How to Do a Competitive Landscape Analysis: Guide + Frameworks (2025)

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been tasked with creating a competitive landscape analysis for your organization. 

First off, congrats – you’ve landed what I think is one of the most interesting projects in competitive intelligence.

But tell me if this sounds familiar.

In an effort to get educated, you’ve turned to Google, only to find yourself inundated with lengthy blog posts and oversimplified templates, none of which provide the clear, practical steps you need to succeed.

To cut through the noise, I sat down with Hunter Sones, Klue’s Competitive Enablement Manager, to discuss how he approaches competitive landscape analysis. 

Hunter pressure-tested every part of this guide — from the core concepts to the practical frameworks — to ensure you’re getting advice that works in the real world.

But before we dive into his unique process, let’s get clear on the fundamentals.

Looking for tactical steps to launch a compete program? Download our nine-step guide 👇

What is Competitive Landscape Analysis?

Competitive landscape analysis is a method for systematically mapping your company’s competitive environment. It includes identifying your direct and indirect competitors and analyzing their market positions, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.

It’s worth noting that competitive landscape analysis differs from competitive intelligence in that it provides a point-in-time snapshot of your market’s competitive dynamics whereas competitive intelligence describes the ongoing process of gathering, analyzing, and distributing competitor information.

Is competitive analysis a one-time deliverable or an ongoing process?

Short answer: it’s both. 

If your boss asked you to create a competitive landscape analysis, be prepared to produce specific deliverables – spreadsheets, frameworks, maybe even a matrix or two. 

That being said, remember that those deliverables are temporary snapshots of your market. Industries change. Competitors evolve. That beautiful analysis you created today? It could need a refresh as soon as next quarter. 

Why is Competitive Landscape Analysis Important? What Are the Benefits?

Mapping out your competitive landscape has never been more important than it is today. Competition is intensifying across all industries, and it’s especially fierce in SaaS, where lowering tech barriers means new competitors can pop up overnight. 

A comprehensive competitive landscape analysis will help your company with:

Threat Monitoring

• Identifying emerging competitors before they impact your business
• Understanding where you’re vulnerable in the market

Market Opportunities

• Spotting untapped market potential
• Discovering underserved customer needs

Strategic Differentiation

• Pinpointing and articulating your unique value propositions
• Positioning against competitors

Strategic Planning

• Supporting leadership’s decision-making
• Ensuring you have a well-defined niche and problem set

Sales Enablement

• Converting these competitive insights into actionable sales material
• Improving competitive positioning in deals

Now, it’s worth mentioning that the real value of a competitive landscape analysis goes well beyond these bullet points. 

Take it from Hunter, who recently created a competitive landscape analysis to support Klue’s annual planning:

“The big purpose behind doing one of these is supporting our SLT’s decision-making. This isn’t just about understanding strengths and weaknesses – it’s about charting our course, making sure we’ve got a well-defined niche, and ensuring we’re not going to be overtaken by some adjacent threat we didn’t see coming.”

7 Steps to Create a Competitive Landscape Analysis, According to Klue’s Competitive Enablement Manager Hunter Sones

Okay, time to get tactical.

Our Competitive Enablement Manager Hunter Sones recently completed a competitive review for Klue’s leadership team, and he’s shared with us the exact steps he took to create a competitive landscape analysis.

Feel free to steal his playbook.

Step 1. Do an Internal Company Assessment

If you’re new to your company or role, start here. Before diving into competitor research, ensure you have a solid understanding of your own product, its capabilities, and the use cases you solve for. 

Key areas to understand:

• Your ICP’s problems and pain points
• Your value proposition (i.e. how you solve these problems)
• Your product features and capabilities (in-depth)
• What channels your customers use to discover your solution
• The typical buying journey for your solution

As Hunter notes: “Before you even begin, you have to really understand your product, its features, and its use cases – this is a must.”

Step 2. Identify Your Direct Competitors

Next, find out who you’re actually competing against in deals. To do this, dig into your CRM data and focus on pre-sales situations. Hunter says he tackled this by diving into Klue’s Competitive Revenue Analytics dashboard, a tool that taps into your CRM to help you measure your Competitive Revenue Gap and spot competitors in your open pipeline.

Key actions in this step:

• Review your CRM data to identify competitors appearing in early-stage deals
• Look at competitive revenue data to understand who you’re competing against most frequently
• Track who regularly shows up in pre-sales conversations and discovery calls with a tool like Gong
• If you’re a Klue user, head to the Competitive Revenue Analytics feature to get an instant view of who’s showing up in your sales cycles.

Want to see our Competitive Revenue Analytics dashboard in action? Watch this video 👇

Step 3. Identify Your Indirect Competitors (Review Your Win-Loss and Churn Interviews)

Once you’ve mapped your direct competitors, it’s time to find the indirect ones. These are alternative players that might not be showing up in your CRM but still compete for your business.

