Product & Compete Working Together | Supporting Product Launches with Competitive Intelligence

All roads lead to product. 

Good marketing amplifies. Good sellers seal the deal. Good CSMs keep customers for life. 

But if it’s all built on a house of cards, your company is not long for this world. 

So in today’s edition of ☕ Coffee & Compete 🤜🤛 

🎙️Growth Product Manager Isabel Gan reveals the secrets to how competitive intel should inform your product roadmap

🔒We turn back the clocks to 2022 and check out three ways Molly Gallaher Boddy says compete should support product launches

👫 And we launch the first ever Coffee & Compete 1:1 network event

Let’s rock

Ben ✌️

🎙️ Using Competitive Intel for Your Product Roadmap🎙️

Marketing sells a fairytale story that sales can’t back up. Sales sells a dream that CS can’t make come true.

And product managers can’t build a product roadmap if compete pros don’t provide clear market, competitive and buyer intel about the competitive landscape. 

Our guest on the Competitive Enablement Show this week was Isabel Gan, Klue’s Growth Product Manager and the host of the Product Toolbox Podcast. 

She dished on how competitive intel can and should inform your product roadmap in the short term and into the future. 

“Whatever competitive intel gets shared with us needs to be really crystal clear on what our market is expecting from us so that we can reflect that in the product.”

Every function in every company would love to get crystal clear intel to guide their decision-making. The problem is it doesn’t exist. 

What does exist is directionally accurate data based on competitive, market and buyer research. 

Buyer intel from win-loss

• Loss interviews show a trend in lack of functionality factoring into the losses
  • This could be your cue to speed up the roadmap on adding that functionality

Market intel 

• Analyst reports show consumers are increasingly expecting a self-serve buying experience
  • This might move your product and product marketing towards a PLG model

Competitive intel

• Your sales reps are sharing that your competitor is dropping FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) around lack of clarity regarding the product roadmap itself
  • Maybe you tighten up timelines on the roadmap and communicate it more effectively 

These are all imperfect inputs. And as Isabel says in the interview, you never want to make a knee-jerk reaction to something your competitor is doing. 

But the call to action here is a tighter relationship between compete teams and product.

Because while the intel on its own doesn’t solve anything, together you can begin to unlock the insights that drive revenue. 

It’s a relationship every compete team should have on their radar. And when you nail it, the whole company benefits.

🔥 3 ways compete can support product launches 🔥

We’re turning back the clock all the way back to September 2022 to our interview on the Competitive Enablement Show with Cloud’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Molly Gallaher Boddy. 

She told us three ways compete programs should be supporting product teams and launches 👇

1️⃣ Positioning, Pricing and Packaging

“I think part of compete’s role is to push the envelope and test people to be innovative in how they’re thinking about their pricing and packaging model.”

2️⃣ Send product-specific competitive intel digests

“They need answers to how particular products similar to yours are or are not performing in the market, and what factors are contributing to the success.”

3️⃣ Build product-specific battlecards 

“Great product teams want to know what everybody else is doing in a deep, feature-specific kind of way.” 

Get your full fix of how compete teams should be enabling product with this interview from the vault 👇

👭Coffee & Compete Community Corner 👬

Today’s installment of the 👬Community Corner 👭 features one of our favourite compete pros, Imperva’s Pat Wall. 

A must-follow account on LinkedIn, Pat was also the most recent guest on the Competitive Enablement Show. 

Give the episode a listen to find out why Pat loves puppies and sales — and what they both have in common. 

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