What resources help you gather competitive intelligence about other vendors? How do you compare your product features with those of others?

I've worked in enterprise tech for most of my career (SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow). To be honest, I think the biggest competitor that I've always come across is the status quo (doing nothing) since there are so many influencers and decision-makers in an enterprise tech sales cycle. 

Here are the main sources I use to keep informed on what's going on in the market.

• Stratechery - great podcast on all things tech 
• WSJ + Bloomberg - I pay for both of these to stay informed on what's going on in the world
• LinkedIn - I follow relevant/interesting people to stay informed of what's top of mind for them
• The Information - great resource and newsletters to stay informed on what's going on in tech
• Earnings calls - listen to your competitors' earnings calls. I consider these marketing events where the CEO and CFO are positioning their company to institutional investors. 
• Community - most companies have both internal and external communities/teams - have found this to be the best way to get a quick answer about a specific feature/function 

I don't work as closely on competitive intelligence since I moved into partner marketing a couple of years ago. Even if you aren't comfortable doing the work, there are likely other people in your company with product strategy/bizops titles who likely have some additional info on win/loss analysis, that can help inform positioning and messaging. 

There are also many third-party firms that also do a great job of sharing competitive intelligence through customer interviews as well.

For competitive intelligence, I use several sources:

• Competitor's website
• YouTube
• Past customers
• Review sites
• Analyst reports

I look at how they position their products and portfolio and compare that to our products and positioning. I try to see where our product features may differ and where we differentiate. I also try to build out feature comparison charts so we can see exactly where there are gaps between our offerings. Typically I will build out a competitive deck which includes objection handling and points of differentiation. I find this to be the most helpful for sales reps to use in their talk tracks.

If you don't have access to a tool like Klue and need to gather competitive intelligence manually, here's what I'd do:

• Set up a Feedly feed to monitor your competitors' blogs, news, etc.
• Set up google alerts to you're notified when they are mentioned (this might get overwhelming if there are a lot of competitors)
• Follow competitors on social media
• At least quarterly, you should do a deep dive where you go through their entire website to see how their messaging is changing, what they are hiring for, what events they are going to, and what new assets have been published. --This will give you clues into the direction the competitor is moving to
• Ask your reps about what they're hearing, especially if they recently won/lost a deal to a competitor
• Conduct Win/loss interviews
• Talk to customers (case study interviews)