What are the top documents you create when working on Competitive Positioning programs?

A few key documents that you should have:

• Research Document - For me, this has always been internal and been a way for me to store insights, data, or any resources on a competitor -- or aggregate set of competitors. This doc is never shared broadly and is just used as a starting point to collect information.
• Competitive Battlecard - This should be the central resource where everything your sales and CS team need lives.
• Competitive Messaging Spreadsheet - I like to create a compettiive spreadsheet that tracks all the key H1s and messaging for homepage and/or core product page in one place so I can compare across competitors.

Hopefully that helps! 

Some key documents that my teams have implemented for competitive positioning are starting with data gathering on points such as: key value props, feature set, target customers, pricing, strengths, customer perception. Partnering with brand and demand gen teams on creative campaign insights and media spend are also helpful to coordinate on. These inputs can then be inputs into frameworks like SWOT matrixes and battlecards for Sales/AM teams or internal one sheeters that can be good alignment collateral across product and marketing.  

- Market Map: Overall visual landscape of our competition. Where does everyone play, where are they moving?

- Battlecards: Tells Sales/CS what to say when delivering competitive positioning to customers.

- Product deep dives: Visual packages for Product teams to help them determine where our opportunities are. 

There are a few documents that I maintain over time:

1. Competitor product releases for the Product team (updated monthly)
2. Competitive battlecards for the Sales team (updated as needed)
3. Win/Loss reporting (updated quarterly-to-semi annually)

Each of these docs helps a specific audience within the company and make sure that they have the knowledge they need to make decisions.

When we do competitive positioning, we try to take a holistic approach, examining companies across numerous areas.

1. We put together a general overview focused on their overall positioning and messaging from their website.
2. We dive a little deeper to look at specific product features and the company’s size to better gauge their offerings and available resources.
3. We also look at their social surfaces, pricing, top clients and existing customers.
4. We also dive into their press, both good and bad, to gauge how they’re viewed publicly and what the overall sentiment is toward them. 

The most important thing here, no matter what the approach, is to have one source of truth, one destination where people can get this information – this way, everyone is on the same page and can easily access the latest findings.

We’ve used Google Docs to merge this information together, but it can be useful to create an internal website or similar destination as well.

There are a few rinse and repeat assets that work well for us in competitive. For products with a significant rep-assisted motion, having competitive comparison cards helps distill complex products into key capabilities, highlighting parity and differentiation to help overcome objections and convey additional value. Competitive teardowns, a more comprehensive exercise in support of the above, help drive a deep, shared understanding of competitive priorities (hint: select a few key competitors, don't mop the ocean) and consistent competitive positioning across marketing teams. 

The most important resource for competitive positioning is battle cards. It's the best summary and most actionable document (or group of documents) that can drive impact quickly. Some important components of battle cards are:

• Top competitor profiles (firmographics)
• Quick dismiss responses to common objections about your product vs the specific competitor
• Wedge questions to de-position each competitor
• Recent news so sellers can stay up to date

Beyond those core components, teams might also find it valuable to include other information in battlecards like:

• Competitor narratives
• Links to competitive materials
• Pricing and packaging comparison
• Competitive demos
• Win/loss analyses

Other documents that can be helpful in the sales process are:

• One pagers that are specific to each competitor and why customers should choose you
• Longer-form competitive narrative vs a specific competitor (or competitors) that allows for more of an in-dpeth positioning story
• Quarterly (or some other pre-determined frequency) executive summaries to inform executive leadership about the competitive landscape and allow them to make better decisions

At the end of the day, it's up to PMM to determine who their audience for competitive intel is and what resources are most valuable and effective for them. 

There are a few things that have worked for me and my teams at various places in my career:

• Having a dedicated Competitive Intelligence team or lead makes a massive difference. When they are creating and distributing insightful content about competitors, it really enhances (and simplifies) the process of positioning products, solutions, or brands relative to competitors.
• Creating a robust messaging framework for your product/solution/service is key. I've seen these be both short and sweet, and very in-depth. Either way can work, they just need to be useful for your internal audiences (content, brand, sales, etc). There's no use spending all that time creating a messaging framework if other teams aren't going to leverage it.
• I'm sure it's not the case everywhere, but in my experience, sales teams still love one-pagers. For competitive positioning, having succinct, but useful comparisons between your products and top competitors are fairly easy to create and useful for sales teams.
•  Go-to-market or launch plans should absolutely include your competitive positioning, messaging, and strategies for how you are going to bring them to life. Evangelizing them internally with your partners is key. Even if you have to talk through your strategies in smaller groups, rather than one big training, it can go a long way in getting buy-in from the right people.

