What competitive positioning frameworks have worked best for you?

I have chosen different frameworks based on different product situations (new category, highly competitive, PLG motion, etc). So with that said, here are my top 2 favorites:The Venn Framework, which is best for simplifying complex concepts into human, non-jargon language:It has three overlapping circles: What customers care about What you do uniquely well What competitors do well Your competitive positioning lives in the intersection of these circles. The Dunford Method, which is best to bring t ...Read More

I'm not sure what "academic" frameworks exist for competitive analysis, but I have worked with dozens of companies and haven't seen a lot of variation in how they approach competitive work. There are three distinct workstreams: Competitive analysis: Building an accurate understanding of how you compare to your competitors. This involves identifying the key capabilities required by your buyers (and important to their buying decisions) and doing research to analyze how you and your competitors sta ...Read More

There are a lot of great existing competitive positioning frameworks out there. I think GTM maturity of the company and primary audience & execution priorities should be considered in designing your framework. I don't always stick to a proprietary framework, I tend to stay agile to my stakeholders. Some best practices: 1. Competitive enablement for sales should be a GTM priority. If the sales team is already adhering to a specific selling framework, I recommend aligning with their common met ...Read More

I generally start out with a very simple, standard framework for a battle card. Then, I present it to stakeholders for feedback. Generally, they find some fields in the framework to not be useful at all, and they request additional information that will be useful to them. The framework you use will be different based on your market, your sales team and the sophistication of your knowledge.  Another thing to add here – your positioning framework is only as good as your team's ability to find, use ...Read More

This would definitely depend on the maturity of the company itself, for example, a pre-seed company would have different needs than Series B or series D. The best thing to do at the start is to capture the baseline KPIs and objectives, clarify the goals, and then work backward on how to achieve them, what tech stack you'll need and which team-members to pull  How this looks like in real life is, you'll do a bunch of interviews with sales, marketing, product and customer success teams and then te ...Read More