This article is based on Bill’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in Denver, 2023. PMA members can watch the talk in its full glory here!
Hi there, I'm Bill Emmett, the Senior Director for Product Marketing at LogicMonitor, and I’m here to share how you can differentiate your product and company with competitive intelligence (CI).
First up, we'll discuss why competitive insight is crucial for your messaging. Spoiler alert: if you don't understand your competition, it's really tough to highlight what sets your product apart. But we'll dig into that a bit more in a moment.
Next, we'll get into how you can bootstrap competitive intelligence (CI) within your team. Finally, we’ll explore the different stages of competitive intelligence growth.
The power of competitive intelligence for collaboration
As product marketers, we're all about collaboration – with sales, product teams, and even other marketing organizations. One of the superpowers of competitive intelligence is how it ramps up the quality of this collaboration, equipping you with insights that earn you a seat at the table.
Instead of having your organization rely solely on your product team to get up to speed on the product, you can use CI to contribute a fresh market perspective. In this way, it's a highly valuable addition to the product-focused mindset of your colleagues.
Your sales team is likely asking for resources like battlecards. With competitive intelligence, you're not just delivering these materials, but also providing consultative insight that helps sales leadership pinpoint where to focus their efforts. The more competitive intelligence and win-loss insights you have, the more effective you are at steering these discussions and raising your strategic standing within the group.
Why competitive insight is so important for messaging
In recent years, competitive intelligence has become more critical than ever, and I suspect the dramatic trends we've seen will only accelerate from here.
Crayon’s State of Competitive Intelligence Report shows that, whether considered “absolutely critical” or just “important”, the perception of CI’s importance among its stakeholders has noticeably increased since 2021.
As many enterprise organizations find top-of-funnel pipelines harder to come by, the focus shifts to mid and bottom-funnel lead management. It's all about maximizing that pipeline and converting as much of it as possible. In this landscape, competitive intelligence is absolutely vital.
Competitive intelligence allows us to do a few things much better:
- Top of funnel: CI helps us generate leads by crafting messages with built-in differentiation. We can't achieve that differentiation unless we have insight into where we stand in the market relative to others. This makes our top-of-funnel assets sharper and better at standing out. It's not just about showing that your product is better – you have to show that it's different.
- Mid-funnel: You can use CI to generate content for prospects and customers in the funnel. This content should center around the selection criteria for the type of solution you offer. Putting these assets in front of your customers and shaping those criteria can be extremely valuable. It lets them better champion your cause when they’re evaluating vendors.
- Bottom of funnel: Here, the role of CI pivots towards building trust. Once they’re at the bottom of the funnel, deals often have to be approved by directors of operations and sometimes even VPs of Infrastructure or CIOs.
At this level, trust in the company they're about to do business with is just as crucial as the features and functions they're buying. They're counting on their technical teams to have done their homework, so our job is to highlight unique aspects of both our offering and our company to build that trust. This also creates an environment where we can reduce discounting.
- Customer growth and retention: Churn is something you want to avoid at all costs. How do you do this? You leverage loyalty and great customer references. You interview customers to understand why they chose your software over others. They're always scanning the market, and their feedback on what's hot (and what's not) is invaluable for gaining competitive insight.
Ultimately, all this is going to generate larger pipelines and higher conversion rates. By creating more differentiation and targeting your message, you can also increase the ROI of marketing both in terms of pipeline and bookings.
Key types of differentiation
Competitive intelligence isn't just about finding differentiation – it's about understanding the types of differentiation out there.
Force Management’s Command of the Message framework breaks down differentiators into three flavors. Let’s take a look.
First up is the unique differentiator. If you've got one of these, you're likely a category creator or leader in your particular market. You're delivering something of value that others simply don't have. These types of differentiators are fantastic if you've got them, but they're often short-lived.
While unique differentiators are great for the top of the funnel, if they don't come to you naturally, don't sweat it because the second type of differentiator is really the most important, and that's the comparative differentiator. These are features of your product or service that are better or somehow different from your competition.
You can use these to build 'traps' for sales to leverage. They can help you find new angles in your messaging, or create variations of top-line ad copy for social media or SEO. They can also help you build specific questions for your BDRs to ask.
In LogicMonitor’s case, most of what we have falls into the comparative category. We acknowledge that depending on who's in the deal, there might be one or two vendors at parity or even better than us on that specific differentiator, but that's alright. The aim is to build a range of differentiators so you can rotate or use them in combination, depending on the delivery and form factor of your message.
The last type of differentiator is the holistic differentiator. These are becoming increasingly important as we focus on maximizing conversion in the pipeline. Holistic differentiators aren't just about the product – they're about creating trust in you as a company.
Factors like financial stability, growth, commitment to causes that resonate with the customer, or even something about your company's background can all play a part here. These traits give the customer a reason to see you as a partner, rather than just another vendor.
It's important to remember that differentiators, particularly holistic ones, come into play during the late stages of a sales cycle, often when deals get escalated to those with purchasing authority within the company you're selling to. From the vendor end, this is when you're likely also bringing in your high-ranking staff to help close these deals.
