Competitive intel | Customer Quotes | Executive Summaries | Sales Process Improvements | Product Roadmap

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a million times more:

The compete community is so damn impressive. The proactive knowledge sharing and the “ask for nothing in return” mentality blows me away.

Nobody went to school for compete. There are only a few helpful textbooks and the others focus too much on the theory and not enough on the practice.

That’s why the best way to learn about compete is by doing it yourself and learning from others. 

In today’s edition of ☕️ Coffee & Compete 🤜🤛 we’re featuring two prime examples of the compete community’s generosity. 

Product Marketing veteran Alex Salop sat down with Adam on the Competitive Enablement Show this week to talk about how win-loss analysis makes your compete program stronger. 

He also wrote a fantastic blog post on the same topic. So we took the best takeaways from both and are stoked to be sharing them with you today. 

And in the Community Corner, Unbounce’s Director of Product Marketing Jess Petrella shares one of the most epic resources for compete pros and product marketers there is. 

So buckle up because we’ve got a particularly spicy hot volume of C&C today. 

Let’s get moving,

Ben 🏎

💪 Five ways win-loss boosts your compete program 💪

1️⃣ Competitive Intelligence 1️⃣

Win-loss questions asked in your win-loss interviews need to cover the entire buyer journey.

Whether you’re interviewing a customer you closed or a prospect you lost, digging into the experience they had with your competitors reveals a ton of competitive insights. 

Insights about your competitors’…

• Sales process and cycle
• Pricing and discounting strategy
• Demos, and more

Especially in a hectic economic climate when your competitors are discounting heavily to win deals, understanding how much and when they offer the discount is important information for your reps and CSMs. 

2️⃣ Customer quotes and proof points 2️⃣

Win-loss interviews don’t always reveal something extraordinary. But they will always produce customer quotes and testimony that can and should be used to enable your team. 

While interviews are generally confidential, anonymized quotes are powerful additions to your battlecards. As Alex puts it:

“Anonymized quotes can help sellers home in on hot-button areas that will resonate with buyers.”

Whether or not your reps can use these quotes verbatim in a competitive deal will depend on the agreement you made with the win-loss interviewees. 

But if nothing else, these insights provide strong context on which to develop elevated competitive plays and talk tracks. 

3️⃣ Executive summaries 3️⃣

Win-loss insights aren’t just about tactical insights for your battlecards. They’re also a prime resource of strategic intel as well. 

On the strategic side, win-loss presentations delivered to your executive team are a proven way to get a strategic seat at the table.

If you nail it, executive summaries aggregate themes and clearly present competitive insights.

And when you make recommendations from those insights that benefit the entire organization, you’re shining a bright light on the value your compete program brings to the table. 

“Nailing it” is always easier said than done. But this template makes it a whole lot easier.

👇

4️⃣ Sales process improvements 4️⃣

Competitive win-loss analysis isn’t only about looking at the competition. It also reveals insights on how you can improve your internal sales process on topics like:

• The timing and delivery of your demo
• Improving the SDR to AE handoff
• Honing your discovery and qualification processes

These aren’t always the splashiest insights. But finding lots of little efficiencies in the sales process can turn into a big value-add for the entire organization. 

For example, Alex leveraged win-loss insights to make a huge improvement to his organization’s discovery process.

5️⃣ Product Roadmap 5️⃣

When we say competitive enablement is about elevating the entire organization we mean it.

For instance win-loss insights can pave the road on your product roadmap and give your product team a line of sight into what buyers are looking for.

“You may think you know what your customers want, but there’s no better way to set roadmap priorities than hearing from buyers what’s most important to them.” 

Win-loss insights don’t always have to make their way into a battlecard. If you’re tasked with enabling your product team, collecting and curating buyer intelligence is one of the most valuable ways you can help them out. 

Dive deeper into why Alex is passionate about using win-loss analysis to boost his compete program here. 

👭Coffee & Compete Community Corner 👬

Remember when I said how amazingly generous the Compete and PMM communities are?

How about someone taking it upon themselves to collect 60+ free resources and a list of 20+ influencers and share them all for absolutely nothing in return? 

Jess Petrella did just that and compiled it all into one masterpiece of a Notion page that you can find here. 

We’re not just stoked on this initiative because she included a few awesome Klue resources (but we are definitely super stoked on that). 

We’re stoked because we know just how valuable PMM and compete can be for the entire organization. And we want everyone to know about it. 

People like Jess are making our discipline more accessible than ever and elevating it by leaps and bounds in the process. 

Thank you Jess! 

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