While there are many ways to approach this, Hunter recommends two key analysis methods:

1. Win-loss analysis: Analyzing the reasons you’ve won or lost deals
2. Churn analysis: Analyzing why customers leave and who they switch to

Note* both of these methods rely on direct feedback from buyers through interviews and surveys. Win-loss interviews happen after deals close (whether won or lost), while churn analysis interviews take place when customers decide to leave.

Key actions in this step:

• Review win-loss interviews to see what competitors get mentioned most often
• Analyze churn interviews to understand what alternatives your customers are leaving to explore
• Document every competitor that comes up
• If you’re a Klue Win-Loss user, dive into the platform’s Win-Loss and Churn Analysis tabs to see exactly which competitors keep appearing in buyer feedback.

“Churn analysis is unbelievably helpful when it comes understanding your adjacent competitors because people who leave your product know it intimately –– they understand your value prop and limitations, so their next choice tells you a lot,” says Hunter. 

Step 4. Check Your Competitive Intel Channel and Do a Web Search for New and Emerging Competitors

With your direct and indirect competitors mapped out, it’s time to look for a third type of competitor – emerging threats. For Hunter, this meant leveraging Klue’s competitive intelligence Alerts alongside Klue’s internal competitive intelligence Slack channel to spot potential “ankle-biters.”

Key actions in this step:

• Get your team involved – set up a competitive intelligence Slack channel and keep an eye on recent insights
• Do a web search using keywords related to your business, or try experimenting with AI research tools like Perplexity
• Check your sales call recordings for any new names that keep popping up
• If you’re a Klue user, set up competitor Alerts and keep your eyes peeled on your competitive intel news feed

Step 5: Categorize Your Competitors By Use Case 

By now, you should have uncovered quite a few competitors. The next step is to organize them in a way that makes sense. Hunter’s approach? Group them based on which parts of your product they compete with.

Let’s use Klue Compete as an example. While Klue is a competitive intelligence platform overall, we have several core product capabilities, including:

• Market monitoring
• Battlecard creation
• Sales enablement
• Intel distribution

Some competitors might only compete with us in one area (like market monitoring), while others might overlap with multiple capabilities. Creating these groups helps you understand exactly where each competitor poses a threat.

Key actions in this step:

• List out your main product capabilities in a spreadsheet
• Map each competitor to the specific capabilities they compete with
• Use your win-loss data to verify where customers see overlap

Step 6. Create a Micro-Analysis for Each Product Category

Now that you’ve mapped which competitors operate in which areas, it’s time to dig into the details. Take each product category and analyze how competitors perform in that specific space.

Let’s stick with our battlecard example from the previous step. For each competitor in this category, you would try to  answer questions like:

• How are my competitors positioning their battlecard solution?
• What new features are they building in this area?
• What do customers say about their battlecard capabilities?

Key actions in this step:

• Analyze your competitors by product category
• Track what they’re building and investing in (analyze their recent press releases and SEC filings)
• Look at your win-loss interviews and take note of how buyers describe these competitors
• Read review sites and dive into LinkedIn/Reddit discussions
• See what industry analysts are saying about each player
• If you’re a Klue user, let AI do the work –– our Review Insights feature automatically analyzes thousands of G2 and Capterra reviews for key themes.

“Don’t just rely on CRM data.You need to look at qualitative feedback from win-loss interviews, review sites, and social media to really understand how each competitor plays in these spaces,” explains Hunter. 

Step 7. Visualize Your Competitive Landscape Research (SWOT Analysis)

Finally, it’s time to visualize all this research and turn it into something actionable.

If this is your first time, Hunter recommends a straightforward method –– create a SWOT analysis, and focus heavily on opportunities and threats in each competitive category.

Key actions in this step:

• Pull key findings from your category analysis
• Build your SWOT framework
• Pay extra attention to opportunities and threats

Competitive Landscape Analysis Frameworks and Examples

Whether you’ve followed Hunter’s process or taken your own approach, you’ll need a framework to present your findings. Here are the most effective ones we’ve seen teams use.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a visual framework that helps you evaluate your competitive position by evaluating internal factors and external factors that affect your business. These include:

Strengths: Internal advantages that give you an edge over competitors

Weaknesses: Internal limitations that put you at a disadvantage

Opportunities: External chances to improve your market position

Threats: External factors that could hurt your business

The key to an effective SWOT analysis is being specific and backing each point with data:

Strengths: Don’t just list features –– focus on your known advantages backed by win-loss data, customer feedback, and reviews.

