What teams benefit the most from competitive intelligence
This is the second article in a series on competitive intelligence. For the reasons why I’m writing this series, please check out this post.
When I first started doing competitive intelligence work for Sprout, one of the most important questions to answer was who needed this information. The first, and most obvious, team was our sales team. The role wouldn’t have existed if our head of sales hadn’t advocated for it.
Okay, that sounds easy enough: help the sales team understand our competition so they can sell more effectively.
But as I spent more time at Sprout, it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t just sales that clamored for market insights. Sure, they were the loudest, but product managers, customer success managers, marketing teams and the larger executive team all seemed to lack the intel necessary to make informed decisions.
This was a bigger problem than just what sales was facing. My strategy had to take into consideration where competitive intelligence could benefit the organization. Every kernel of insight could be delivered to several different teams, but it required a different lens so the team could make sense of it .
What mattered to sales wouldn’t necessarily matter to product, and what mattered to product wouldn’t necessarily matter to marketing. Every team could benefit from competitive insights, but I had to answer a few questions:
- How do I decide whether to share it with them or not?
- Why would this team benefit from this insight?
- What would they use it for?
Weighing whether or not a certain team would care about or value the insight became a balancing act. Share too much and you’re seen as overzealous and just delivering noise. Share too little and teams may miss out on intelligence that could impact their objectives. This is the one area that I still find the most challenging with competitive intelligence.
So we’re going to take a look at the various teams that can benefit from this information and how they could use it. Ideally, with this context, you can figure out how to share day-to-day insights with various departments.
Sales Individual Contributors
No team craves competitive intelligence more than the sales team. Even if you have the best product in the market, you always need to know how to defend that position against competitors across the market.
If you’re trying to replace an existing product, you have to understand why a customer has purchased that product in the first place. What advantages did this competitor bring? Cheaper pricing? A set of features offered nowhere else? Exemplary customer support? You also have to understand what may have caused them to almost not purchase that product. What are the core weaknesses that product has that you can exploit in your conversations?
Without having even a high-level understanding of your core competitors’ value propositions, you’re flying blind when you’re talking with customers. You won’t know if your positioning has any impact.
For example, one of Sprout’s biggest competitive advantages is how easy it is to learn and use the software every day. In the world of SaaS, a usable product can beat a more “powerful” product any day of the week. However, even though I am biased and I think we have the best user interface in the market, I know that many of our competitors have tools that aren’t far behind. In fact, some customers prefer those other tools. And if a salesperson doesn’t know that this isn’t a differentiator for us against one of these competitors and we ramble on and on about how great ours is, we’re hurting our conversation with the customer. Even worse, we’re missing an opportunity to exploit any known weaknesses that competitor may have.
If a sales team knows your product’s core value propositions, that’s a good start. But there’s more opportunity available if that team knows how to highlight the values that are strongest against a specific competitor in their deal. It’s absolutely critical that they know how to adjust their stories to capitalize on every customer conversation.
If your sales reps cannot succinctly answer the question, “how are you different from [competitor XYZ]?” for your top three competitors, this is where you need to start. It will help them have more productive conversations with every customer. As you collect more intel, you can share that with the team and help them continuously refine the points.
Sales Leadership
Sales leadership will benefit from the same type of competitive intelligence as their individual contributors, but leaders need even more. They need to understand which competitors are we beating the most; which are we losing to the most; why are beating them; why are we losing to them; what signs indicate a good or a bad sales opportunity.
Every quarter, I share win / loss data with sales leadership so they can see the top five competitors they beat and lost to in the last quarter. I outline the reasons why we are winning and why we are losing. I also work with them to understand what changes we need to make to be more successful in the future.
With this information at their disposal, they can help their teams prioritize winnable deals and change strategies for deals we’ve historically lost. They can figure out what reps perform well against top competitors and leverage them as peer leaders to help other team members. They can work with my team to develop team-specific trainings to coach reps on how to win against these competitors.
Sales leadership must understand both how to differentiate your company from your competitors and where you’re succeeding and failing at that today. Without that level of knowledge, they’ll struggle to support their teams in competitive deals.
