WHAT’S BREWING

Sybill’s competitive playbook against the category leader

Collin Mayjack is the PMM at Sybill, and he’s also been running one of the more interesting competitive playbooks in B2B SaaS right now (and not being quiet at all about it).

His target: Gong. The category creator in revenue intelligence, with near-universal brand recognition in sales tech. Sooooooo, not a soft target.

I asked him what his favourite competitive play has been. His answer: it depends on how you measure success.

The Bigger Story

Most competitive campaigns live in the shadows.

You scour competitor customer pages, monitor renewal windows, arm your reps with differentiators, and drive traffic straight to a bottom-of-funnel comparison page. It’s effective. It’s also invisible to everyone except the prospects you’re already chasing.

Collin did something different. And it started by being loud.

The brand play: a cheeky ‘Gong Wrapped’ post that caught fire. He timed it to piggyback on Spotify Wrapped’s cultural moment, and then turn Gong’s own positioning against it. Fast, timely, a little dash of spice (okay more like a few handfuls) is the exact energy that catches attention and gets shared around.

Build the perception before the pipeline conversation even starts.

The pipeline play: A dedicated head-to-head webinar. Six parts digging into the more technical differences between Sybill and Gong, led by members of their product team. They also attacked the pricing model and user experience throughout.

Two plays with two different jobs. One built the narrative in the market. One converted the buyer who started paying attention.

This approach works because Sybill is the disruptor. When you’re punching up at a giant, being loud is a legitimate strategy.

Could you imagine Nike running attack ads outside your local running store? I have a hunch that wouldn’t be received quite as well… the incumbent doesn’t get to play that game.

Why You Should Care

If you’re at a company going after a legacy incumbent, there’s real inspiration to take from Collin and Sybill’s approach. You don’t have to be coy about it. Start loud.

Build the narrative in the market before you ever get to the pipeline conversation. Gong has a massive installed base of customers who are sitting on renewals, quietly wondering if there’s a better way.

And that cheeky brand play? That’s what makes sure your name is already in their head when that moment arrives.

DIARY OF A PRODUCT MARKETER

Uh oh, someone gave me access to Claude Code…

I vibe coded a sales asset in an hour, and shipped it that day.

Build vs. buy is the objection I keep hearing on sales calls right now. In fact, every PMM I talk to is hearing the same thing, too.

AI has made everyone feel like an engineer. Buyers who would never have considered building their own CI platform are now genuinely asking: why pay for Klue when we could just… build it?

It’s a fair question. And “trust us, it’s harder than it looks” is not a positioning strategy.

So I did something about it (with the help of the brains of the operation, Jenna). We asked Klue to pull every capability that buyers in deep evaluation had to scope when assessing a build-in-house alternative. Not surface-level stuff; the real list that comes out when a company actually tries to spec out CI software from scratch. Integrations, data pipelines, maintenance cycles, analyst hours, the works.

Then I opened Claude Code. An hour later, I had an interactive build vs. buyer calculator grounded in what real buyers said it actually takes. I added an export button so buyers could share the output directly with leadership.

The next day, a rep was already using it in a live deal. I got feedback within the day on how to tweak, and we’re off to the races!

PMMs get asked to build stuff like this all the time. It usually takes forever. This one took an hour… and it was a cool excuse to pull real competitive and buyer intel out of Klue to make it actually mean something.

If you want the full breakdown — every step, every prompt, exactly how I built it — just reply to this email. Happy to share the whole thing.

UPCOMING EVENT

Live workshop building AI workflows on top of Klue data

We’ve been deep in the weeds lately building workflows that connect Klue’s MCP server to Claude, wiring up Zap automations with Klue data, and talking to customers about what they’re actually building. It’s a cool time to be a PMM.

So we’re doing a live show-and-tell on Mar. 24, walking through the workflows so you can steal them.

CI leaders Jacques Begin from 8×8 and Prathith Venkatakrishnan from Sisense are joining too, to share what’s actually working at their companies.

No deep engineering required, I pinky promise.

SIPS N’ CLICKS

Other Compete News

Anthropic is running one of the smoothest rip ‘n’ replace campaigns — by providing a one-click migration from ChatGPT.

Benioff called ServiceNow “purgatory” on Salesforce’s latest earnings call — and named specific customers he claims to have poached from them. After years of vague jabs at “legacy software,” the gloves are fully off.

McDonald’s CEO took one small, hesitant bite of his own burger and called it a “product” — and the internet lost it — Burger King and Wendy’s immediately clowned on him with their own exec taste tests.

Apple chose Google over OpenAI to power the new Siri — a $1-5B annual deal that hands Gemini distribution across 2+ billion devices. OpenAI lost one of the most important partnerships in consumer tech to its biggest rival.

HubSpot acquired Starter Story — 800K YouTube subscribers, profitable, three-person team. Their combined YouTube network now doubles Salesforce’s.

Stay caffeinated, 

– Adam & Hen (don’t be a stranger, connect with me on LinkedIn 👋)