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The Competitive Enablement Platform
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Competitive intelligence is both an outcome and a process.
The way your organization collects, stores, curates and analyzes competitive intelligence on your competitors is the process.
And the way your organization deploys and enables your team with it is competitive intelligence as an outcome.
Doing both well is vital to your organization’s success.
Every company and every department has to deal with competition. It’s an inevitable part of today’s landscape — one that is only accelerating.
Our vision is for the entire organization to be enabled with actionable insights in real-time, aligning to a coherent and consistent competitive strategy.
Our mission is to give you the resources you need to make it happen.
This guide outline the most critical competitive intelligence tips and best practices for building a competitive intelligence function.
History’s successful leaders have all understood that success in a competitive environment hinges on intimate knowledge of their adversaries.
Today’s leaders are no different. Organizations everywhere need to collect market intelligence and information on the competition.
Competitive intelligence is “a discipline that enables organizations to reduce strategic risk and increase revenue opportunities.” That’s how former SCIP Executive Director Cam Mackey puts it.
When done correctly, the best organizations systematically collect and curate competitive intelligence to enable their teams to beat the competition.
That’s why more and more companies are combining competitive intelligence and sales enablement into a new discipline called competitive enablement.
You as the competitive intelligence expert will be the one who ultimately determines the success of your program.
But you can make starting a competitive intelligence function a lot easier by following a framework for competitive intelligence. And the first step is getting organizational buy-in early on.
This is often the biggest obstacle organizations have with establishing their competitive intelligence program.
For your competitive intelligence initiatives to stick, you’ll need to get quick wins and build a collaborative process from the start.
The more you can tie your efforts to revenue the easier it will be to get buy-in for starting your competitive intelligence program.
Through deliverables and KPIs, you need to demonstrate that your competitive intelligence program generates new revenue or saves time.
Getting a competitive intelligence framework up and running is one way to do it.
One of our clients, a leading software company, set about building a competitive intelligence program that would generate high levels of engagement across the organization.
In order to do this their curator set up three plans of action:
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Conducting competitive intelligence research and collecting intel on your competitors — as well as market intelligence more broadly — can be incredibly time-consuming. It’s rarely the fun part of competitive intelligence research.
The fun stuff for someone like you is more likely building competitive strategies on how to position against competitors in your market.
The challenge in gathering competitive intelligence is knowing what external data to track, how to source internal knowledge, and ultimately, understanding what intel actually matters to move the business forward.
Building those steps of competitive intelligence gathering into a repeatable process will make the analysis and distribution parts of your competitive program far easier.
| External Sources of Competitive Intelligence | Internal Sources of Competitive Intelligence |
| Website updates Press releases Social media Review sites | Sales calls CRM data Slack/Teams |
Website updates and press releases can offer a ton of valuable market intelligence. As Competitive Intelligence professional David Barker said on an episode of the Competitive Enablement Show, messaging that competitors put out in news releases and on their website, “really tells you they think and what they want the market to think of them.”
At the same time, social media — especially LinkedIn — can inform you of both broad and specific personnel changes. Changes that can signal a change in strategy, or inferences about the overall health of your competitor.
As for internal sources of competitive intelligence data, hearing common objections (and how your sales reps handle those objections) on sales calls is invaluable to your positioning in the market.
CRM data and associated win-rate provide a quantitative lens into your business and how you’re faring against competitors. While email and instant messaging conversations provide the qualitative lens you need.
(At Klue, we do a comprehensive market threat analysis to assess your competitive landscape and where you sit within it.)
Once you extract the key intel from your research, it is time to surface insights.
Competitive analysis stacks up where your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses lie in order to identify the best opportunities to beat them. Maybe you spot something in their product that your sales team can leverage against in deals.
Perhaps they have some recent negative reviews about their support team. There is a wealth of information out there — it is up to you to take advantage of it.
When armed with a data collection process that answers the questions your organization needs, it will transition you from being reactive to proactive in the competitive landscape.
