What strategy do you use to ensure everyone internally agrees on what differentiates you from competition?

Our strategy begins with product marketing conducting a thorough competitive analysis to establish a clear point of view on how we differentiate in the market. From there, we collaborate closely with key stakeholders—such as product teams and competitive intelligence (if applicable)—to ensure alignment. If possible, it's also valuable to validate these differentiators with key accounts and sales leaders. By facilitating cross-functional discussions and securing buy-in from leadership, we create a unified message that resonates across teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page about our competitive edge.

There is a difference between having alignment on "what's different" between you and your competition and "what differentiates" you from your competition. The latter is really about getting strategic alignment on 1) what your ideal customer profile (ICP) is, 2) who your real competitive threats are, and 3) which value props / feature sets are the ones you'll lean into developing and messaging to the market.

Because this work is all about making sure your ICP chooses you. And they will choose you because you're good at conveying you're the best at the things they care about most.

So, you need to align on those 3 things:

1. The ICP

   • Who are they? Demographics, firmographics

   • What do they care about? Top challenges, top benefits they're looking for, outcomes they're trying to drive

2. The real competitive threats

   • Are you playing for the high-end of the market? The low-end? Somewhere in between?

   • Who are the competitors in your ICP's consideration set?

3. Value props you'll lean into

   1. What are the top things your ICP cares about most that you do better (or aspire to do better) than your competitive threats?

We actually just went through a corporate messaging alignment exercise at SurveyMonkey, and these are the steps we took:

1. We did an internal survey with leadership to gauge alignment on some critical elements of our corporate strategy: who our ICP is, the top challenges we solve for, why we win, where we fall short for customers, etc. We found out we weren't as aligned as we thought we were.

2. We did some extensive ICP analysis:

   • Where are we currently seeing success? We looked at revenue, retention, LTV, AOV, win rate, etc. cut by department, level, industry, company size, use case, and more

3. We first got exec alignment on the ICP (this took a few rounds of debate)

4. Once we were aligned on the ICP, we did research on what the ICP cares about

   • We ran a product value prop MaxDiff study with our ICP to get a stack ranked order of importance, and we also validated things like top challenges, benefits, and ultimate outcomes

5. We crafted corporate messaging that went through a few rounds of executive-level feedback

6. We rolled it out to leadership first, then the entire company

7. We ensured the go-forward strategy was embedded in the company-wide approach to annual planning

Some learnings & tips if you want to do something similar:

• Get executive-level buy-in. In this case, our global head of marketing drove the effort with PMM & Brand, with CEO sponsorship.

• Make sure your recommendations are backed by data. It will be easier to get alignment across functions if you can point to data showing that these are the things our customer cares the most about

• Don't rush it. You can move fast, but you'll want to save room for feedback & iteration before company-wide roll out.

You’ll need to do two things:

1. To gain internal alignment, identify who your stakeholders are and how you want to bring them along in your process. Do you need to involve them in workshops and brainstorming? Or brief them at regular intervals to get their feedback before you finalize your recommendations? I’d recommend, at a minimum, collecting their input on what ‘good’ looks like to them. This could be competitors' positioning, prior examples of work that they think hits the mark.

2. Lead an exercise to sort your differentiators and table-stakes capabilities. This can be a simple as a table or a whiteboarding exercise, but should be collaborative. That’s because there will be differences of opinion on what constitutes a differentiator - price, features, services, etc. - and it’s important to hash out what is a true differentiator internally before building messaging or a story around it.

In identifying differentiators, focus on categories of value - features, pricing & packaging, onboarding or services offerings - and then sort them into the “table stakes”, “differentiators” and “emergent differentiators” categories. Then, lead a discussion with your stakeholders about:

• Which differentiators do we have today? How defensible are these against the competition?

• Which emergent differentiators are we investing in that we could lean further into?

• Where are we getting feedback that we are meeting or missing table stakes that we need to be mindful of in both our roadmap and our messaging?

Typically, the best strategy to align the organization is to lean into data. When defining -- and agreeing on -- what makes you different from the competition, here are a few tactics to deploy:

1. Identify key value drivers: Often done via survey research, identifying and aligning on features and capabilities that create value for buyers and users is incredibly helpful. You can use this insight to align product and sales teams on the "must have" features, including requirements to meet or exceed customer expectations.

2. Ask your customers: It's too easy, right? Understand why your customers chose you in the first place. Use this knowledge to determine whether you should double down on your existing differentiators or expand your capabilities. This also creates a great opportunity to level-set. If your customers' perspective on what makes you different is inconsistent with your company's expectations, it's an opportunity to refine your positioning and/or re-evaluate where your product delivers the most value.

