Enabling Product Teams with Competitive Intelligence and Earning a Strategic Voice at the Leadership Table: a Conversation with Unbounce’s Fiona Finn

Ben Ronald

Your sales team might be the most obvious consumer of competitive intelligence. But there’s also a hunger for competitive intelligence from product teams

But it can’t be the only team embedded in the world of competitive enablement. Not if your organization wants to win on every level. 

For organizations like Unbounce, competitive intelligence is entwined throughout the organization — and a key driver of results across multiple departments. 

So how did they get there? What drove Unbounce’s desire to leverage competitive intel to enable more than just the sales team? And what — or should we say who — ensures there is organizational visibility and leadership buy-in?

Listen to the full conversation with Fiona Finn, Director of Product Marketing at Unbounce on Spotify and Apple.

Product teams are hungry for competitive intelligence

When Fiona Finn, Director of Product Marketing at Unbounce, first dove into the competitive enablement program at Unbounce, it wasn’t the just sales that craved content. It turned out that Unbounce’s product team was the one with an appetite for competitive intelligence. 

“I quickly did a bit of a search to see who are the most engaged viewers in the organization. I was so surprised to see that our product managers were way up there,” Fiona shared in a recent episode of the Competitive Enablement Show. “Of the seven most engaged individuals, I think five were within our product management team.”

Unbounce’s UX and product teams were already in the habit of checking out competitive battlecards in the discovery phase of a new product.

Feeding competitive intelligence to your product team

Fiona saw that product teams were looking for content on their competitors that would help them differentiate when launching a new feature or product.

She began to understand her product marketing team could support the product teams to help them start differentiating during the ideation and discovery phases. 

“When we launch a product, we know that differentiation is really important. There’s so many new technologies out there, both indirect and direct competitors. That’s why product marketing is really part of that ideation process right from the start. We don’t just come in at the end of the product life cycle when something is ready [to be launched]…We’re really embedded there at the start of the conversation.” 

Fiona is constantly looking for ways to speed up the discovery process to bring products to market more efficiently. Using a Lean Canvas framework, with a section devoted to market landscape and competitive analysis, inputs from product marketing are used as a north star for how to differentiate. 

“When reviewing the lean canvas in the direction you want to take, if there are things at odds between the market opportunity, competitive landscape analysis, and the solution you think you should be building… you have that data at an early point in time and you’re giving visibility to the product marketing sentiment and their competitive insights.” 

There’s nothing worse than fumbling your differentiation strategy when you’re already 60-70% of the way through building a product. That’s why Fiona vowed to help the product team differentiate from the ground up. 

Building the foundation of a competitive enablement program

Luckily for Fiona, there was already a competitive culture in place at Unbounce. However, in order for her competitive program to really be embedded within the organization, the competitive program had to:

• Understand the specific needs of different stakeholders and provide quick wins
• Gain, and maintain, visibility with the leadership team in the organization
• Have a leadership team that’s bought into the value of competitive enablement 

The best way to help your cause is to get a quick win that can serve as a proof of concept of the entire program. And while all functions in an organization benefit from competitive enablement, a partnership with the sales team specifically is the gateway to success. 

Blog > Competitive Enablement