functional projects. This person took on the competitive role internally, and they send out a monthly competitive overview to the sales team.

We are lucky enough to have someone on our product marketing team dedicated to Competitive Intelligence today, but before she joined, this is how we approached it with shared resources:

• Our strategy team was in charge of broader market level analyses, while PMM produced research and content for specific competitors.

• Each PMM was responsible for a specific product area and persona. In many cases, those product areas aligned with specific competitors. For example, the PMM aligned to our market research solutions owned keeping tabs on market research companies, while the PMM aligned to the CX persona was responsible for monitoring CX platforms. Whenever there was a main competitor that spanned all product/persona areas, we just assigned an owner. The owner would manage the creation of landscape presentations, product research, and sales battle cards.

• We had 1 PMM in charge of our win-loss program, and we rotated focus areas each quarter. For example, one quarter we'd focus on prospect experience, another would focus on a specific product area.

• We leveraged a competitive intelligence platform (At SurveyMonkey we've used both Crayon and Klue in the past) to produce feeds for our top competitors. Our Comms team would also flag anything they caught.

• We had a public #industry-chatter Slack channel where anyone could drop in competitor news for all to see.

At some point, it wasn't effective for CI to be everyone's "side hustle", and we had more than enough work to justify a dedicated person driving the program.