🤘 Dejan Gajsek

Coming from a full-stack marketing background, my vote goes toward retention than acquisition. Why? Because even if you kill it with acquisition and get new customers for your service, if your "bucket is leaky", you're going to eventually lose them because there's something that isn't right in your client funnel. According to Forbes, acquiring new customers can cost five to seven times more than retaining them. This means that until you fix the churn issue, you'll be hemorrhaging money. Only when you get to the point of healthy retention, I'd go and focus on winning new clients. Just based on that financial calculation and explanation you should be able to muster the team behind you and prioritize on fixing the leaky bucket syndrome.

This would definitely depend on the maturity of the company itself, for example, a pre-seed company would have different needs than Series B or series D. The best thing to do at the start is to capture the baseline KPIs and objectives, clarify the goals, and then work backward on how to achieve them, what tech stack you'll need and which team-members to pull How this looks like in real life is, you'll do a bunch of interviews with sales, marketing, product and customer success teams and then tease out the right positioning, establish a persona, and messaging around your department and around your product. Then you'll find your top 3-5 competitors and build comparison sheets and battlecards. Share those with your sales and ping them to check their confidence levels and in cadence check the win/loss analysis. Last but not least, having some social listening tools and keeping tabs on your competitors is also important since you can react just-in-time when they slip. I'd also establish a weekly internal newsletter to share what's going on out there in the competitive landscape so everyone is aware. The result after all of this will be a specialized playbook that you can execute on other departments and products in your organization. 

If you're banking that your sales teams will use your materials then you ask them first! Start with the top 2-3 sales reps or a sales manager who has a low-down on the biggest objections and reasons why deals aren't closing. Prioritize the top objections and construct your battlecard. Make sure that there are supportive links or any other collateral that supports talk tracks and arguments you are saying. This isn't all. Your battlecards need to be easy to use. (Most of the) People don't want to change the way they are doing things - especially seasoned sales veterans. To increase your chances, do this: 1. Make a battlecard super simple and easy to understand (your designer might be able to help) 2. Record a simple 2-minute Loom video on how to use it. 3. Get buy-in from a sales manager who will champion your campaign. They will help you get it down the line. 4. Include the new asset in your in-house newsletter, internal Slack/Mcrsft teams, and email. Add short descriptions and reasons why, how to use it and don't forget to include your loom video Your communication needs to be on-point. You don't want to communicate in a way where sales teams feels inadequeate. Always frame it in a way that this is another tool that will help them when they're talking to their prospects. There's also a chance that you'll have to build and fill knowledge gaps as well. Make it available and easy-to-access to everyone from customer success, sales, product, and marketing teams. Always follow up with your sales teams to check how successful your battlecards were. Not much change? Iterate, perform more win/loss analysis, rebuild your battlecard.

I never thought of checking competitions as immoral or "scammy". I would go and say that I do like to play detective and spy on the best competitors but that's simply called gathering intel. If I'm being a little bit philosophical here, that's what you do in life as well as in business. You go out and search for success factors that resulted in a positive outcome in someone's life. If you do that on 4-5 individuals you will come up with overlapping patterns and factors that you can (up to a certain degree) sum up to helpful pieces of information on what to do next. In business, it's the same. If you want to reverse-engineer a company, product, or process, you'll find breadcrumbs and tracks that your competitor has left behind. This could mean: * use special intelligence tools to discover the story behind the success (social listening tools, web traffic tools, etc..) * Interviews from management teams (podcasts, YouTube videos, conferences/events talks) * Your Internal CRM data. Ask your sales and customer success teams when they encounter competitor phrases or mentions. You can go back and listen to those recordings. * Explore your competitor positioning over time - the Wayback Machine is great at that. Also opt-in in their customer journey to understand their messaging strategy. The unethical things that I wouldn't do is: * bash your competition internally or publicly. You only have one reputation. * Poach and try to convince competitor employees to share their secrets * Camouflage myself as an interested buyer and go on sales calls with competitors These are just couple of thoughts. I hope it helps! 🤘🤘

Outdated information is almost worse than having no information since you might be making decisions from data sources that are no longer relevant or valid. To make sure this doesn't happen to you, come up with a process or SOP (standard operating procedure) where you refresh/update your information on a regular cadence. This could be bi-weekly but even quarterly works. It's also important that you incorporate some sort of social listening and competitor tracking solutions. Your prospects are already doing their homework by comparing your product/service with your competitor. Your customer success and sales teams have to be on-point when they talk with these prospects. If a prospect senses that you're not in the loop with the market or offerings the trustworthy factor may fall and the chances of a sale will go down as well. In short: * Develop SOPs and process for updates/refreshes * Timestamp/date your materials (research, positioning, battlecards, comparison sheets, etc...). * Have social listening, competitor tracking process so you can predict, react, secure quick wins and/or prepare/plan for your future product update to stay ahead of your competition