3. Deliver consistent and detailed competitive intelligence: This tactic is not quite as easy, but so helpful when done well. At a minimum, you can track what your competitors are saying, what features or capabilities they're highlighting, and even if new products have launched. Use these insights to align teams in your organization on table-stakes in the market and where your brand stands apart.

When in doubt, go back to the beginning. What was the hypothesis behind the product or company? Presumably there was a gap in the market or an opportunity to do something better. Determine if the original hypothesis is still true, and if so, realigning teams against that vision can be a powerful way to cement your position and brand in the market.

This is a great one. First, try not to differentiate on features alone. Most features can be copied, they aren't defensible enough from a long-term perspective. Your overall approach to building products - your unique point of view on the market -- that should be the source of your differentiation. Features can, on the other hand, be great proof points of your differentiation. For example, Third Love is a bra and underwear brand that tried to differentiate from Victorias secret by being more inclusive of different types of beauty. They walked that walk by having a far wider range of sizes in their clothing than alternatives (that was the feature) but they sold the differentiation by weaving that point of view on inclusive design into everything from their marketing to their hiring practices.

If you have a number of points of differentiation that you're considering, here's how I'd recommend sorting them. Lay them all out as a group and rank them by the following filters:

• Most defensible: You have a wide range of strong proof points to back up that differentiation.

• Most ownable: Your product is the best example of that differentiation on the market and you have a significant head start in owning that differentiation.

• Most closely tied to prospective customer's pain: There is sufficient demand for that kind of approach or differentiation in the market. e.g. Customers have been dealing with complex software for years and are tired of it and you're differentiating on intuitiveness.

I would recommend by first narrowing down your differentiators by which of them specifically direct a real complaint or pain that prospective customers have, then map the remaining on a 2X2 of defensible (x axis) and ownable (y axis). That practice should help you sort what is your most strategic choice.

First, you need to become an expert in your competitive landscape. Do the research, do the analysis, then do the storytelling and debate with your team. Involve stakeholders from other disciplines in your research projects if possible so they are invested from the beginning, and will champion your conclusions. Bring your team along for the journey. This works much better than waiting til the end to bring people in. There are many research approaches you can use here. I find it helpful to use multiple, but do what you have the bandwidth and resources for. 

Qualitative Research

If you can do some customer and prospect interviews, you should! Your target customers will know better than anyone what they need, and how they perceive your product’s strengths and weaknesses vs. competitors. If you have a sales team, they can help you identify customers/prospects to interview. Develop a discussion guide where you craft the key questions you want to ask and what topics you want to dig deeper on. You’ll be asking customers which features made them choose you over others, what they wish you offered, etc. Record the interviews (with your subject’s permission) so you have clips to share with your team later. 

Market Research: Feature Comparison

I like to create a feature comparison grid where you list your key competitors on one axis, and then list all or most of the features you and competitors offer along the other axis. Then you check off the features that your product, and each competitive product, offers. At the end you should see a clear picture of where you or your competitors might have gaps, or competitive advantages, in terms of feature set. You can also apply a scoring mechanism to take into account how important each feature is to your audience (which you hopefully learned from your interviews!)

Market Research: Messaging Comparison

Gather your competitors’ messaging and see what they are each emphasizing as their competitive advantages. You can find this on their websites, video ads, billboards, you name it! Collect key messages into a doc, and put them side by side with your own. See what insight you can gain by looking at how they are positioning themselves against your product and each other. 

Internal Research

Talk to internal stakeholders including sales, customer success, customer service, etc. Gather their insights on what customers are saying they love about your product or where it may be lacking. Listen to sales calls. Look at win/loss reports. Review support tickets. You’re looking for insights on where your product excels and where it falls short.

Do the Analysis

This is critical: do not simply share your mountains of raw research with your team and expect them to make sense of it all. Do the deep thinking to narrow it down to just 1 to 3 (no more) competitive advantages you can win with. Then put it all together in a deck or doc, with excerpts from your research to help you tell the story. 

Tell the story, have the debate

Now you set up a meeting, or even better a roadshow with several teams, to share your analysis and findings. Tell a good story, backed by all of your research. Video clips from your interviews will be very powerful here. And don’t just expect everyone to agree with you. Have a healthy debate with your team. Listen to opposing points of view. Do your best to arrive at a conclusion that most can agree with, and incorporate feedback to make your competitive positioning stronger. 

To recap: Do the research. Include your team from the start and bring people along for the journey. Be willing to debate and incorporate other points of view. Keep socializing your results and show them in action in your messaging and positioning. 

For a high-level strategic initiative like Storytelling or Narrative development, I've found that creating a consistent touchpoint with a small cross functional team is foundational to the success of the project. I've typically included stakeholders from Product, GTM and the exec team, and set the expectation up front that while we will take feedback from others throughout this process, this core team are the final drivers and approvers of the story we tell.

