What metric, goal or KPI can you put on providing competitive intelligence to the company or product teams?

Ultimately, the change in win rate against that particular competitor before vs. after your CI project.  There are sub goals and metrics to unpack here:  QoQ change in the competitor features & functions, and messaging The pace at which your product team is able to ship against new intel PM survey results on the usefulness of your CI program This may be a controversial statement, but after seeing CI programs run out of Product, PMM, and Ops at different companies, I think the actual research ...Read More

This really depends on the actual goal of a CI program, but here are a few ideas: For the sales team: Competitive win rates (pre and post intel) Sales confidence on competitive pitching (This is something you can measure using surveys at a regular cadence like quarterly) For the product team: Feature parity if that is what you are focused on Competitive differentiation - if you really need a metric you can create a percentage scale and see how that changes over time For the marketing team If you ...Read More

Competitive win rate! This requires reps to record (and for your CRM to have a field for) competitor (existing -rip and replace - or exploring - head to head). This is the most direct way to see if you are moving the needle against your core competitors. Secondary metrics may include things like analyst and review site achievement (i.e. G2 ranking) or traffic and search relevance for comparrison pages (i.e. a competitive landing page). This answer is highly dependent on which data exists in your ...Read More

Terrific question! A few metrics that are key to competitive intel: Competitive Intel 101 Metrics 1. Sales engagement -- Is your sales team using the competitive content that your team is developing? If you use a sales enablement platform (we use Highspot), getting this data is much easier. Set your OKRs on increasing sales engagement with this type of content. 2. Sales satisfaction -- This is a more qualitative measure, but very important. Find out whether your sales team feels more confident i ...Read More

1. Sales confidence - While not a metric measured in SFDC, you can work with enablement to craft a pre and post sales confidence metric to assess how confident reps feel in navigating competitive conversations.  2. Competitive win rate - You're likely already measuring win rate, but competitive win rate will give you a direct KPI to measure the improvment in closing competitive deals.  3. [ Product specific] Reduction in lost deals due to product capabilities - To measure this metric you'll need ...Read More

Competitive win rate is a great north star goal. But it can be challenging to accurately impact that in a positive way in a short amount of time. A couple other KPIs I've used in the past and that I recommend: 1. Competitor confidence (from the sales team) 2. Project-based contribution If you can increase the confidence of your sales team when it comes to competitors, you can infer that it will positively impact your competitive win rate. So every 6 month, I send a survey to my entire sales team ...Read More

It's great to see companies putting more emphasis on measuring this. It's definitely a challenge, but if competitive investments aren't measured, it's less likely they'll be appreciated or incorporated into key processes. The ideal measure of competitive intelligence is win rate. Measured on a quarterly basis (and at the close of a quarter) it can indicate if the organization is competing more effectively in qualified opportunities. It's important to note that like most PMM metrics, win rate is ...Read More

Rule #1 of Competitive Intelligence is to tie it directly to revenue. By doing that you uplevel it from being seen as a research project to something that drives specific impact for the business. Here are three revenue metrics I try to focus on: Win Rates: Track win rates against your top 2-4 competitors. Keeping the number of competitors limited helps maintain focus and provides clearer insights. Deal Involvement: Monitor specific deals where CI/MI has been involved. You could track content use ...Read More

For the Sales side, you can look at: - competitive win/loss rates - win rates of deals that used competitive support or resources vs. did not - ultimately, market share over time But for the Product teams or overall company distribution of intelligence, it's tough, because it's not as close to a specific outcome. May need to look at more qualitative measures like positive feedback from your Product teams, saying that your CI helped them make a specific decision faster or more confidently. Good l ...Read More

Love this question! I'd think about it in terms of outcomes, and effectiveness.  So I'd look at metrics like: Competitive Win Rates Usage - To be clear, I like to look at this through the lens of whether the usage of a particular piece of competitive content is impacting the sales cycle and not just pure usage of content.  Product Feedback/Usage Retention Depending on the size and stage of your company, you may also have things like: Competitive SEO - If you use a tool lke SEMRush then you'll be ...Read More

Teams should be tracking win/loss rates vs specific competitors. This information is most easily gathered and tracked via the sales team (or possibly solutions eng) and stored in a system of record like Salesforce. Additional detail around win/loss reasons when in a competitive situation is key to measuring success. It's not perfect data and should be viewed through a lens of subjectivity. Is there a product gap vs a competitor that led to a win or loss? Was it a pricing decision? Was the seller ...Read More

You're right this is difficult to measure but I would suggest two things. First, if you have created battlecards for each competitor, you should be able to measure views of those battlecards, both individually per competitor and overall. If you are using a competitive analysis tool like Crayon or Klue and you've integrated your CRM, you should also be able to measure closed won opportunities by reps who have viewed your battlecards. If you use a call intelligence solution like Gong, you can also ...Read More

The end game is for customers to choose your solutions and brand over the competition, so the most meaningful KPI is your win rate against against different competitors when you encounter them in deals. To measure that, you need to make sure your sales team is documenting who they encounter in each opportunity.  As a personal KPI, you could provide a quarterly or even monthly analysis and update with actionable insights and recommendations regarding competition. In my experience, a lot of real-t ...Read More

This is underrated as a question. Most CI programs measure the wrong things, typically output metrics like battlecards published, competitive updates sent, or portal page views. None of those correlate reliably with winning more deals. The output metric I anchor to is competitive win rate by segment, tracked quarterly. Everything else is a leading indicator that should be evaluated against whether it predicts movement in that number. Useful leading indicators I have actually used: Sales rep comp ...Read More

Sarah, Grant, Sam, and the others here have covered win rate well. It is the right north star. Let me add the angle that changed how I approach this measurement after running CI programs at Tableau, Salesforce, and now in the AI automation space at UiPath. The core problem with win rate as a CI KPI is attribution lag. A competitive battlecard built today influences a deal that closes in six months. By the time the data shows up, you have already been asked to justify next quarter's CI budget. Mo ...Read More

Another great question, thanks! I have been in a few roles where my job was to provide market data, competitive intelligence etc to other teams (CEO, Product, Sales etc) within the org. These teams would use this information to make strategic decisions, use them in sales presentations, etc but to put a common metric on providing competitive intelligence was hard. So we would send a quarterly survey to other teams within the org to participate in an anoynmous survey asking them about the usefulne ...Read More