AMA: Culture Amp Director of Product Marketing, Ambika Aggarwal on Competitive Positioning

There's no silver bullet here because this really does involve setting aside time, especially when CI is not the only part of your job. You can set aside 1-2 hours once a week to do deep dives into your competitors website, PR/news, social media, etc. There are a few automated ways to do this leveraging sophisticated tools like Klue and Crayon that will track your competitors every move (from news, PR, website changes, social media) and alert you to those changes. They can integrate with slack so you can get a competitive daily digest(or whatever frequency you decide). They have various filters that allow you to filter out the noise and focus on what is relevant to you. 

This is a great question and one that generally takes refinement over time based on feedback from sales. Here's what you can do to make sure your competitive intel is beneficial and leveraged by your sales team: 1. Conduct in-depth Win/Loss research - identify the key lost and won reasons that come up from your deals from the notes that reps are inputting into salesforce but also from win/loss interviews. You can hire a win/loss vendor to do this. I've personally worked with Clozd and Primary Intel and they've been great in accelerating these competitive insights. 2. Survey reps, listen to calls or simply talk to reps to find out what the most common objections are per competitor - remember to take a per competitor approach here since objections vary across the board. 3. Find reps who have successfully closed deals with those competitors and listen to their Gong calls and reach out to them to find out what worked and how they handled objections. Gathering all this intel together, craft together a "Swords" and "Shields" playbook that outlines your "Swords" - what reps should LEAD with as competitive strengths against that particulary competitor accompanied by proof points and case studies, and "Shields" - how reps can handle objections with talk tracks, proof points and case studies. When you roll this out make sure you highlight the fact that the playbook was crafted based on data and direct feedback from them on what objections they're struggling with most. 

Here's what I like to put into a positioning doc: 1. What market are we in ? How big is this market (TAM)? What's our serviceable obtainable market (SOM) ? 2. What does the competitve landscape look like? 2. Who are our customers? (buyer personas) 3. What challenges do they face? (key pain points) 4. What is our solution? (description of your offering) 5. How do we solve their problems? (solution/benefit statement) 6. What makes us unique (differentiators) From what it sounds like you'll need a positioning doc and a Go-to-market plan which will also incude your marketing and sales plan ( marketing mix, channel partnerships, sales plays etc). 

1. Sales confidence - While not a metric measured in SFDC, you can work with enablement to craft a pre and post sales confidence metric to assess how confident reps feel in navigating competitive conversations. 2. Competitive win rate - You're likely already measuring win rate, but competitive win rate will give you a direct KPI to measure the improvment in closing competitive deals. 3. [ Product specific] Reduction in lost deals due to product capabilities - To measure this metric you'll need to be tracking lost reason and have a drop-down for reps to choose "product gap." 

The key to getting adoption is to make sure you first get executive alignment along with bringing those teams (sales, marketing, product) along for the journey . As you're creating your positioning and messaging make sure you're getting sales, product, and marketing feedback. That way when you roll it out they will feel much more compelled to use it since they were part of the process. Some other ideas: 1. Do an official " internal roadshow" where you roll this out to each team. Join team meetings and present the process, the positioning and messaging and make sure everyone knows where to find the positioning docs (via a central hub). 2. For sales, if the timing aligns you can use an event like SKO to really make a big splash or award prizes for sales teams that are adopting the new positioning and tagging those calls in Gong. 3. For marketing, you should already be part of campaign planning so whenever your DG teams are kicking off planning make sure you're part of those conversations and point to your positioning as you come up with campaign themes. 4. Work with HR/ Onboarding teams to bake it into onboarding for all new employees

Honestly, with the rise of tools like Gong you don't even need to necessarily ask your reps to join in on customer calls. If there are specific questions you want to ask you can always ask your rep to weave it into the call, or ask your AM or CS rep to schedule a call with an existing customer to aid with the market research. As long as customer calls are recorded in Gong you can always use that as a vehicle to go back and listen (and take advantage of some of the cool analytical features that Gong has!) If you have a particular set of questions you want to ask, I would recommend starting with existing customers rather than joining in on sales conversations since reps are really in discovery and pitching mode and you wouldn't want to interrupt the flow. You can work with your CS team to identify really strong customer champions who would be willing to talk to you. 

