What do you do for external-facing competitive assets? That is, assets (PDF, slide, etc.) that a sales rep can share with a prosect or customer to compare or differentiate their product from a competitor?

This is certainly a divisive topic. One school of thought is what I call “the Pepsi challenge” approach. That is, if you’re #2, you always mention #1, but if you’re #1, you never mention #2 (you don’t hear Coke bringing Pepsi into their ads, right?). While philosophically that might be the right approach, I believe the fact of the matter is you need to arm your GTM teams with targeted H2H approaches because that’s likely what the majority of their cycles entail. Do this with clearly defined internal versus external battlecards/material. The internal ones should not only tout your benefits over the competitors but also include the pitfalls to avoid. You’re never going to beat a competitor on every single dimension, so be honest with your teams on where they should lean in and where they should try to avoid. This will also act as a safety guard to prevent these battlecards from being shared externally. Now for your external material, I personally think it’s fine to create targeted H2H collateral that calls out competitors and your points of differentiation. However, try to avoid really “measurable” elements like using Harvey balls to represent capabilities because these are always up for debate and can lead to inaccuracies. You’re safer to talk about themes, approaches, and drop in case studies/quotes regarding that competitor. Also, 3P research is your friend here. Take your opinion out of it by anchoring on Gartner Magic Quadrants, Forrester Waves, industry news, etc… Finally, you can also create versions of this collateral that might be more publicly hosted with an “us versus them” approach that doesn’t specifically name the competitor.

I’ve created competitive webpages in the past and that’s been a huge success with sales. Whether you make these webpages easily accessible on your website (top nav or elsewhere) is a good discussion to have with your growth team. These webpages are so useful to sales because any time they are asked about our (top x) competitors, they can easily bring up those pages, talk through the key differentiators, and then follow up with an email to share these pages with their prospects.

Slides and/or one-pagers work well too since they are easy to share. I'd say the webpages have definitely gotten more traction and enthusiasm from Sales!

I actually have a Competitive Intel PMM on my team who works on some of these materials. It can be helpful to use a CI tool if you have budget for this. At Klaviyo, we also have a Creative team that helps out with customer facing work but you can totally create this type of material on your own with access to Powerpoint. Just be careful with making claims against competitors in writing as there's always the risk they could respond with some legal action if you aren't totally buttoned up.

We do 'market analysis' reports for in-flight opportunities These are effective solution requirement documents that position you against a competitor without naming them. Naming the competitor in external documentation tends to commoditize your offering and box you into a budget line item (especially if you have a differentiated offering). These would be delivered to our champions so they can deposition competitors and build requirements around our unique offering. 

You define in columns: 

• Key capability or solution requirement (tagless analytics, real-time alerting, etc)
• Based on your unique or competitive differentiators
• Your solution's advantage or approach to the key capability (Configurable alerting engine built on XYZ cloud platform enables real-time alerting etc)
• This should help to define a requirement that is best in class and unique to your offering
• 'The Other Guys' (Alerting engine with minimal configuration and latency)
• Not stating the competition explicitly, but still allowing your champion to draw a comparison 

Let me know if this helps! Happy to expand. 

Oh, and never send a checklist comparison.