What tools or frameworks do you utilize when conducting competitive and market intelligence?

Doing market intelligence work can be very detail-oriented both in the research and analysis phase as well as the synthesis and share-out phase, so there are a few frameworks I like to help simplify the output of that work. I use the WIN framework for battle-cards when honing in on one competitor, comparing it to my product/service. Each battle-card should cover: What they do (overview, strengths) Implications for us (where they beat us, where we win) Narrative (how to position against them) I a ...Read More

Three types of research should inform any competitive and market intelligence program: Internal resources and intelligence, such as sales calls and win-loss analysis, are great for identifying high-level competitive and market insights. I typically use these resources to identify areas for further research (e.g., we usually lose deals to competitor X due to a specific capability gap) and differentiators to showcase in our marketing and selling motions. Publicly available resources, such as compe ...Read More

It's a mix of things. We run a consistent win/loss and call analysis loop to track real-time competitor mentions, objections, and positioning that works (or don't). We've recently created an internal GTM play framework to help us slice the business in ways that help us understand what's working and what's not. This could be any combination of persona, segment, vertical, region, etc. It goes deeper than RevOPS/MOPS level reporting of performance by product, region, and vertical (broad metrics, ba ...Read More

There are plenty of tools out there to gather competitive intel and you don't technically even need a tool - you could just set up Google alerts or search yourself. That said, here are some of the things I think are critical to gather when conducting competitive research: Strengths/weaknesses (sometimes called swords and shields) with talking points for each Product(s) overview Feature comparisons including gaps Questions for prospects to plant (landmines) Track record against you with customer ...Read More

AI tooling can be very helpful for streamlining competitive and marketing intelligence. That enables the team to focus less time on collecting inputs and competitive and market intel, and more time analyzing what the insights mean for Etsy. A structure I like to use for competitive analyses is: A one page introduction featuring a clear comparison grid of key features across adjacent companies and direct competitors. A deeper, in-depth analysis of the specific features across companies following ...Read More

The modern CI stack has changed significantly in the last two years, and I think about it in terms of three tiers: signal capture, competitive framing, and win/loss. For signal capture: dedicated tools like Crayon and Klue do good work for automated monitoring at scale, but I have also seen strong results from lightweight custom pipelines using Perplexity for ad-hoc research, RSS feeds piped through Zapier or Make for automated monitoring, and custom prompts for synthesis. The key is routing sig ...Read More