• Example: “Only vendor offering [specific capability] according to G2 reviews”

Weaknesses: Be honest about gaps that actually impact deals

• Example: “We lose 40% of mid-market deals due to lack of [specific feature]”

Opportunities: Identify specific market gaps and emerging needs

• Example: “Win-loss interview data shows growing demand for [specific capability]”

Threats: Focus on concrete risks backed by market evidence

• Example: “Competitor X is launching a competing product in Q4”

BCG Growth-Share Matrix

The BCG Growth-Share Matrix, developed by Boston Consulting Group, helps you visualize how different products or business units perform based on two key metrics: market growth rate and relative market share. 

This framework is particularly useful when you need to decide which products deserve more resources and which might need to be sunset.

The matrix splits products into four categories:

Stars: High growth, high market share

• Example: Your flagship product that’s growing 100% YoY and leads the market
• Strategy: Invest heavily to maintain a leadership position

Question Marks: High growth, low market share

• Example: Your new AI feature that’s seeing rapid adoption but trails competitor offerings
• Strategy: Decide whether to invest aggressively or exit this market

Cash Cows: Low growth, high market share

• Example: Your legacy product that dominates its market but only grows 10% annually
• Strategy: Minimize investment while maximizing profit

Dogs: Low growth, low market share

• Example: Your outdated feature that few customers use and isn’t growing
• Strategy: Consider phasing out or selling

Porter’s Five Forces

Developed by Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, this framework zooms out beyond competitors to analyze five key forces that shape your entire competitive environment.

Below are the five forces, and questions you should be asking to identify each:

Competitive Rivalry: 

• How intense is competition in your current market? Consider the number of competitors in your space and how mature the market is. In SaaS, this often means evaluating if you’re in a red ocean of similar products or in an immature market where your competitors are not necessarily vendors but alternative workflows and approaches.

Threat of New Entrants: 

• How easily can new competitors enter your space? With no-code tools and cloud infrastructure, barriers to entry are lower than ever. Consider what’s stopping the next startup from copying your solution.

Bargaining Power of Suppliers:

• How much leverage do your vendors have? Think about your dependence on cloud providers, API services, or data sources. Could they squeeze your margins or impact your service by changing their terms?

Bargaining Power of Buyers: 

• How much leverage do your customers have? Consider how easily they can switch products, whether they’re demanding custom features, and if a few large customers hold too much power over your decisions.

Threat of Substitutes: 

• What alternatives could make your solution irrelevant? Look for cheaper alternatives customers might stitch together, emerging AI tools that could replace parts of your solution, or simpler ways to solve the problem.

Feature Comparison Tables

These competitive analysis charts provide detailed comparisons of specific features and capabilities across competitors. Here are the basic steps you need to take to build one:

• List features/capabilities down the left
• Place competitors across the top
• Use consistent rating systems
• Include notes for nuanced differences
• Update regularly as competitors evolve

Pro tip: Feature comparison tables double as top-notch sales battlecards for your reps. 

How to Create a Visually Appealing Competitive Matrix

Visualizing your competitive landscape research is crucial for making your insights actionable. The goal here is NOT to create elaborate charts and matrices — it’s to help your team quickly understand what’s happening in your market so they can make smart moves.

With this in mind, here are the essential elements every competitive visualization needs:

• Clear headlines that get straight to the point
• Brief annotations explaining standout findings
• Updated dates showing data freshness
• Consistent visual style across all charts

And remember: keep the design simple. Stick to 3-4 colors max, use consistent symbols, and label things directly instead of using complex legends.

Integrating AI into Your Competitive Landscape Analysis

It’s no secret that AI is disrupting the competitive intelligence and market research space. 

Not surprisingly, the rise of AI-powered competitive intelligence software is already changing how teams conduct landscape analyses. Platforms like Klue use machine learning to automatically identify patterns and insights that might take weeks to uncover manually.

For example, Klue’s Insights feature automatically analyzes competitor reviews, win-loss interviews, and call recordings to surface competitive intel, including common themes and sentiment patterns around your competitors.

To leverage these AI capabilities in Klue, head over to the Insights area and follow the steps below:

1. Select a competitor you want to monitor

2. Review AI-generated summaries of positive and negative feedback

3. Use the topic filter to focus on specific areas like features, pricing, or support
4. Pin important reviews for quick reference
5. Export insights to share with stakeholders

This automated analysis serves as a powerful complement to traditional competitive research methods, and can speed up the time it takes to create a landscape analysis or competitive matrix. 

Good Luck!

Your competitors aren’t sitting still. Right now, they’re launching products, adjusting pricing, and potentially eating into your market share. That’s why competitive landscape analysis is a crucial part of any modern business strategy. 

When done right, it’ll help you identify threats and opportunities so you can chart your future path and better differentiate your product or service from the competition. But remember – analyzing your competitors isn’t a one-off exercise. Markets evolve, competitors innovate, and customer needs shift.

To gain a true competitive advantage you need to make creating competitive landscape analyses an ongoing part of your strategic process. 

Best of luck!