Adina Schoeneman

There are a lot of great existing competitive positioning frameworks out there. I think GTM maturity of the company and primary audience & execution priorities should be considered in designing your framework. I don't always stick to a proprietary framework, I tend to stay agile to my stakeholders. Some best practices: 1. Competitive enablement for sales should be a GTM priority. If the sales team is already adhering to a specific selling framework, I recommend aligning with their common methodology as much as possible to increase adoption. 2. For a more in-depth competitive analysis, aligning competitive comparisons to phases of the workflow of a product helps to articulate clear differentiation based on user needs. 3. Overall commercial competitive positioning should stay high-level and succinct. The more internal, forward-looking product strategy positioning is best staying separate as it is often complex and not the right message for all levels of the sales team to combat competitive concerns in the field. This divide is most common in scaling orgs with an evolving product-market fit.

Battlecards, training documentation, or whatever medium you choose to deliver this information should be built specifically for sales as the audience in mind. A couple quick tips: 1. Keep information concise and easily digestible. 2. Get real-time feedback from your sales team. If there is an example from a recent deal or prospect, this is gold. Sales teams love to hear from peers vs. objective information or research. 3. If pricing information is available, share it. 4. External facing documentation is something sales may push for in urgent, high pressure scenarios. If you are early on in garnering adoption of your CI program, it may be a good opportunity to personally support. Use it as an opportunity to expand the effort with a more standardized approach for objection handling & intel education across the org.