Initially, I collect inputs on competitive differentiators across these groups, and then use that to stack rank as a group based on incorporating areas like customer feedback, win/loss reports, market intel, and product data. I've found that there are certain differentiators that everyone agrees on that are core to your company's story (those are the easy ones!), and often times there are important differentiators that get surfaced based on team expertise, that rise to the top of the list as well (think customer feedback from an EBC, how we've won against an upcoming competitor, product adoption of a core area that competitors lack, etc...).

These differentiators, along with other messaging, get added to a narrative framework that this team reviews. Throughout the process, we keep the lines of communication open with regular check-ins to make sure we’re all aligned as things change. That way, the entire company is aligned and telling one cohesive story no matter who's talking.

In order to ensure alignment (not total agreement but alignment), leading with facts to identify the differences is the most important. The facts are usually gathered via Competitive Intelligence and Audience understanding of their needs.

The product should have a clear, fact-based perspective of the value propositions that differentiate from the competition and solve the audience's need. The easiest facts to differentiate are on price, and capabilities/specifications.

The harder differentiators to prove are not fact-based. These are things like ease of use, support, trust and things that are all opinion based, and this is where finding alignment can be harder. But can be done. This is where it's important to do the research, and get customer feedback, especially qualitative if possible, to validate that value propositions that are not based on "facts."

If you're having trouble driving alignment, most likely it's because most of your value propositions and differentiators may be based on things that are hard to prove with facts. If that's the case you need customer validation. So I would recommend a customer feedback push on the value propositions or an alpha/beta to verify the differentiators, and that customers agree. After that, it will be easier to drive alignment because you will have research backing to move forward.

Also, if possible, I'd urge the product team to go back to the product and see if you can add in fact-based value propositions prior to launch to have true differentiators in the power of the product. Then you can drive must-faster growth because you'll rely less on what the people "believe" and can show with the specifications/capabilities of the product that it will be the best in market.

I think the best way to gain consensus and alignment on how you’re differentiated from the competition is to first start by soliciting input from all stakeholders (sales, product, customer success, marketing, engineering if a technical product). From there, I typically look for customer stories, calls or interviews that mention competitors (we’ve been using Fathom to flag these during calls and alert in real-time). Once you have raw internal and external notes, it’s also good to fill in your knowledge with how those competitors talk about themselves through their webinars, product marketing, customer case studies, and social channels. From there, it’s time to build a battle card for sales on a per competitor basis with guidance on which traps to set, traps they might set, how to deposition their traps, and key points of differentiation.

I think about my strategy in three steps:

• Objective Facts

  • Product: Collaborate closely with the product team to conduct feature-by-feature comparisons. Dive into the technology to identify what’s truly unique. Sometimes, depending on the product area or space, you might be lucky enough to be able to test out your competitor's product yourself through freemium accounts or trials to gain firsthand experience!

  • Sales Insights: If you work in a space with a meaningful sales motion, leverage win/loss analyses with your sales team to identify key themes from customer conversations. In my experience, my sales counterparts were an incredibly rich repository of insights. They could typically zero in on the "top 3" reasons why we win (and lose) in 1 or 2 short conversations.

  • Customer Insights: Customer interviews can provide invaluable feedback, revealing what tipped decisions in your favor. Hearing customers articulate value directly helps cut through internal disagreements. While it could be somewhat duplicative with sales insights, there is significant power in customer story vignettes. Sometimes if you want to fast track things you could even check out customer review sites (e.g., G2).

  • Analyst Insights: Engage with industry analysts for their market perspectives. Analysts offer broad visibility and unique insights that complement these other buckets. Just note that there may not always be analyst coverage in the sector you play in.

• Triangulation and Synthesis: Look for common denominators, incongruencies, and patterns across all insights to zero in on the key differentiators that matter most.

• Internal Alignment: If you truly built up a solid fact base from the first two steps, alignment becomes way easier. I recommend workshops or competitive positioning sessions where stakeholders review findings and can more easily align on the core differentiators. In general I've found that you can typically walk away with alignment on 80%+ of things which tends to be sufficient in my view.

Whenever I'm working a project that involves many people's opinions, I look for ways to bring objective data and a variety of stakeholder viewpoints into the conversation through win-loss interviews, x-functional brainstorms, and digging into differentiated value.

• Win-loss interviews: This is the objective data that tell us exactly what the market views as our differentiators. It's hard to argue with! At Seismic, we interview approximately 25 recent buyers or would-be-buyers per quarter and ask them why they chose us or didn't. We make sure to dig into non-product related topics like services or customer success.

• Cross-functional brainstorms: Whenever we're working on a narrative or other initiative that requires alignment on our differentiators, I seek to include a wide variety of stakeholders in a brainstorming session. We start with crafting a laundry list of what we believe our differentiators are. We look at that against data from win-loss interviews. We offer complementary perspectives from different parts of the business--and have a healthy debate. I like to include Sales, CS, Product, our Value team, and Marketing.

