What are some of the best practices and tools that you use to determine competitive positioning that you could recommend?

Question

Amey Kanade · Accepted Answer

Early on in my career I use to spend a lot of time analyzing my competitors. I closely followed everything on their website, product pages, old blog posts, social media handles etc. Youcan almost make a mental model of how the company, product and their marketing strategy has evolved over the years. It is good learning but it is very easy to fall into a rabbit hole and spend hours reading. Nowadays I have a google alert set on a bunch of keywords. I get a daily email report with information just enough to keep me aware of the important movements in my space. I think if you spend too much time on your competitors, your prodcut is only going to be marginally better than your competitors. This may sound cliched - but start with your customers, spend a lot of time analyzing your customers and then work backward to improve your product/strategy.

Andrew McCotter-Bicknell · Answer

First, there is no one magic tool that will do your Competitive Intel program for you. All of the tools below require a strategy before using. But they can be extremely powerful when you use them correctly.

For competitive alerts, battlecard creation, and win/loss reporting, try looking at Klue or Crayon.

For third-party agencies that conduct win/loss interviews and surveys on your behalf, take a look at Clozd, DoubleCheck Research, or Iceberg IQ.

For review mining, check out G2, TrustRadius, or wherever your customers leave reviews.

For benchmarking, check out PeerSignal.org (free!)

Ambika Aggarwal · Answer

The goal of competitive positioning is to own a space in the market that's yours by focusing on differentiated value. In order to fully be able to answer the question of what your differentiated value is or should be, you'll need to do some analysis. The following are key buckets that you'll need to dive into:

1. Market Analysis/ Profile: Market Size, Market Trends, Market Competitors, Market lifecycle stage

2. Segmentation& Personas -Determine your segmentation strategy and create a detailed buyer persona profile that represents a target buyer in that particular segment

3. Competitive Analysis - Direct, Indirect, Future competitors

4. SWOT Analysis - Synthesize the information above and create a SWOT analyze to highlight strenghs, weaknesses, opportunities, threats

5. Bring it all together into a value proposition that serves as the basis for your competitive positioning (think about things like product leadership, operational execellence, customer intimacy as value drivers)

Grant Shirk · Answer

This is highly requested, so I'll take a shot at it. But first, an acknowlegement of bias: I don't really like competitive tools that much. I find they put more emphasis on collection than utilization and understanding. Kind of like how we all can't remember anyone's phone number any more because we carry smartphones around.

Best practices and tools for determining positioning in a competitive market:

1. Understand your Tier 1 competitors' lead message and how it overlaps (or not) with yours. That's 75% of the battle

2. Talk to customers directly on a weekly basis. Hear what they hear. Understand what they fear, broadly or with your product. Build empathy with their core problem.

3. Adopt a standard framework for discussing and documenting competitive positioning. I like "Lead with / Defend against" because it aligns with how sales operates in two modes: proactive and reactive.

4. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Only the market can tell you if you're "right." And it will change in 6 months.

Marina Ben-Zvi · Answer

To determine the competitive position in which you’re a clear winner and have unique strengths, try the following:

* SWOT analysis
 * Competitive map plotted against two axis of the main attributes/values that matter to your CUSTOMERS, not your company
 * Customer/Company/Competitor values venn diagram to identify your unique value points (where company and customer overlap), where its a draw (all 3 overlap and where copy-cat messaging stems from), where you lose (where customer and competitor overlap), and the value points that don’t matter (company and competitor overlap)

Before getting started be clear about your ICP and Personas and fill in these frameworks vs the competition based on how your target audience would rate you vs them. Perception is reality, so even if you have the best capabilities but your personas can’t tell the difference or it’s not important to them, don’t focus on it. This is where a lot of companies stumble.

Related Ask Me Anything Sessions

Eightfold Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Ryan Smith on Competitive Positioning

Atlassian Head of Core Product Marketing & GTM, ITSM Solutions, Daniel Kuperman on Competitive Positioning

Guidewire Software VP Product Marketing, Axel Kirstetter on Competitive Positioning

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