Lessons from a Career in Compete, Curating Intel, Messaging for Startups

🎙Lessons from a Career in Compete 🎙

Have you ever finished a conversation with someone and realized:

That’s easily one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.  

Such was the realization both Adam and I had after our interview with Mayur Palta, Competitive Intelligence expert and Win-Loss Lead at Data Bricks. 

AWS, Dell EMC, Oracle, Cornell, Harvard — all organizations that have hosted Mayur within their four walls. 

And he’s picked up more than a few valuable lessons along the way. 

Mayur’s 3 Tips for Starting a Win-Loss Program

1️⃣ Start with your customers in mind and work backwards

2️⃣ Make big decisions on sound data, not opinions or anecdotes

3️⃣ View your program through a multi-departmental, cross-functional lens

We also dive into the importance of the Competitive Intelligence Flywheel and how the team at Databricks makes it happen. 

It’s not every day you get to be a fly on the wall for a conversation like this. 

But today is your lucky day. 

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🤔 Important. Interesting. Archived. Delete 🤔

When Jason Oakley told me that Klue’s new Triage Mode would be the most fun anyone has ever had curating competitive intel, I thought to myself:

The bar must be pretty low. 

Lo and behold, Mr. Oakley’s assessment was spot on. Triage Mode is good times!

For compete experts, daily intel curation is one of the most critical steps on the path to uncovering competitive insights. 

And whether you’re a team of one, or part of a larger team, curating vast amounts of intel every single day can be a huge time suck. 

So our product team set out to simplify, gamify, and enjoyify the process of intel curation — and voilà: 

Triage Mode. 

With the click of a button, your daily intel feed can be triaged into one of four different categories. 

🚩 Important: Actionable and urgent. The kind of intel you reschedule items in your calendar for. 

💡 Interesting: Actionable but not urgent. You want to look deeper into these items but it doesn’t require immediate attention.

⏸ Archive: Intel that doesn’t require action right now, but may be useful in the future to help build your intel repository. 

✌️ Delete: Away with you! 

Triage mode or not, these four categories are important concepts in organizing competitive intel. 

I know you want to have as much as I’m having playing with Triage Mode. So read more about it here.

And check out Brandon Bedford’s deep dive into the what, why, when and how of becoming a competitive expert through intel curation here. 

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👭 Coffee & Compete Community Corner 👭

Did you get the message?

Messaging and positioning are living beings. 

They’ll evolve over time as the needs of your company and the market shift. 

For startups especially, adopting new messaging can be a serious challenge. 

Luckily, there are experts like Emma Stratton who can come to the rescue. 

Her recent post on this topic is our feature spotlight this week for the Coffee & Compete Community Corner. 

Make sure to follow Emma on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Punchy Newsletter for tips on how to bring your messaging to the next level. 

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