Pricing will be one of the elements of how your brand is perceived. Priced low - you might be thought of as an early-stage startup who doesn't have product/market fit yet or isn't confident in their solution, Priced high - clearly the confidence in solving an issue is there and it usually correlates with the perceived image of the company. I always like to think of real-life physical examples and then translate them into a software solution. Someone who buys a $10,000 watch or a designer bag, is treated like a VIP. Every little detail in the physical store is impeccable and is there to create an ambiance of what that product represents. On another side, Gap and Walmart have self-served/browse-through retail racks where you dig through piles of clothes often marked with big font price signs screaming discount and value for money. Or another obvious one - how does getting a coffee at Dunkin Donuts differ from getting a single-origin cappuccino from a local roastery? The product has a similar effect from the utilitarian standpoint but a completely different perspective and context. How this correlates to the software? 1) Solving a business pain point for a high-ticket B2B client would garner a high price point because of the value it gives. Everything on the website should be congruent on problem-solving and building trust with your prospect - branding, content, journey, social credibility etc... 2) Look at the competition. What are their pricing structures? How does your product or service differ from theirs? Do you offer more value, better onboarding, and better experience? You can take the competitors as a baseline and adjust the price tag based on the differentiation factors 3) Your win/loss analysis and conversations with your actual clients? What kind of software are they buying apart from yours? What kind of problem are you solving for them? For example, if your solution enables sales teams to be 2x as efficient and could garner between 4x revenue to the bottom line then you can pull their numbers and see what their potential ROI would look like if they used your product. For example, if your B2B software solution costs $100,000 per year, but it helps bring an additional $1M at the end of the year, everyone would sign off on that deal. 

OOOOhhhh I love that question. There are always tracks you just need to start looking for them. I call this operation Ghost Recon. * Play a Secret Shopper - all of us have some sort of email account for checking messaging levels. Opt-in to the product and check its positioning and messaging. * Online Fishing holes - While G2, Capterra and TrustPilot usually hold at least few reviews those might be gamified or there are just not that many. Better source? Reddit and private forums or channels like Slack / Discord. Reddit is particularly useful since "all" opinions are unbiased. * Objective Research - Use tools like SpyFu, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs/SemRush to check unusual discrepancies. Did they increase their PPC spend, have they received a bunch of new backlinks (it might be a PR campaign). * Social Listening - There are specialized tools that capture mention of your competitors ranging from free (Talkwalker, Google Alerts, Reddit tracker) to Paid (Mention, AgoraPulse,...) * Social Media - although it could be a bit tedious to search, tools like Social Blade or Vicinitas will reveal top-performing posts in the last short history. Look for "fins" and reverse-engineer what contributed to those spikes. * Employee Data - Places like Glassdoor submit anonymous employee reviews. You'd quickly get an inside scoop on the team culture. There are a lot more tools and tactics to get the information. Once you do the analysis, you gather all the data, identify patterns, and construct a clearer and more reliable picture of your competitor. 

Oof. I feel seen. If you're in an early-stage startup or if your department is usually quite small then you will have to rely on tools. If budget is the limit, fret not, there are tons of free options. In the past, I've used these tools which are still a great way to get started but there are more solutions out there. The one piece of advice I'd give you is to try not to do the same tasks twice. Document the first research and create a first-team playbook for scrappy research. You'll have a lot of competitors in the field so you'll likely do the research a bunch of times. Congratulations, you've made your first Competitive Intelligence SOP. You can always go back and update it to make it even more relevant. Once your organization grows, you'll have more resources to play with. Lastly, don't underestimate the power of qualitative interviews. Even if you interview your top 5 clients you'll walk away with insights to update or craft your avatar and start creating assets that matter most - the ones that matter to that avatar. Good luck!

There's definitely an overlap but competitive intelligence is based on building systems and tools to combat and defend yourself against competition while market intelligence gets you the research and information about the needs, wants, and trends of the market. If you combine both and add customer intelligence to the mix, you will have a super sophisticated integrated intelligence program that when used correctly, can build you massive leverage in the industry. You can think of market intelligence as a broader perspective research on market size, growth, segmentation and a general look at the key players while competitor intel is narrower in scope and looks more at how you position yourself against the competitors. For CI you'd look at what your rivals are doing and use your own internal data found in your CRM while performing win/loss analysis and reports. It's a bit more tactical. Market intelligence looks at the needs of the market and is the first source and signal on how you will build your product roadmap.