Tapping into the intel that the sales team receives on calls with prospects is an underutilized method of gathering critical competitive information. They often provide a direct window into a competitor’s offerings during the sales process — information that is invaluable beyond the immediate deal at hand. Here is one competitive intelligence example from the field:
One client recognized that their salesforce wasn’t effectively capturing and sharing competitive intel across the team. Sure, their competitive intelligence team was gathering public information, but they needed deeper insights. Ones that could only come from the field.
In order to improve this, they created a friendly competition between the North American and EMEA sales teams: Whoever shared more competitive insights to their CI platform from calls would earn a teamwide reward.
This method was a win-win. By tapping into the competitive nature of their sales teams, information silos immediately began to open up and far greater amounts of competitive insight were being submitted for company-wide access.
It was also effective in making the salesforce active participants in the CI process. The company simultaneously improved the quality of their intel and got an entire department to champion the value of competitive intelligence.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Creating strong positioning messages and competitive strategies are the linchpins of building an effective competitive intelligence program.
Your salesforce needs to know how your competitor is talking about themselves so your team can effectively deposition and leverage values within their own product.
Concurrently, your marketing team needs to know how your competitor is presenting themselves at events and promotional campaigns so they can reconstruct their own messaging accordingly. If you know what your competitors are going to say, you can decide how to preemptively deposition them.
Our battlecard framework is a way to provide your salesforce with all of the information that they require, and provide it to them at the correct time in the sales cycle.
Flooding these cards with too much information — especially intel that is outdated or irrelevant — will overwhelm your team. Only include clear, digestible content that is easy to use.
Battlecards aren’t exclusive to salespeople; your executive, marketing, and product team can all use them to leverage competitive intel relevant to their interests. This broader organizational alignment is what we call competitive enablement; it keeps everybody on the same page.
One of our clients, a fast-growing B2B SaaS company, tripled their number of sales reps over the past year. One of the biggest challenges this presented was ramping their sales hires onto their own products, and making sure that they understand how these products are positioned in the market.
Battlecards helped them to arm sales reps to deposition competitors, and also to prepare them to accurately speak to their own products. By having these clearly defined battlecards, it was easier to progressively ramp up a massive number of new sales reps and ensure that they were all on the same page.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
How does each of your stakeholder groups prefer to communicate? What channels do they use?
Your sales reps may prefer Slack or Teams. Your executive team may use email heavily and prefer communication with graphs and charts that help to visualize issues at a high level.
When you’re building a plan to distribute your competitive intel, it’s critical to take your stakeholders’ preferences into consideration. The success of your competitive intelligence program relies heavily on your ability to effectively communicate your insights to them.
One very common method of distributing competitive intelligence data is via a competitive intelligence newsletter. These newsletters generally include 3-6 stories pertaining to the most valuable competitive intelligence data of the week.
Naturally, it takes a concerted effort at the beginning to build your newsletter into something your colleagues actually want to read. But when you do, you become a curator-extraordinaire of competitive intel.
As Nick Larson from Staffbase said on a recent episode of the Competitive Enablement Show, “when something hits the intel digest, people realize this is something they should take notice of and start talking about.”
Your program needs not only good content but a strong content management strategy in place so that you are delivering fresh content and continuing to build trust with your stakeholders over time.
As such, your program is only as good as the quality of content you produce and the upkeep of your data and content is very important to the performance of your competitive intelligence strategy. In other words, maintaining intel relevancy is a key component of your CI program.
The most disheartening result for a competitive intelligence team is when all the hard work put into creating competitive insights goes unused. The keys to beating your competitors collect dust sitting unread in an inbox, PowerPoint slide, or Word Document while another deal goes over your head.
Here’s a competitive intelligence example that shows how one client made a small tweak to their distribution practices that got departments to care about the intel they gathered. The key?
Context.
Previously, they shared weekly email digests to the whole org with a vast amount of information. However, that was the issue; it was too vast. A collection of news articles would be dumped into an email with no context, relying on every employee to read each article and understand why it was important.
It was an inefficient process that became a major pain point. There was no explanation as to why the information mattered and to whom it mattered.
With a new intel digest format, the client prefaced articles or links with a few succinct lines explaining the story and why it was important. They then added specific notes to each piece of shared intel, noting how the sales teams could leverage it in conversations with prospects. Taking that extra step to lower the barrier of entry for employees with competitive intel was a simple, yet effective way to improve usage across the organization.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
One of our clients, a fast-growing B2B SaaS company, tripled their number of sales reps over the past year. One of the biggest challenges this presented was ramping their sales hires onto their own products, and making sure that they understand how these products are positioned in the market.