Product Teams
While sales teams don’t need to know all the nitty gritty details of your competitors’ products, your product team definitely should. How is it built? How is it designed? What do customers like and hate about it? What part of their product are they most focused on? If we were to build an offering like theirs, what would we emulate and what would we change?
Product teams can use competitive intelligence both reactively and proactively.
As a competitive intelligence team, we work closely with our product managers to understand what parts of our product need additional investments. This means that we have to understand from a product-only perspective why a customer chose a competitive product over ours. We will then research what it is about that specific product that the customer preferred. We’ll take that information, share it back with the product manager and come up with a way to improve on that product to deliver a better experience. This is generally a reactive process as the deal has already closed, but it helps us understand what we need to do to improve in the future. For CI teams, it is important to prioritize the most common product deficiencies instead of focusing on one-off pieces of feedback that may have only impacted that one customer.
Product teams should be able to proactively look at intel on individual competitors and ultimately aggregate those into larger market trends. In today’s world, it isn’t enough to simply have a perspective on the upcoming six-month roadmap. You need to think about what the next 3–5 years looks like. This will give you the opportunity to build an innovative solution that the market has never seen before. Taking a long view is how you build a product that solves your customers’ problems before they even knew they were problems. But without actively surveying what the rest of the market is doing, it would be nearly impossible to have an informed view on where it is going. CI teams must work closely with product to sift through the everyday noise to identify those larger trends and then have a point of view on them.
Marketing
The biggest area of opportunity for competitive intelligence to help the marketing department is through messaging development. At the core of marketing lies the story that you’re trying to tell your market and your customers. It is what establishes your brand and what people think of it.
Your story will ultimately permeate every activity that the marketing department undertakes: the copy on your website, the messaging in your marketing materials, the talking points used in PR etc. But you can’t create a compelling and unique story if you haven’t examined what else is in the market.
A few years ago at Sprout, we re-engineered our core Sprout story. Before we could do that though, we needed to understand what our customers thought about us, how the market perceived us and what stories our competitors were telling. I provided a full audit of the core themes and messaging that our competitors used across all their digital properties. This helped ensure that what we ultimately rolled out to our organization was differentiated and a story that only Sprout could tell. If you’ll recall from my second post in this series, there’s nothing worse than going to market with a story that isn’t differentiated from your competitor’s.
This competitive research ultimately impacts all facets of marketing: content, SEO, paid ads, events, communications. Understanding the market and where there is whitespace enables you to tell a powerful story that no other company can.
Executive Team
Ultimately, your executive team needs to have a high-level understanding of all the individual team insights. A good CI team will know how to take the most important points and bubble those up to the executive team.
But they also have their own specific needs too. Executives will want to understand competitors’ growth rates. They’ll want to know about where competitors are making investments in their business, whether that is going into new product areas or opening offices in new geographies. They’ll need to understand where competitors are hiring.
The most important point is to help the executive team understand which competitors are long-term threats vs. short-term vexations. For example, one of the biggest differences between how I talk about the competitive market with sales reps and the executive team is which companies I refer to as our competitors. To an individual sales rep, every company in every deal is a key competitor. My team does our best to support those needs and provide intel for a wide swath of competitors because we want our reps to close as many deals as they can. However, for the executive team, we almost exclusively report on five core competitors. At the end of the day, these are the companies that will have the biggest influence over our long-term trajectory, so we give them special attention when sharing intel with the executive team.
Interestingly, the executive team is the one that I probably share the least amount of information with on a day-to-day basis. That’s because there’s a high threshold for what needs to be on their radar.
Realistically, this barely scratches the surface of teams that could benefit from competitive intelligence and how a CI team can work with them. The point is to show how all the teams have very different needs and what you provide for one won’t necessarily be critical for another. It is critical that you’re thoughtful about what you share and with whom.
As you’re starting to incorporate CI work, whether as your full-time job or as just a part of your role, take advantage of the opportunity you have to bring value to multiple departments across your organization. Whenever I come across an interesting piece of intel, the first question I ask myself is “which teams would benefit from this and how should I share it with them?” It won’t just help your company make more informed decisions; it will also make you an irreplaceable asset.
In the next post, we’re going to discuss where your competitive intelligence team should live in your organization. Feel free to drop me a note on LinkedIn if you want to chat more!