I think there are a couple of different docs that I would use, depending on the audience (internal, external) and the competitor (are you ahead, behind)

INTERNAL resources

• Feature comparisons
• "Killer" features that set you apart
• Common objections
• Loaded discovery questions (I love these, questions your reps can use to purposefully attack a weakness)
• Switch stories
• Deal win stories (these are different than switch stories. Dive into how the rep positioned to overcome competitive objections)
• Pricing comparisons

EXTERNAL

To be honest, I started writing this response with the internal vs external lens. I was always taught to take the high road when marketing externally. Your first call deck and messaging should be LOADED with differentiated features and benefits. Picking a fight publically isn't always the best idea. Better to get your reps fired up to bring the fight to each deal.

The only exception is external customer testimonials. We do password protected customer interviews that we can share as references. Customers are much more likely to be blunt and honest when it is a gated asset. 

Here are my go-tos for competitive positioning:

• A competitive overview deck that speaks simply and directly to our positioning in the field and our most defensible differences between categories of competitors.
• More detailed internal wiki pages for our most frequently seen competitors.
• Closed-lost analysis and theme summaries to inform objection documents
• Public comparison pages on the website to help buyers decide. These should be fair, objective, and serve as guidance not defense.

I recommend three documents. 1. an inbound competitive document, covering things like product differentiators, win/loss analysis, pricing and type of open roles. 2. a separate document summarizing industry commentators, analysts or review sites. 3. Finally, a document that focuses on your category definition and messaging within. I call this outbound positioning document.

The first establishes a competitive baseline. No FUD. Nor hearsay. Only qualitative statements. Times 4-6 competitors. this should give you a good insight of what you are up against. Industry commentary helps with understanding third party perspectives. This is important as the first document will inevitably be guides by your relative biases. Finally, outbound positioning is all about drawing the market you operate in according to your definitions. For example a simple 2x2 with pricing and quality. now map your market (=position). And then according to where you land you message accordingly.

Let me share the elements I've found to be most useful for competitive positioning materials like battle cards. While this may be geared toward a sales team, if done well, much of this content can be repurposed for other activations like competitive web pages and competitive replacement campaigns.

• Competitor overview – A high-level overview of the competitor, their product offering(s), how they position themselves, and their pricing.

• Quick dismiss – A short (3 sentences or less) articulation of why the competitor falls short, written exactly like you'd want a sales rep to say it out loud if asked by a customer "why shouldn't I go with [competitor name]?"

• Why us – A short (3 sentences or less) explanation of our differentiation, written exactly like you'd want a sales rep to say it out loud if asked "why should I choose you?"

• Competitor strengths and weaknesses – I like to structure this as a 2 column table for easy synthesis.

• Trap-setting questions – these are useful discovery questions with which to enable your sales team, to help them steer customer conversations into areas of competitive advantage.

• Objection handling – a FAQ anticipating negative things the competitor might say about our product, and how to respond.

• Why we lose / when to walk away – this is important to provide some real talk with your sales team. Speaking as a former sales person (not a good one, I'll add), sometimes it's just as important to know when to qualify-out a prospect as it is to qualify them in. Understanding where we lack product-market fit or where we're not well-positioned to win against a competitor builds trust with the sales team, and helps them focus their time on highest-probability-of-success opportunities.

• Customer wins – examples of customers that chose our product over the competitor and why.

There's a few documents I've found consistently valuable for CI programs.

1. Competitive battlecards for customer-facing teams

2. Product deep dives: typically done for product teams to show them competitor capabilities and where there are strengths/gaps compared to our own offering.

3. Win/Loss reporting: data-driven and shows trends such as win rates by competitors, industry, region, etc. and reasons behind key losses

4. Messaging deep dive: more for a marketing audience to analyze competitor positioning and where there's opportunity for a more differentiated message.