For smaller teams that may not have a built out CI team or CI PMM it can get tough to manage competitive research, positioning, creation enablement and dissemination of assets on top of everything else that you're doing as a PMM. This is why my philisophy is to really prioritize your top tier competitors and maybe even limiting it to the top 2 or 3 max. That doesn't mean you shouldn't stay on top of your industry and trends and what other players are doing, but that does mean that you aren't going to dive as deep or create as many assets for the majority of competitors in your space. Some techniques: 1. Pull a salesforce report to look at who you're losing the most deals to. Take a yearly view and see which competitors are gaining traction Quarter over Quarter. Likely 2 or 3 will emerge as the clear ones. Focus on them first. 2. If you serve different segments and industries, think about the competitors that are coming up across those segments and industries. Maybe there's 1-2 additional competitors in your SMB segment or your Healthcare vertical that have started to come up. If these are different than your primary competitors identified in step 1, put them on a backlog and get to them when you're able to, don't try and do all at once.

Competitive differentiation should make up the pillars of your messaging and value proposition. The reason being is that most markets are crowded and customers can choose from many alterntatives, so your differentation needs to be clearly articulated across the buyer's journey. To understand your competitive differentiation you can conduct buyer persona research, closed won research, analyze Gong calls with high ACVs, speak to reps and customer success teams, and really hone in on determining 1) What pain points are you solving for your buyers and 2) What makes you the "only" one? (see onlyness test here ) A couple ways to know if your messaging and value proposition is landing with your buyers 1. Market research messaging testing 2. A/B Test is through marketing channels (paid, email, website) 3. A/B Test it with SDRS in their outreach sequences 4. Present it to your customer advisory board (or similar) to see if it resonates 5. Test it with Analysts 

You'll need to have both 1) Your core positioning and messaging doc at the overall company and product level and then 2) Your GTM plan for the new feature which includes messaging and positioning for that particular launch. For any launch, you'll also need to come up with a tiering structure and then let's say it's a Tier 1 product launch that changes your positioning or messaging in some way you'll need to update your core positioning and messaging doc to reflect that change if the launch is big enough that it warrants an update.

You'll want to create materials that you can package up and disseminate via a central hub like Highspot, Seismic, Showpad, Confluence etc. When you roll this out make sure you lead with "what's it in for them?" (faster deal cycles, higher ACV, etc) It depends on who you're trying to enable (AEs, AMs, technical sales engineering) but typical effective competitive positioning materials include: 1. Battlecards 2. Swords and Shields (offensive/defensive plays) supported by customer stories and proof points 3. Product differentiation deep dive (but be careful not to turn this into a feature comparison as we don't want reps to feel like they need to get down into individual feature wars) 4. Enablement session that also highlights a handful of reps who have had success closing deals against key competitors Also, make sure you instill a regular cadence around disseminating competitive positioning and intel. Creating a slack channel can also help crowdsource reps who are closing competitive deals and elevating their talk tracks and best practices to the rest of the team.

This is definitely tricky since getting in-depth product intel requires intimate knowledge about your competitors products. One technique some companies employ is mystery shopping research where you hire a researcher to pose as a buyer, but your organization may have a stance against this type of research. You can always look through review sites like G2 to see how your products are compared against top competitors products. But what I've found to be most effective is actually spending time talking to your sales, account management, and customer success teams. Prospects and existing customers are constantly sharing competitive intel with reps and CS teams and will often even send through a competitor's pitch decks, sales collateral, demos and sometimes even product roadmap which can give you really granular insight. 

The goal of competitive positioning is to own a space in the market that's yours by focusing on differentiated value. In order to fully be able to answer the question of what your differentiated value is or should be, you'll need to do some analysis. The following are key buckets that you'll need to dive into: 1. Market Analysis/ Profile: Market Size, Market Trends, Market Competitors, Market lifecycle stage 2. Segmentation& Personas -Determine your segmentation strategy and create a detailed buyer persona profile that represents a target buyer in that particular segment 3. Competitive Analysis - Direct, Indirect, Future competitors 4. SWOT Analysis - Synthesize the information above and create a SWOT analyze to highlight strenghs, weaknesses, opportunities, threats 5. Bring it all together into a value proposition that serves as the basis for your competitive positioning (think about things like product leadership, operational execellence, customer intimacy as value drivers)