How do you start a competitive analysis program from scratch and scaling it out or even work with a current or past competitive program that you liked?

Here are some initial thoughts based on my experience building a CI program at previous companies, as well as what I've learned from our customers. Start with the goals you want to accomplish with this new program - why does the business need this now? This can really help with focusing early efforts and making small but measured steps towards an impactful program. Include a healthy mix of proactive, self-serve, and custom services. The proactive component is the "push" side of the CI program - ...Read More

Currently, I am building a CI from scratch. Honestly, I have started with a goals document, which outlines what is a CI at Mode. My goals document included - (1) Crowdsourcing - which is a Slack channel. This has already existed at Mode, but I applied some rules of engagement to make it more insightful and actionable  (2) Feature by feature comparison, including any services like support and customer service  (3) Positioning and messaging intel and even web traffic or SEO if possible  (4) What a ...Read More

I've built our CI program from scratch here at CallRail, and there's definitely been some things I've learned along the way over the last two years: Like Derek said, make sure the documents are hosted somewhere everyone can easily access. And as a follow-up to that, let EVERYONE know when you've made an update. I spent a lot of time updating documents only to find out that people had printed out older competitive battlecards and were not working off of the latest and greatest intel. We now docum ...Read More

From scratch, start with a slack channel and encourage everyone in the company to be submitting bits of intel. Most of your competitive intel at this stage will come from sales engineers and former employees of competitors. If you've got an indirect channel, partners will often share intel as well, including pricing.    As you get bigger, you can invest in dedicated resources to do teardowns and shootouts, but that typically doesn't come until you're much bigger. Until then, CI is everyone's job ...Read More

At a previous company, we started by maintaining a wiki page for competitive intel that was the "single point of truth" for the sales team. Mike is correct when he says that at an early stage, CI is everyone's job and the PMM's job to QB the effort. I would suggest that a solid level of competitive intel is necessary in order to truly understand your differentiation and sell effectively. Think about structuring your CI program in terms of structured and unstructured data. Side by side feature co ...Read More