Starting a company or launching a new product in a highly competitive tech space is like going to war where knowing your enemy is imperative. With the pace at which technology is evolving, the need to keep a pulse on new players and solutions has never been greater.
But scaling competitive analysis and measuring its success continues to remain a challenge for most B2B technology companies. Sales, product, and marketing leaders remain misaligned in answering the most fundamental question, “Why us?” How can we fix that?
Sam Rinaldo, HubSpot’s Competitive Intelligence Analyst talks about the incredible power of ‘competitive intelligence’ and how only some companies manage to get CI right. Sam served as an Intelligence officer in the US Marine Corps for 9 years before entering the B2B tech world.
SUMMARY
- In the real world, framing the problem with your stakeholders is absolutely critical; reframe the question to get the heart of the issue.
- Break it down to its constituent parts and focus specifically on something that’s discrete and answerable.
- If all you’re ever looking at is feature comparisons and data on buying statistics, or even qualitative information from a survey, you’re leaving out a lot of human aspects.
- The center of gravity and critical vulnerability analysis are both intensely competitor focused approaches.
- You can align based on priorities, if you’re collecting all of the stakeholder input and also measuring the utilization and impact at the end of the creation cycle.
- Feedback can be an active component through the whole process.
WHAT ARE THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE WORK YOU DID IN THE INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM AND WHAT YOU DO NOW?
The amount of similarities between running a portion of a national intelligence apparatus, and working with sales productivity and product development and working in this open, transparent flat organization is huge. One thing that’s constant throughout all of it, as technology changes or processes change, and as people change is that there are certain core elements of the intelligence cycle and the intelligence gathering method that remain constant, no matter what kind of problem you’re trying to solve.
I use a five step intelligence process when I’m doing competitive intelligence and most people’s intelligence cycles look pretty similar. There’s some element of setting the conditions, getting the information and then turning it into insights for whoever’s going to examine the intelligence.
I see a little bit different from my peers and colleagues in CI. The first step that I do is to set the conditions with very robust problem framing and getting to the core of the question that’s being asked. At the end, I always cycle back through utilization and feedback as a deliberate part of the entire intelligence process.
CAN YOU GIVE AN EXAMPLE OF HOW THIS COMES TO PLAY IN REAL LIFE?
In the real world, framing the problem with your stakeholders is absolutely critical. And I think everyone accepts that, but it’s very difficult to do that in practice. The best option that you have is sitting down and having a conversation to figure out what’s the real question that needs to be answered. And I know any analyst can testify to this fact, you get a very vague question from leaders in your organization. Something like, ‘what is competitor X position relative to us’, or ‘what competitors are going to rise out of nowhere and threaten our position’. The team then has to sit around and start chasing down the answers to these questions. And many analysts will take these more or less on face value. It’s what the CEO said he wanted, so that must be what we need to go out and find. But what I’ve found is quite different. Often you need to reframe the question to get the heart of the issue.
What did they really mean when they said, ‘what are our low end disruptors going to look like in the next two to five years?’ And I spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on those questions. I usually will go through some sort of deliberate structured brainstorming to try and get at the actual questions that we want answered. So if you take that initial question, for example: ‘Give me everything you have about competitor X.’ You take it, you narrow the focus, say ‘what is competitor X going to do in the next three to six months that could threaten our revenue generation?’ That’s a much more clear understanding or much more clearly answerable question than something so broad.
You can also reverse it, take the question and turn it inside out, and then start looking at other questions related to that main, broad initial question posed by the stakeholder. You’ll often find some more interesting insights that when you bring it back to the stakeholder, are going to be much more getting at the core of what they need to make a good decision moving forward. That can be for anyone at your organization, for the CEO asking that big, huge, broad question, or that for that individual sales rep who just needs a couple of competitive points so that they can close a deal.
