Brady Jensen

Most vendors do a good job of win/loss, especially when compared only to what your team is able to do in-house. Garter's research about how flawed win/loss answers are when they come from inside the company is 100% right. However, what I've learned from standing up win/loss at a few different companies is that you want to make sure you trust the elicitation skills of the person actually conducting the interviews. Folks who gather other types of market intelligence and are used to gleaning insights from willing and sometimes unwitting primary sources will often bring home the most insightful data because they are well versed at how to make the most intrusive question seem benign. If they can't get you what you can't get buyers to honestly divulge yourself, then why engage an outside vendor? The first time you do win/loss you should (hopefully) have all sorts of new insights that you can act upon as a PMM and PM team. The next time you do a round you are going to hear 80% of the same information, and maybe 20% will have changed. Don't be discouraged! That 20% in many cases is more important than all the first round information combined because it's telling you where the ball is going, not where it's been. That's the strategic gold that gets you invited to present consistently to the executive team as a strategic partner and ultimately consulted for strategic decision support on M&A and other strategic decisions of huge consequence to your company. Good luck! 

Something like Talkwalker Alerts is free like Google Alerts and much more flexible. If you are ready to get serious, something like Crayon from Ellie (above) or Kompyte can be helpful. That said, I've found that in tech it's often a problem of too much information and a noise over signal problem. There is something inherent to tech that requires a lot of information sharing in order to run the business. The near constant self promotion often requires sharing roadmaps, updating documentation, constant press releases, Techcrunch articles etc. and means there is often a ton of information floating around. This is not always the case, in CI for industries like pharma. My recommendation is to automate this secondary internet information gathering as much as possible, and swiftly shift from worrying about sucking up every possible piece of information to sorting the signal vs. noise and optimize for determining what actually matters to the business. 

If you aren't partnering with sales, and seeking meaningful feedback from a number of the highest performing reps and sales leaders, I think it's impossible you will get it right. You need to ask sales what they need to know to feel confident. I'm convinced that competitive intelligence as a sales resource is as much about instilling confidence in sales as it is with informing any specific deal strategy. That confidence comes from being able to anticipate the landmines their competitor will place, and have a concise response to each. It comes from knowing the competitors product at least well enough to be able to position their own differentiators accordingly. It comes from knowing they can make a statement about the market without fear that they will get egg on their face and lose the confidence of their prospect. I think you will never know for sure that you have enough to guide sales, but you should publish anyway. Sales will help you know what's missing, and you can iterate. Avoid battlecards being downloaded locally by reps. They will always have outdated information and the egg on the face will be unavoidable.