Craft Ventures COO on Competiting in a Recession | Compete Week Sessions Available

This week marked a first for the Competitive Enablement Show.

We’ve hosted star PMMs, Hall of Fame Compete practitioners, and even a CEO or two. 

But this week we welcomed Craft Ventures Partner and COO Brian Murray to the show. 

Adam asked him five questions about how he’s seeing businesses compete in a tough economy. 

So today we’re bringing you:

• Three takeaways from Adam’s interview with Brian Murray 🎙
• Day 1 recordings from Compete Week 2022 🎥
• Some advice on how not to impress your boss ☝️

 Enjoy,

 Ben ⚽️

🚨 Executives don’t have a good enough handle on the competition and it’s a huge problem 🚨

If Brian Murray had it his way, a competitive landscape analysis would come up in every single board meeting. 

In reality, they don’t come up often enough. And when they do, the competitive analysis is shallow and unactionable. 

“I’ll hear from certain leadership teams who say things like ‘we’re not focused on our competition’. I think that’s actually just a euphemism for we were too lazy or we’re too cocky to think anyone could catch up to us.” 

For investors like Brian, that kind of head-in-the-sand approach rings all kinds of alarm bells. 

That’s why he says that every single good board meeting must include a competitive landscape analysis.

Ideally, one that features a company’s main competitors and their relative position in the market. 

📖 Competitive intel and competitor volatility 📖

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

If times are particularly desperate for a competitor of yours, they might employ aggressive tactics. 

Tactics like slashing prices by half just to close a deal and generate cash flow. 

A good competitive enablement program can help quickly collect and curate valuable intel about your competitors’ erratic behaviour and set you up to respond from a position of strength. 

As Brian puts it:

“Rather than stooping to that level, you might take a pause and think critically about what’s going on in this market, and then leaning into your own competitive intelligence to figure it out.”

With the right intel and enablement in place, you can:

• Preempt a dramatic price drop from your competitors and position it as a sign of weakness
• Empower your reps with the right talk tracks to redirect conversations about price back to value. 

With investment money drying up and budgets shrinking down, Brian says competitive intelligence is more important than ever. 

🙆‍♂️ Be Tech Optimistic Not Tech Skeptical 🙆‍♂️

Find ways to generate more revenue or be more efficient with what you already have. 

This is the mandate of every startup on the planet big and small today. 

Luckily, there’s one industry whose entire reason for being is to create efficiencies — the tech industry.

Yet Brian finds that sometimes it’s people in the tech sector who are the most hesitant at taking a chance. 

“The irony is that the tech sector exists to create efficiencies, but those same technologists are skeptical of new technology.”

Businesses everywhere need to be more diligent than ever with new costs.

And at the same time be passionately looking for new efficiencies.

The right technology can deliver those efficiencies — if you let it. 

So maybe we all should be a little more tech optimistic and a little less tech skeptical. 

🎥 Watch Every Session from Compete Week 2022 🎥

I told you we wouldn’t make you wait too long. 

Every single Compete Week session, workshop and roundtable is now available online for your viewing pleasure. 

All in four convenient playlists from each of the four days. 

Today I thought I’d share Day 1 with you — the day that kicked it all off. 

You can catch presentations like Klue’s Jason Smith on Closing the Competitive Revenue Gap and roundtables like the one hosted by Shopify’s Brock Everett and Dennis Brosnan. 

CHECK OUT ALL 7 SESSIONS FROM DAY 1 HERE

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