What constitutes a competitor, and what is the goal you have in mind when you conduct competitor analysis?

Here is the competitive intelligence mission statement I've used for several years (repeat from previous post but will add more detail).  “Define ourselves based on problems we solve and value we provide, not your competition. But also equip ourselves to stand out from competition and win against them.”Sales: Equip teams with knowledge and tools to win against the competition.Product: Equip teams insight into competitive product sets so we can build better, differentiated product. Marketing: Dee ...Read More

The competitive set is defined by your audience, not you. And it changes all the time. At Square, we compete against anything that enables anyone to participate in our economy, not just other POS companies. The "Jobs to be Done" framework is helpful here - anything (tool, company, resource) that enables one of these critical jobs, or COULD, enable it in the future is a competitor. Make sure you look at your audience and what they are trying to achieve from different angles, not just from a "shar ...Read More

Thanks for asking this question. The exercise of defining your competitive set is a critical, but at times under-emphasized aspect of conducting research. There are three primary modes for competitive research: 1) optimization, 2) growth and 3) exploration. 1) Optimization is the most narrow mode. This is meant to identify how you are positioned relative to direct competitors, who are in the same industry and product family as your company. This is where your win/loss interviews become important ...Read More

This is a great question because: fortune favors the focused. In our world, there are thousands of SaaS offerings on the market. Many offer competitive products and capabilities to us. However, only a select few come up frequently in head-to-head deals where win-rate meaningfully impact our performance. That's where we focus (for established, rep-assisted SKUs). For newer, product lead growth (not reliant on a sales team / without win-loss data) this is more of a GTM strategy question. What does ...Read More

"Competitor aware, customer obsessed" is something that I've internalized when thinking about competitors. Competitors are a good thing - it validates your space, your product-market fit and the market opportunity. The key is balancing the focus on competitors and the focus on customers. It can be really easy to go down competitive rabbit holes and chase every organization in your space but the best way to prioritize top competitors Is by looking at the impact they are having on your organizatio ...Read More

I think competitors are important, but developing your own unique perspective of who you are, what makes you different, and who you serve is 10-100x more important. A short-ish anecdote: I used to work at AdRoll, which helps small businesses advertise on Google, Facebook, and everywhere else (e.g. Bing, Forbes, etc). Advertising is one of the most competitive markets ever, with Google and Facebook on an endless conquest for power. And yet, AdRoll was able to reach hundreds of millions of dollars ...Read More

'I think a competitor is anyone who is in or adjacent to your space. Said another way, a competitor is a vendor that can cause confusion or slow down your sales cycle for some reason. There are a few different types of competitors: Main competitors - the ones who you are competing with head on and can materially impact your revenue if you dont win. Spend most of your time on these.  Ankle biters - these are competitors that only impact part of your TAM. Ie a vendor who only goes after SMB. These ...Read More

Depends on how competitive your market is. You can create a list of competitors and create segments based on different variables that are important for your product or business. For instance direct competitors vs indirect competitors, Or competitors by vertical, or competitors by use case, etc. Secondly, If you have a LOT of competitors, I would do a prioritization exercise to identify the top 3-5 that you track more regularly vs others that you passively track, as needed. For instance, prioriti ...Read More

1. Revenue impact 2. Product innovation I used to only focus on the first point. That's an important one—and if you have limited bandwidth, I'd recommend you start there first. These are the vendors that are impacting your sellers' win rates. They're likely the more well-known vendors in your category, are easy to discover, are brand names, and are the largest in size (headcount, annual revenue, etc.). The second point is important, as well, though. Especially for businesses that are wanting to ...Read More

In the most simpliest terms, a direct competitor is solving a simliar or same pain point as you are. One goal in conducting a competitive analysis as part of your market research is to identify points of differentiation and keeping a pulse on what's working (or not) in market. You can produce helpful reference docs such as a competitive market landscape to competitive messaging frameworks to sales battle cards! Here is an example from Patti, our Head of Consumer PMM, from her past life: think ab ...Read More

I typically think of direct competitors as being other players in the same category of my org that are going after an overlapping share of wallet with an overlapping group of target customers. You may also spend time on your indirect competitors or even substitute products, but you're much less likely to hear about them from your sales team day to day. There are actually a few possible goals of competitor analysis, here are some common ones I've seen in my career so far: Create battlecards and t ...Read More

My primary philosophy around competitors is a little different than most: focus 80% of your energy on what makes you great as a product or service, and the rest on what anyone else is doing.  I've worked in duopoly markets (speech IVR in the contact center), highly fragmented markets (enterprise content and collaboration), and mature markets (enterprise networking). This approach works in all of them, because no matter how many competitors you have, you'll never have enough resources to properly ...Read More

I've found that there's a tendency in B2B SaaS to have some people in the org get concerned over every new "competitor" in the market. You can't allow this to affect your strategy because most SaaS tools and solutions today have a lot of competitors.  When I think about who my true competitors truly are, I look at a few metrics or types of data: How often does this vendor win deals from us? What is our win rate compared to this vendor? How many of our existing customers are leaving for this vend ...Read More

For smaller teams that may not have a built out CI team or CI PMM it can get tough to manage competitive research, positioning, creation enablement and dissemination of assets on top of everything else that you're doing as a PMM. This is why my philisophy is to really prioritize your top tier competitors and maybe even limiting it to the top 2 or 3 max. That doesn't mean you shouldn't stay on top of your industry and trends and what other players are doing, but that does mean that you aren't goi ...Read More

There are a few types of competitors to think about: Tier 1: Prime Competition - Those who compete for the same dollars for a very similar product. You often end up in feature battles with them and eat each other’s lunch. They look very similar to your offering in the eyes of prospects. They end up copying your features or vice versa. Tier 2: Patrial overlap - They have one or more similar products, common verticals, or solve the same problem in different ways. They are sometimes point solutions ...Read More

A competitor is anything that can be substituted for the value that your product offers. Sometimes, that's a product with a very similar feature set. Sometimes, it's a product that is designed for a different purpose, but people are using it (poorly) to solve for your product's value prop. And in some cases, a competitor may be nothing at all—the status quo. When you're trying to sell a product to customers that's in a new category, requires a new skill set, or is rooted in people doing things d ...Read More

I think of competitors in two ways. 1. alternatives. Excel the classical example here. An alternative way of achieving the same 2. similar / same product offerings targeted at the similar / same buyer. This last part around targeting and segmentation is important. Tesla and F150 are both electric cars. But do they really compete? They focus on different market segments. Further when it comes to specific insights there is a short-term and a long-term perspective. Long-term, take a look at balance ...Read More

Interesting question about how I define "compeititor" in and of itself. I tend to look at competitors as barriers that keep people from buying the product I'm selling. Sometimes its a comparable product, sometimes it's an alternate type of solution and sometimes it's nothing at all. The question driving competitor analysis is always: Why? Why is it that customers are gravitating towards buying/staying with an alternative (including doing nothing new/different)?  I hate feature-for-feature compar ...Read More