• Differentiated value: April Dunford uses this term to describe the "what's in it for me" aspect of differentiation. A capability may be unique, but if the customer doesn't care, then it's not worth highlighting. For any differentiator to make it to the top of the list, you need to be able to articulate the customer value. Part of the healthy debate we have in our x-functional brainstorms is around exactly this.

Strong external messaging starts with clear internal alignment on positioning. Internal positioning should focus on the internal narrative of how your products are clearly and measurably differentiated. 

I’d begin this exercise by gathering a core cross-functional group of decision-makers from product, sales, marketing, customer success, and executive teams for input and influence across the org. Align on the core persona(s) you want to focus on for the positioning - the fewer, the better. Define the traits of this persona clearly - what matters to them and in what order? What gets them a promotion when done well, and what gets them fired if not handled well? Focusing on traits of the target persona, begin to break out the areas of benefits from your offerings that help your customer get promoted or achieve their desired outcome. This should be translated to value props at the level of sales conversations and marketing messaging. 

I have done Harvey-ball exercises (look it up) to internally rate our capabilities vs. competition as objectively as possible to help develop clear and differentiated internal positioning everyone can agree on. Use the outcome of this core exercise to craft external messaging and stories. This will be a lot of work but it is guaranteed to pay dividends to strengthen your core differentiation in the market. 

To make sure everyone internally agrees on what sets you apart from the competition, I like to break it down into layers.

First, there's the one-liner: a simple, clear statement about how your approach to solving the problem is different. Everyone in the company should know this—it usually comes from leadership and ties into the company’s overall strategy. To keep it fresh and top of mind, it needs to be repeated regularly in all-hands meetings, internal communications, and whenever leadership speaks externally. For example, at Sentry, we focus relentlessly on building for our end user—the developer—something our competitors don’t do as well. You’ll hear that message reinforced in everything from interviews to social media posts from our leaders.

Next, I focus on building out proof points to back that up. The key here is that these proof points have to be true and resonate with your customers. To do that, it’s important to tap into both customer and market research—understand why your customers chose you over the competition. This ensures the proof points reflect real-world experiences, making it easier for the team—especially those in customer-facing roles—to confidently talk about what makes your product stand out.

When it comes to structuring the proof points, I like using Force Management’s framework:

• Unique – Something no other vendor offers. This is where your product stands out as the only solution for a specific need.

• Comparative – Features other companies might have, but that you do better or differently.

• Holistic – These are the things that make customers feel good about working with you, like having a large user base or contributing to open-source projects.

Once these are on paper, gather a few key stakeholders—like product, sales, and customer success—to review and get everyone aligned. Then, it’s all about repetition. Keep the messaging in front of the team regularly, and make sure there's a clear, single source of truth for everyone to refer to.

By rooting your differentiation in real customer feedback and data, it becomes much easier to get everyone on the same page and confidently talking about what sets your company apart.

Here are the steps that I would follow:

Step 1: Do your research first and build a point of view.
Step 2: Align with internal SMEs (engineers, SEs, architects) to validate your findings and differentiators.
Step 3: Find customer stories to support (1) and (2).
Step 4: Create the internal battle card and external messaging (slides for sales enablement and landing pages).

The key is developing a shared narrative that everyone can champion. Start by facilitating workshops with cross-functional teams—Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success—to gather perspectives on what truly differentiates the product. Use real-world examples from customers to ground the discussion. Once you identify the core differentiators, document them in a clear, concise, and easily repeatable format. Regular check-ins and reinforcement through internal communications are crucial to maintaining alignment.

There are two components to get alignment on here — the playing field, and the scores.

With both, the first step is creating a feature/functionality matrix for your company and its key competitors.

• The choice of competitive set is important — these should be alternatives that you're actually encountering as direct competitors.

• Along the rows, detail out all the relevant features and functionality, ideally in categories (infrastructure, product lines, support/service, etc.).

• The columns should be companies — your company and its competitors.

• Do your research to determine not just the availability of different features/functionality, but the strength and completeness. Look at company websites, review sites, and analyst reports. Work with your product team. Talk to your sales & CS teams. Make sure to save your documentation for future reference!

• Color code each cell red, yellow, or green.

  • Green = Complete / strong solution

  • Yellow = Partial solution / doesn't work well / coming soon

  • Red = No solution

• If you like, you can add text to the cell to explain why you gave that color.

Now the two things you have to get alignment on are:

• The playing field. Are these the right competitors? Is this the right set of functionality to evaluate? (Note: Do this first, before you research!)

• The scores. Does everyone agree that this is an accurate reflection of the company's capabilities, and the competitors' strengths / weaknesses? This is where your documentation comes in really handy.