Joe Abbott

Competitive research is a critical step before you even start your messaging and positioning exercise — I see it as an input rather than an output.

I have a few favorite messaging frameworks and usually combine my favorite elements into one. Geoffrey Moore's classic FOR...WHO...PROVIDES...UNLIKE...ONLY framework (not sure where this originated) is a solid start for messaging. 

For personas, we build cards that cover demographics, sensibilities, responsibilities, pain points, motivations. There's no wrong way to do it but for enablement and internal education, it's best to distill into something easily consumable.

Ideally, your brand positioning pillars are unique enough individually or in combination with each other that competitive positioning is baked in.

Effectively enabling sales is about educating them on the landscape and competitive buckets (read answer above re: putting all your competitors into distinct categories you can more generically position against).

Then when it comes to your Tier 1 competitors, it's all about training the sales team and making battlecard content super easy to find. Bring the energy, show them a side-by-side demo if you can to give them confidence, and personalize your competitive differentiation for each sales role (e.g. SDRs need a one-liner, Senior AEs may need you to explain product differentiators). That, combined with compelling assets, is a winning strategy.

You can measure effectiveness of competitive positioning at different stages of the funnel. For example, if you have competitive landing pages you could A/B test messaging changes to see if there's a lift in conversion. Further down-funnel (this takes more time), you can do before-and-after analysis of competitive win/loss rates.

Positioning is the DNA of your differentiation and messaging is how you bring that to life with your brand's unique personality. 

Positioning establishes context (for who? what benefit or outcome?) and messaging is the way you communicate or express this unique position to your target audience.

I'll try using the classic iPod example -

Positioning: A simple, stylish and innovative portable digital music device that appeals to young adults who are tech savvy and have a passion for music (kind of cool, but straightforward)

Messaging: 1,000 songs in your pocket (really cool, concise, tangible, powerful)

This is a really great question. For stealth products that are competitive in your sales cycle, it's worth asking your sales team to try to gather information from prospects that are evaluating your competitors. 

Alternatively, you can dig around the internet - suprisingly, Twitter threads and Reddit forums can be just as useful review sites like G2.

I'll go back and say - this is why it's so important to do thorough market research and define super sharp brand positioning pillars with truly unique claims. Makes playing defense so much easier.

I'll start by saying - having a solid competitive positioning framework with a few buckets for your entire universe of competitors helps immensely. I think this is the only way to build a competitive function from scratch with a lean team. e.g. Competitor X, Y, and Z fit into Category A and can generally be positioned against this way, Competitor Y fits into Category B and can be positioned against that way.

The next step is using the right tools and automation to stay informed about top competitors. One easy (and probably obvious) way is to subscribe to social and RSS feeds mentioning competitors to stay on top of new messaging, content, and press releases. Alternatively, tools like Crayon, Klue and SEMRush can be immensely helpful here once your competitive function is well defined and you're ready to invest seriously.

I think the only correct answer here is not as often as we'd like :)

We typically rely on good old fashioned interviews and questions can vary depending on whether it's for customer references, beta product feedback, or buyer research. So, generally point in time.

Customer inputs are critical across the board, here are a few examples: 1) informing the product roadmap (some feedback may not be shared in a PM interview context), 2) informing messaging for your website (use the words your customers use), 3) defining your buyer journey and decision-making criteria for sales enablement.

This one is tricky because I think there's a tendency to want to boil the ocean and do everything for every competitor. Some combination of market research and competitive win/loss analysis should help you create a few different tiers of competitors. My rule of thumb is no more than 3 competitors should be in your first tier and this is where you should really focus your efforts and train sales. 

Everyone else can fit into a category of competition, and if your core brand/product positioning is differentiated enough, you can position against them more generically. Super important to be open to sales feedback though, especially as your buyer/segment changes or market evolves.