Battlecards helped them to arm sales reps to deposition competitors, and also to prepare them to accurately speak to their own products. By having these clearly defined battlecards, it was easier to progressively ramp up a massive number of new sales reps and ensure that they were all on the same page.
How does each of your stakeholder groups prefer to communicate? What channels do they use? Your sales reps may prefer Slack or Chatter. Your executive team may use email heavily and prefer communication with graphs and charts that helps visualize issues at a high–level.
When you’re building a plan to distribute your competitive intel, it’s critical to take your stakeholders preferences into consideration. The success of your competitive intelligence program relies heavily on your ability to effectively communicate your insights to them.
Older competitive intelligence programs haven’t made it easy to build a workflow around updating data and distributing real-time content.
Your program needs not only good content but a strong content management strategy in place. This sets you up to deliver fresh content and continuing to build trust with your stakeholders over time. It’s critical.
Your program is only as good as the quality of content you produce. The phrase “Garbage in, garbage out,” seems fitting here. Point being, the upkeep of your data and content is very important to the performance of your competitive intelligence strategy. Maintaining intel relevancy is a key component of your CI program.
The most disheartening result for a competitive intelligence team is when hard work put into creating competitive insights goes unused.
Here’s a competitive intelligence example that shows how one client made a small tweak to their distribution practices that got departments to care about the intel they gathered. The key?
Context.
Previously, they shared weekly email digests to the whole org with a vast amount of information. However, that was the issue; it was too vast. A collection of news articles would be dumped into an email with no context, relying on every employee to read each article and understand why it was important.
It was an inefficient process that became a major pain point. There was no explanation as to why the information mattered and to whom it mattered.
With a new format, the client prefaced articles or links with a few lines explaining the story its importance.
They then added specific notes to each piece of shared intel, noting how the sales teams could leverage it in conversations with prospects.
Taking that extra step to lower the barrier of entry for employees with competitive intel was a simple, yet effective way to improve usage across the organization.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Every function in every organization should have to demonstrate their impact on the business. Starting a competitive intelligence function is no different.
Of course, for all nascent disciplines, determining the right KPIs that best highlight the value they bring is a challenge.
Competitive confidence is quickly gaining prominence as one of the key performance metrics used by Competitive Intelligence and Competitive Enablement professionals.
By surveying the end-users of your competitive intelligence program, you can gauge to what extent your efforts are having a positive impact.
Sales reps might be underconfident against a particular competitor, or in selling to a particular industry. A competitive confidence survey lets you establish a baseline and then measure improvements over time.
Consumption metrics relating to reps’ use of the battlecards you’ve created, and open rates related to your competitive intelligence newsletter are also indicators of your performance as a compete expert.
More established KPIs like competitive win-rate, deal size, ACV and time to close can all help you paint a picture of the impact your competitive intelligence program is having on the organization.
At the same time, there are many, many confounding variables within each of those metrics. Ones that are far outside of your control and may not accurately reflect the ultimate value of your competitive intelligence program.
That’s why an impact analysis — tying consumption metrics to revenue — can be the holy grail of competitive metrics.
(For a deeper dive into the ins and outs of a sales impact analysis, read this article.)
Setting these benchmarks early in the process will now provide a clearer idea as to what you need to deliver. If you’re curious where your efforts currently stack up, and what you can do to improve, then check out our Competitive Enablement Maturity Model.
Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all method to measuring your competitive intelligence program.
For example, Tracy Berry, Senior Competitive Strategy Manager at ServiceMax, uncovered these five objectives that her company needed their competitive intelligence program to achieve:
It is also crucial to map out how your competitive strategy will function in order to achieve your established KPIs. Where will the intel be stored? How do team members access it? Have these questions answered before you jump into the data collection phase.
Ensure that the competitive intelligence team is present during critical strategic planning sessions, that ROI measurements and expectations are established, and that you have a thorough understanding of the existing flow of competitive information.
One of our clients in the software industry was in the beginning stages of building out their CI program.
