Lacework is in the highly competitive cloud security space, competing with over 20 point solution vendors on a regular basis, and new companies constantly entering the market. A top priority for the CI team was to educate and enable their sellers on differentiation. As typical in many SaaS companies, competitive requests were coming in ad-hoc through Slack and other channels, and most competitive deliverables in static format such as PDF, which leave opportunities for outdated materials.
Reps needed a central place to go for the latest Competitive Intelligence, and Lacework needed to level up their competitive program with a strategy that linked all areas of the business. The Lacework team brought on Kim Bauer to build up this program. Kim had extensive experience creating full scale Compete programs in her previous roles, including adjunct teaching a CI course to FEMBA students at the University of California, Irvine.
As the Lacework team always valued the overlap of customer needs, competitive differentiation and their own Lacework value prop, they created a Compete program that also included Win-Loss insights. The team was working with a different Win-Loss vendor but insights were kept in a different platform, and the results were not as expected.
Early on in her career, Kim met with a number of vendors and reinforced her belief that a CI platform should have a more customer centric approach centered around Win-Loss research. Klue was the first vendor to acquire a Win-Loss services company, having an expert team of research directors and analysts.
Kim and the Compete team were looking for a Win-Loss program that would provide actionable insights to help continue to attract and delight customers and prospects. After using other research tools at prior organizations, Kim was delighted by the professionalism and depth of insights delivered by Klue’s Win-Loss research. Based on this level of services expertise and having a single integrated platform of both Compete and Win-Loss insights together in one place, Kim decided to expand their Klue contract to include the customer voice within their battlecards.
This integrated Compete + Win-Loss program, referred to internally as ‘All in Won’, allows Kim and team to share comprehensive learnings with the Exec team, sellers, Product, Engineering and everyone in between within the organization. It has been instrumental in giving her team a ‘seat at the table,’ highlighting the role and value of the CI team. This is best demonstrated by the CI team’s regular stand-up with their CEO, CMO, and CRO where they have the opportunity to highlight opportunities for differentiation, win-loss, and the competitive landscape.
