AMA: Klaviyo Director of Product Marketing, Katie Gerard on Competitive Positioning

As a PMM, it can be frustrating to put a lot of work into something and have it sit unused. But I have a lot of empathy for my sales colleagues. Their lives are super busy and they're overwhelmed with information. It makes sense that it's hard to get their attention! When working on competitive intel for a new competitor, here are some action items that will help you to optimize sales engagement: * Prioritize the right competitor. Within PMM, we get a lot of one-off requests for comp intel and we don't have bandwidth to complete them all. I make sure I'm aggregating requests, both from sales directly and senior leadership, and picking the competitor that will have the most strategic impact. * Understand the push back sales is getting from their prospects. Can we do a win/loss analysis specific to that customer to better understand how we're currently viewed vs. the competitor? This will allow you to really tailor your positioning. * Make an enablement plan. I've definitely had the experience of making very in-depth battlecards only to discover that sales would have preferred three bullets of talking points. I figure out what works best for each team in terms of format and plan how to enable (training? recording? simple email?) ahead of time. * Iterate, iterate, iterate. Don't just make a battlecard and throw it over the fence. I like to listen to recordings of calls where sales has used my competitive positioning. Is it working? Does it need to be tweaked?

This is a tricky one and there are definitely some more above and also below board answers. I've known people who have made up fake identities in order to get demos from competitors. If you're not a great actor, here are some other approaches: * Ask your customers. You may have a customer you won over from that competitor. Maybe you have a customer who considered your competitor and remembers their pitch. * Ask your partners. Your partners often have a pretty good idea of how your shared customers feel about a competitive product. * Find an internal resource. A little more below-board, but maybe you have an employee who used to work for your competitor or has used their product in a past role. * Look online. You'll be amazed what you can find. Youtube videos are super handy. * Throw some money at it. Depending on what you want to know about the product, there are CI agencies who can help you out.

I typically think of direct competitors as being other players in the same category of my org that are going after an overlapping share of wallet with an overlapping group of target customers. You may also spend time on your indirect competitors or even substitute products, but you're much less likely to hear about them from your sales team day to day. There are actually a few possible goals of competitor analysis, here are some common ones I've seen in my career so far: * Create battlecards and talking points for your sales team * Help product better understand how to compete with an existing product * Provide your board, executive team, or strategy org with context for decision-making * Inform company or product positioning

Narrative differentiation is essential no matter what. No product speaks for itself and often comparing features can lead you down a "who wore it better" rabbit hole. Also, research actually shows people remember things better if they're part of a story. So your pitch will be a lot more memorable if your product features support the narrative of how you're going to change a customer's life for the better. When I'm crafting competitive differentiation, I think about: * What's the experience I'm selling and who is it for? Great positioning comes down to the value I'm unlocking for the customer, arguably the product is just the vehicle for doing that. So it's not just about the features, it's about how much time/frustration/money my customer will save and the wonderful fun they're going to have instead. Tell that story to the right people. * Why have my existing customers chosen me? What drew them to my company? Win loss analysis is super helpful here and the more recent the data, the better. * What's the stickiest spot for my sales team? What objections do they just not have answers to when it comes to certain competitors?

The easiest way to differentiate yourself is to have a really innovative product and solid marketing to back it up. My favorite example right now is a Klaviyo customer, Magic Spoon. They make low carb/keto diets for people on a diet but wish they weren't. On their website, they even have a tagline "Hold on to the dream." (The dream of eating sugary cereals guilt free.) They have lots of fun cereal flavors you'd associate with your childhood but they're grain free, low carb, etc. For a certain market, their differentiation just hits home with such clarity because it fills a need in such a unique way. Many people love cereal and many people are on keto diets=perfect example of strong differentiation in a niche market. You can find a competitive matrix on their website that compares them to some of the most popular cereal plans across attributes like how much sugar, protein, and carbs. This is a throw back but on the tech side the Apple "I'm a mac, I'm a PC" ads are a perfect example of this. Apple used actors to portray their mac as their target customer (young, laid back) and pc as how they wanted their competitor viewed (old, old fashioned, not that smart). The dialogue is basically an illustration of Apple's key differentiators. For example, in one ad PC sneezes and Apple asks him if he's ok. PC says "no, I've got that virus that's going around." It's a charming way of pointing out that PC's were more prone to viruses than macs.

Competitive positioning is basically a zoomed in version of your overall positioning. If you think of a competitive matrix, your overall positioning puts you on the map. How you're positioned versus a specific competitor zooms into the matrix and describes your exact position relative to this one other specific data point. Also, all positioning is competitive in a world where you have competitors. Not everyone in your company will understand the difference and that's ok. When I think about enabling positioning for the company, I just want them to understand the concept and why it's so important. They don't need to get too deep into the PMM terminology.