Although information was being collected, their lack of direction resulted in it not truly being actionable insight. The organization started tracking some initial data:
Using the deal data trends, they noticed an emerging competitor popping up in deals that the salesforce had no prior knowledge of.
This unexpected turn put immediate stress on the business but also gave the team a clear focus as to where their competitive intelligence efforts should be aimed.
A light bulb moment struck as the team was able to use data to build an even more effective competitive intelligence program for the organization.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
As your program becomes more sophisticated, you’ll need to expand your team.
The emergence of competitive intelligence as a discipline has created the need for more competitive intelligence jobs.
Here are some common roles in the field of competitive intelligence and what they entail.
The O.G. of compete roles. Competitive intelligence analysts generally support the competitive intelligence manager in tracking and collecting relevant data in order to draw out competitive insights and advantages.
A level above competitive intelligence analysts, competitive intelligence managers are often tasked with building and executing on broader strategic goals and strategies. In addition to overseeing the collection and curation of insights done by the competitive intelligence analyst.
There is a ton of overlap between market intelligence and competitive intelligence. In fact, you’re more likely to see the two paired together as a competitive & market intelligence manager. Generally speaking, market intelligence professionals focus more on macro market factors than specific competitors.
Where competitive intelligence falls short, competitive enablement brings it all home. Competitive enablement managers are responsible not just for overseeing data collection and curation but turning that data into insights — and then giving their teams the practical tools they need to leverage those insights.
Traditionally — and in some organizations presently — competitive intelligence falls within the purview of the product marketing manager; on top of owning go-to-market strategy, sales collateral, messaging, positioning, and much, much more. This broad scope of work is why many companies are quickly conceiving of compete as its own discrete function.
Of course you can’t hire a competitive intelligence analyst or any role without a competitive intelligence job description.
When it comes to hiring a competitive enablement manager, their main focus is on:
When a house is built on a strong foundation, it is built to stay forever. Knowing the best sources of competitive intelligence to track is the foundation that your program needs to flourish.
Competitor news, events and press releases is one of the most accessible sources of competitive intelligence.
These timestamped pieces of content can help piece together the story of where they’re headed, and what they value.
A company’s press release page is a strong indicator of what they want current and potential customers to care about.
These announcements are a tool for competitors to position themselves. Tools that might introduce new funding and partnerships, product advancements, or suggest that a business is scaling up.
Competitor blog articles, social posts, podcasts, videos, e-books, case studies and white papers, are all sources of competitive intelligence your company should be monitoring.
Now more than ever, companies produce content for branding and industry positioning purposes.
Thus, frequently checking a competitor’s content production will help you build out your own strategy.
How regularly are they posting blogs? What are the main topics they’re trying to ‘own’? What calls-to-action are they embedding in their content?
Ultimately, understanding how your competitor wants to be seen by the market helps you position against them more effectively.
A competitor’s products and offerings are essential — if not obvious — sources of competitive intelligence.
At the end of the day, you need to know how you stack up.
And knowing everything about your competitors arms your reps with the actionable information needed to close a competitive deal.
Finding a competitor’s most common FAQs and support threads sheds light on their user experience (UX). More, they aggregate the main issues affecting those using the product.
Beyond that, analyst reports by Forrester, Gartner, and IDC can help you understand your competitors in a variety of ways.
They analyze strategy, market presence, and other criteria for groups of products within a particular category.
Pro-tip: Using Google’s advanced search can reveal intel that a competitor doesn’t highlight prominently on their website.
Here you may find product and user guides that are intended for sales reps or customers. These are far more detailed than public-facing feature lists and offer insight into a product’s roadmap and positioning.
Becoming familiar with your competitor’s personnel strategy reveals their current needs and where they might be headed.
For example, looking at a competitor’s hiring trends is a great way to forecast their next move.
These insights don’t just indicate a competitor’s growth, but also provide a glimpse into their strategic plan.
Personnel changes at the C-suite level are also strong indicators of a strategic shift.
A new member of the executive team with a background that differs from their core business may portend a change in strategy
Every team across your business makes decisions with the customer in mind. But who exactly is your customer, and how are they different from your competitor’s target audience?
