I'm a one woman product marketing team in the crowded mobile analytics and attribution space. How can I better keep up with competitive analysis to arm my team with up to date competitive knowledge?

Question

Axel Kirstetter · Accepted Answer

Given that you are resource constrained I would highly recommend you explore using CI software. There are a few out there. Do a little research. For $20k you can be up and running. Team up with Sales to fund it. In PMM you dont always need to own everything. You can have can also impact by facilitating the path to the solution.

Amit Bhojraj · Answer

Considering your limited bandwidth, it is challenging to go broad. So, the answer, in my humble view, lies in "focus". When I think about competitive analysis, I usually think about one competitor that I call the "Next Best Alternative." The next best alternative may not always be a competing vendor. Your positioning (and messaging) should ideally focus on these 1-2 competitors.

If you want to go broad, there are competitive intelligence platforms such as Crayon and Klue that you can use to track "changes" in the digital landscape and create integrations in your CRM or workflow tools that can help you scale. I think that there is a Gartner Magic Quadrant that you can use to analyze these vendors better.

Charlene Wang · Answer

Great competitive analysis comes from access to the right information, meaningful insights into the data, and addressing the needs of sales in real-time.

From an information access perspective, it's important to find the right sources of information first and to do this efficiently. This should come from figuring out both what you can easily access from sources available to you (perhaps online research and analyst perspectives) and where it makes sense to put in th effort to dig out further information (for example, finding former customers or industry experts who can provide specific information, such as pricing). This information finding step is key and can be very time consuming if not properly defined -- what are the most important things that you need to understand about your competitors? Once you've defined what this is, then you can better identify how to effectively target getting that information quickly.

Uncovering meaningful insights is easier to control by yourself since this usually just involves your approach to analyzing data. I highly suggest again thinking through what are the key questions that you need to answer to help sales win. From there, I really try to take an 80/20 approach to getting to those answers as quickly as possible (i.e., what activities can I do that only require 20% of my time but drive 80% of the impact for questions that really matter to the sales team). For example, you may discover that the key thing that sales needs to win is convince customers that your competitor is too expensive. In that case, try to conduct a quick analysis to communicate that you and your competitors are charging an order of magnitude difference in prices (e.g. their total cost is around tens of thousands of dollars, wheres yours is thousands of dollars). In this example, you don't need to put in the significant extra work to get down to exact numbers if orders of magnitude is plenty.

Finally, you want to address the needs of sales in real-time. This starts with understanding what's happening in a sales process -- I like to both ask a couple of reps how prospect conversations went and to selectively sit in on or review recordings for one or two prospect conversations to see firsthand what customers are brigning up. Another way to get to this information is to run a great win/loss analysis program. Understanding the actual needs of sales in a prospect conversation will be key to helping you properly target both what information you need and which insights you have to drive from your dta.

Good luck with this! Product Marketing is often a lightly staffed function that supports so many critical needs across the organization, and I can certainly empathize :)

Mary Margaret · Answer

If you are one person it is all about ruthless prioritization. That is the one thing that will make or break you and your efforts.

Through feedback from the team and from any data you might have, zero in on the core competitors (and restrict that number based on your bandwidth) that are going to be the most impactful and focus on those.

Then, in terms of keeping up to date more broadly, set up google alerts, subscribe to newsletters, to keep up with any breaking news in the space.

And every quarter or half, set some time to revisit the feedback and data to see if that core set of competitors has shifted or changed (are their new challengers you are losing more deals to and should focus on?).

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