AMA: GitLab Vice President of Product Marketing, Dave Steer on Competitive Positioning

I think of competitive intel like product managers think about their product. The first step is to listen to your stakeholders (or internal customers) from sales, product, customer success and marketing to understand what they want and need in competitive intel. What are their gaps in intel? In content? How do they best consume the information and content you develop for them? What form factor(s) should it take? What cadence do they want it in? Once you have those insights, you can develop content that they will read...use...and LOVE. Another important factor is to think deeply about the competitive factors in your market and factor those into your intel and content. What trends or changes are occurring in your category? How do those change points impact moves that your competition is making? And, based on this, how do you plan to position your solution to competitively differentiate? One final point: Embrace the value of Iteration. The best intel content that I've seen breaks down large projects into smaller pieces so that you can ship to your audience quickly and get the valuable feedback that will guide your next iteration, and your next, and your next. Iterate often with competitive intel and content.

Terrific question! A few metrics that are key to competitive intel: Competitive Intel 101 Metrics 1. Sales engagement -- Is your sales team using the competitive content that your team is developing? If you use a sales enablement platform (we use Highspot), getting this data is much easier. Set your OKRs on increasing sales engagement with this type of content. 2. Sales satisfaction -- This is a more qualitative measure, but very important. Find out whether your sales team feels more confident in the conversations they have with prospects and existing customers. If you want a more quantitative measure, consider sending an NPS specific to your competitive intel to your sales team on a quarterly or bi-annual basis. Advanced Competitive Intel Metrics 3. Impact on sales success -- Once you've established your foundation with #1#1 and #2,#2, you can take it to the next level by measuring the impact of competitive intel content on closed/won and accelerating the sales cycle. You can do this most effectively if your sales team uses an enablement platform that associates content with sales engagements. 4. Impact on product roadmap & GTM strategy -- At its best, competitive intel can influence product roadmap and go-to-market strategy. I recommend qualitative measures to gauge success. Look at the degree to which company strategy is informed by your competitive insights. Last KPI: Great competitive intel makes a product marketer an MVP across the company. Count how many high-fives you get from sales, product, customer success, and marketing. If the number is going up-and-to-the-right, you're doing something right.

Be resourceful! Even when there's little public-facing marketing, there's always a ton of other public resources that you can look to. Here are a few: 1 - Audit their social media, press coverage, and press releases -- Companies like to talk about their products and the success they are having in market. This is a great resource for intel. Another great resource is LinkedIn. You'd be amazed about how much information you can glean by looking at the background of people who work for your competitors -- what are their background? what's their current focus? 2 - Look at 3rd party review sites, such as G2 and Peer Insights. These usually have a wealth of information -- from the customers of your competitors -- about your competitor's (and your) strengths and weaknesses. 3 - Read industry analyst reports and, if there's relatively little info, schedule an inquiry with the most relevant industry analyst. 4 - Talk to your salespeople. If they are seeing competition in market, they have insights to share.

My team and I use a Message House framework that covers the following elements: * Solution/Product Naming * Tagline * Positioning Statement * Short and Long Descriptions For the Positioning Strategy, we use a modified version of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome positioning canvas. The canvas, we have found, invites us to be more critical and thorough in our positioning strategy. It includes: * Competitive Alternatives * Unique Attributes * Value * Who Cares A Lot We inform the messaging framework with the positioning canvas, filling in the following elements: * Target audience (personas, ICP) * Unifying message * Pain Points (up to 3) * Solutions (up to 3) * Key messages (up to 3) * Competitive differentiators * Proof points/Customer references It can be quite comprehensive, but when the thinking is crisp, so is the end result -- differentiated positioning and clear, resonant messaging. As you can see, Competitive Positioning is woven through all of this work and strengthens the overall messaging strategy.

I have a few lenses that I look through for competitive differentiation: 1. The Positioning Canvas -- I mentioned this in an earlier question, but it's worth repeating the effectiveness of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome positioning canvas (must reading for any Product Marketer). With this methodology, you and your team will go through an exercise of defining 'competitive alternative' -- the task here is to identify what customers would use if you did not exist AND to look inwards at what unique attributes you have that your competitors do not. Highly recommend using this as part of your competitive differentiation exercise. 2. Company Strategy -- Many people think competitive differentiation is limited to product. It's not. I like to look at competitive differentiation through a combination of (1) product strategy, (2) GTM strategy, and (3) operational strategy. Often, you can find -- or create -- differentiation in one or multiple of these areas. One way I've put it all together is to develop a 'Buyer Consideration Attribute' map and workshop strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis competition on the most important attributes. <-- Informed by Blue Ocean Strategy (another must read) Once you have a good thesis on competitive differentiation, it's time to document it and enable as many relevant teams as possible. Not just sales. Product management and engineering needs these insights to inform their roadmap. Marketing needs these insights both for messaging strategy and in determining other GTM elements like channel, audiences, and more. And then, yes, Sales and customer success needs easy-to-understand and easy-to-take action enablement so they have 20/20 vision of who they will be up against in deals and so they know how to navigate conversations....and win deals.

You're right: competition never stands still. And when you capture competitive information, it's likely that you are seeing the result of what they put into motion weeks, months, or quarters ago. I've approached the flow of information coming from the competitive landscape differently from company to company. Here are a few guideposts that I've used: * Time-based: Find a cadence -- like 1x per month, 1x per quarter, etc. -- to update your competitive intel, including content like Competitive Cards. If you wait any more than a year, you are waiting too long. * Release-based: Another cadence to use is based on product releases. Since they are points where your product's capabilities have changed, they offer good opportunities to re-assess your product vs. competition. * Enablement-based: Similar to Time and Release-based, you can use your Sales Enablement cadence to keep your competitive intel updated since you'll need it to train the sales team. Another benefit to doing this is that Enablement provides an input opportunity for the Sales team to inform your Competitive content. * Real-time: Competitive marketing is a team sport, so find channels to share competitive news in real-time. Like many companies, we have a dedicated Slack channel for competitive conversation. We also use GitLab, itself, to document work in this area and enable everyone to contribute to it (again, it's a team sport)

If you are relying on narrative differentiation alone, then the problem to solve is creating differentiated solutions rather than finding different stories to tell. Use competitive intel as a lever to get product, GTM, and operational strategy. Once you have that in place, you'll have differentiated offerings in the market, which is a foundational (and necessary) part of your narrative.

The market is littered with really bad examples of competitive messaging, unfortunately. They usually make their case on technical details that are irrelevant to the prospective customer. The best competitive positioning doesn't mention competition. After all, why give them air time? Rather, it uses competitive insights to guide positioning strategy -- and the positioning strategy, in turn, guides salient messaging that is relevant to your customers. Make the messaging about the problems they have and the unique ways you solve them. And if you do want to integrate your competitors in your messaging to show clearer differentiation, be careful to not pick fights or alienate customers. Again, make the messaging about something that is relevant to the audience and that you do better. My favorite example of this is an oldie but goodie. Rental car company Avis was in second place in its market category but scored its customers loved Avis' customer service. So, Avis launched the 'We Try Harder' advertising campaign as a sneaky way to tout its strength (and, note, they did this without mentioning competition by name).