Daniel Kuperman

You have to establish a cadence of updates for different assets, which will vary based on how they are used and your market dynamics. Personas don't change often, so revisting them every 6 months might be enough, but if you are on a competitive market it may require a quarterly or more frequent update of competitive battlecards. The important thing is to establish a schedule for revisions and set time aside for updating those materials. Another part of your process should be communication to the sales team and others that might use them. Depending on how drastic the update was (e.g. minor edits vs major overhauls) you will also want to have different ways of notifiying the team. A Slack message about a minor update could be good enough but you probably want to do a full enablement session for major revisions that could impact a sales person's abilty to deliver the message or close a deal. In sum: 1. Identify 'expiration dates' for all your assets 2. Establish a cadence for the revisions and updates 3. Block time on your calendar to work on the updates 4. Agree w/ the sales teams and others on the best way to communicate those updates

Ultimately is about revenue attainment. Are sales reps being able to make their numbers? If yes, you are likely doing your job well. Now, if we look more closely at how to impact revenue attainment from a product marketing perspective we end up with the following metrics: * Win / Loss rate: this can indicate if the messaging/positioning needs work and if sales reps have the right tools at their disposal. * Competitive win rate: indicates how effective are the battle cards and competitive training. * Conversion along the marketing funnel: this will give you anindication of content performance and messaging. * Pipeline coverage: are we targeting the right personas, the right companies, and are reps able to convey value. Other metrics that the sales enablement team will be monitoring include sales ramp time, quota attainment, etc. which may not be relevant for product marketing unless your team is also involved with these activities.

The best enablement decks I’ve seen address: * Who is this for? * Why is this important? * What is the impact of this? * Action items / next steps Whatever the subject, following the framework above will help identify the specifics of why someone should pay attention. It is also important to always keep in mind the broader context of where the company operates and if you are selling multiple products and/or have a large global presence, to make sure that the team understand that particular situation. Finally, it is not as much about the deck itself I think is important but the delivery of it and the fup activities. How are you going to ensure people are paying attention? How will you measure knowledge retention? These will be important aspects to consider as you rollout any enablement session.

Good question. In my experience, the best way to prioritize competitive insights is to show there's a clear connection between the work and business results. This often comes in the form of improved win rate for the sales team, better messaging for the marketing team, prioritization of product features, and higher ranking in analyst reports, to name just a few. Something to consider is creating a table in a Google Doc or similar in which you list all the deliverables or types of insights you will be gathering in one column and in the column next to it you identify which areas are impacted and why. For example: a) Competitive battle cards --> helps sales to better position us in competitive situations and win more deals; b) Competitive messaging reviews --> assists the marketing team in updating our website and competitive landing pages, also helps the content team in their planning process; c) Competitor feature take-down --> used by the product team to prioritize roadmap items; etc...

The key rule of thumb is to always be truthful. Don't lie about who you work for, your role with the company, and what you are looking for. For example: * When filling out an online web form to download content from a competitor's website, use your real name and business email address. * When approaching a competitor's booth at a trade show, disclose who you are and who you work for. * Don't ask anyone else to misrepresent their intentions so that you can get eyes on a competitor's product or get insider information. * When interviewing former employees of a competitor, remind them to not disclose confidential or proprietary information.

The biggest mistake is to focus on what the competitor does versus what the customer cares about. Don't start with what the competition is doing or not doing, start with what specific customer needs are not being met by the current players, and find better ways to serve them. Another common issue is to be too reactive to the competition and following competitors into whatever new shiny thing they believe will give them an edge. Again, looking at what the customer wants and why they want it will give you a better competitive edge. A great way to do this is by using a jobs-to-be-done framework to identify current and future market needs. Finally, many companies try to be the best in all markets for all customers and look at their competition as "every company that does X". If you try to be the solution for everyone, you end up being good at nothing... focus on a particular market with specific players and find your edge there, before venturing elsewhere.

For me the term 'market intelligence' is more broad, signifying not only what your direct competitors are doing but also where the market in general is headed. For example, in a market intelligence report, I would expect to see information about customers' priorities and needs, new technology entering the market, and changes in behavior by geography, to name a few. In competitive intelligence, you focus more on the specific vendors in your market and how they are moving, what they are planning, and how these things may impact your own plans for product launches, etc.

This is tricky, especially if you are a startup or strapped for cash. I have reached out to people via Linkedin asking for help to validate a specific product or feature and have also seen other companies to the same. If you have the budget, hire an outside market research firm to help with it. Another good way is to leverage your channel partners (if you have any) because they can put you in touch with people that match your ICP and who might be more interested in helping because a trusted partner asked them to!

We are always looking at the competition and assessing their moves. Having said that, we don't obsess about it. This means there's gotta be a balance between what the market is doing vs what your own plans should be. Too much outside focus and you are just copying and following someone else, but only internal focus means you lose touch with reality. Each market is different, so the amount of time you spend on competitive analysis will vary a lot. I've been at startups where the market was very new and dynamic so we had to do monthly competitive analysis and deep feature comparison constantly because all vendors were super fast in releasing new functionality. At another company I worked at, they came to a mature market as the disruptors of incumbent solutions, and so quarterly or semi-annual competitor analysis was a good pace because the large, incumbent vendors, were not moving very quickly. My recommendation is the following: * Figure out who your top 3 to 5 competitors are; * Identify their release cycles (you can see this via press releases, etc.); * Establish an initial cadence for competitive analysis, let's say quarterly; * Adjust as needed.

In the traditional B2B Tech world, my experience has been that you need several ways to disseminate your competitive positioning: * Sales battle cards for your field sales teams and channel partners easily reference; * Training sessions to go over key competitive differentiation and review your value prop; * Self-service short videos where you go over competitors and how you win; * Create a dedicated competitive channel in Slack or MS Teams where field teams can come for information and ask questions; * Regular enablement sessions where you give field teams a refresher on your competitive positioning; * Share via email, Slack/Teams, new competitive win stories highlighting customer quotes that reinforce your positioning.