Use competitive intelligence to build buyer personas that enable your sales and marketing team to better aim their efforts.
It is time to start looking at who your competitors are bringing in, the size and industry type of these customers, why they chose to sign with your competitor, and if they are satisfied. Don’t forget to look at your own customer insights as well! Gather as much information as possible on customer feedback from prospective and current clients.
The goal is to figure out what customers in your industry truly care about.
Simply put, customer reviews dominate the internet. How your customers endorse your product or service on various review websites greatly affects your company’s credibility. It’s also a great resource for getting the inside scoop on a competitor.
It is also useful to track how your competitor schedules out their content. Maybe they are churning out weekly blogs, but are only running webinars and longer content on a monthly basis. These insights will provide you with benchmarks to assess your own content strategy. You may also be able to dominate an area of content where your competitor is lacking.
No matter the maturity of your program, interviewing internal partners will always be a primary source of competitive intelligence.
These stakeholder interviews are so important that Tracy Berry, Director of Competitive Intelligence and Communication at Freshworks, makes them as an essential part of any compete program she builds.
“I use interviews to help me understand, to get my fingers on the pulse of competitive in the company. And that helps me really set the priorities I need to.”
The best compete programs are the ones that work in close partnership with important stakeholders. The more you connect with these stakeholders, the more successful you’ll be.
That’s why interviewing your stakeholders and drawing insights from the interviews is a pillar of competitive intelligence.
If your company doesn’t have a dedicated competitive intel channel, you need to stop everything and create one.
Internal messages are an absolute goldmine when it comes to sources of competitive intelligence.
Companies with a culture of compete have a leg up on those that don’t.
Create a #competitiveintel channel in your internal messaging platform and start building that culture.
Despite our great love of internal stakeholder interviews, gathering competitive intelligence via this method has its limitations.
Namely because third-party objective data trumps subjective hunches.
Win-loss interviews, through an agency or conducted in-house, help uncover valuable insights about why you’re winning or losing.
Competitive intelligence professionals like ServiceTitan’s Jenn Roberts always advocate for internal win-loss programs. She says it’s an entree for her to get a strategic seat at the executive table.
Win-loss gives you intel with which to make informed decisions about your product, messaging and positioning based on the voice of the customer.
And that my friends, is a highly valuable source of competitive intelligence.
At the very least, CRM data should help your guide and validate the priorities of your compete program.
Your reps have a good handle on which competitors they face off against most. But they may not always have the most accurate view of changes in the competitive landscape.
When CRM data matches up with what you’re hearing from reps, you can confidently decide which competitors to prioritize.
If it doesn’t, this could be a sign you need to look deeper into this discrepancy in perception.
What’s more, keeping a tally of when competitors come up in deals should inform your strategic competitive intelligence strategy.
This is the kind of competitive intelligence that lets you earn and keep a strategic seat at the table.
Call recordings are excellent sources of competitive intelligence because they give you direct insight into how your messaging is landing.
These insights then allow you to shift and adjust your messaging and positioning as necessary.
And as a compete pro, analyzing call recording lets you hear what’s resonating and what isn’t. With that info, you can adjust, remove and add talk tracks based on their success in the field.
Competitive intelligence programs need to establish a process that lets all teams mobilize quickly to outmaneuver their competitors.
By making sure that your competitive intelligence is in a central, easy-to-locate repository, insights will be used more frequently and teams will become more comfortable sharing intel they pick up in the field to the entire organization.
However, the best competitive programs go beyond just simply storing juicy intel. It enables employees by sharing information that is relevant to their role and easy to use.
This guide provides the building blocks needed to get an effective competitive intelligence program up and running, yet it is a continual process to ensure that employees are bringing competitive intelligence into their jobs on a daily basis.
Competitive Enablement
News
Buyers make decisions based on a variety of factors. Knowing which are driving your success or failure in deals is incredibly valuable. That’s where win-loss comes in.
Competitive Enablement
News
I've had the privilege of working in compete for amazing tech companies in past. Today, I'm excited to announce I'm joining Klue!
News
Klue’s platform will now be the premiere source of truth for buyer intelligence and competitive insights thanks to our acquisition of DoubleCheck Research
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