Define the outcome first before you get into it. By asking the right question, you can focus your efforts just on those things that matter. So you’re not trying to wrap your arms around a giant set of data that’s out there. This isn’t even unique to competitive intelligence or being an analyst in the business space at all. This just has to do with any time you’re trying to solve a big complex issue, breaking it down into its constituent parts and focusing specifically on something that’s discrete and answerable just makes it so much easier and more streamlined to align your objectives across multiple disparate programs or multiple different people working on elements of the same project.
HOW DO YOU NARROW DOWN YOUR OBJECTIVES TO WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS?
You can put yourself in the other person’s shoes, or the last major purchase that you made, you were probably weighing all sorts of different criteria and you were also probably taking some mental shortcuts and saying, ‘well, I really know and respect this brand name’, or even something as simple as ‘this sales rep seems really pushy’ and ‘you know what, I don’t think I’m going to buy this product because the other sales rep that I talked to at the competitor, made me feel a lot more comfortable.’ As you look at this, you’re weighing all sorts of different factors. If all you’re ever looking at is feature comparisons and data on buying statistics, or even qualitative information from a survey, you’re leaving out a lot of human aspects. You’re not incorporating all of the psychological and emotional factors that go into that buying decision and, ultimately shape the entire experience for that buyer, that prospect or that customer.
WHEN IT COMES TO HUMAN FACTOR, HOW DO YOU CAPTURE THAT IN CI? WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CRITICAL ASPECTS THAT ONE MUST COVER WITHIN CI?
Everybody’s process will be unique, but the way that I try to break it down or the way that is most comfortable for my mental frameworks and the way that I work is to intensely focus on a couple of specific factors so that you’re not trying to just overwhelm and weigh all of this information at the same time. The way I focus, how I’m evaluating and what areas that I’m focusing on, is by looking at, the centers of gravity and then the critical vulnerabilities. For anybody who’s listening that may have been working in the national intelligence space will probably sound very familiar. It’s definitely a holdover from my time doing military intelligence and being in the Marines is very competitor centric. So when you break down the center of gravity and the critical vulnerability of a competitor, you can look at what is the element that you really need to avoid.
This is the major advantage that the product might have over yours and is really going to convince a buyer or prospect to go with that competitor instead of you. But oftentimes there’s also an underlying critical vulnerability, a weak spot, a shortfall, or some area that has received lower investment, lower focus from the competitor, so that they could focus on bolstering that center of gravity, identifying that you can develop your sales pitch, or you can develop your product to fill that gap and really differentiate yourself from that competitor in the most crucial way possible that is going to set you up as a distinct entity from your competitors.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE TWO APPROACHES OF DEFENCE AND POSITIONING?
You can make a great case for not focusing on competitive intelligence. There’s circles in a bunch of different industries that say, ‘don’t worry about competition, worry about your customer’s needs and your own needs.’ And that’s totally valid. The center of gravity and critical vulnerability analysis are both intensely competitor focused. You’re looking slightly retrospectively at yourself and you’re weighing market factors, but ultimately you’re looking at the competitor. In practice, you need to weigh that by looking at your customers and your prospective buyers, because you’re not trying to sell the competitors and you’re not trying to beat competitors. You’re trying to provide a solution that customers are going to utilize and realize benefit from, and eventually come back and stay your customer over time as well.
It’s absolutely critical to keep a customer facing their eyes, when you’re doing competitive intelligence. You can do that in a couple of different ways. The first way is by focusing on your competitors. Chances are, if they have a competitive product in there and they’re coming up against you, they’re probably also looking at the customers, trying to figure out what their pain points are and solving it. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t be a very good competitor and you won’t be worried about them in the first place. Looking at your competitors with a focus on the customer, allows you to flip the tables a little bit and get a completely different perspective on how to solve for that customer. So you’re already just incorporating that competitor’s position and all of the work that they’ve done to try and understand the customer and the market by looking at what they’re doing.
WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR EXPERIENCE AND HOW DID YOU SOLVE THE MISALIGNMENT BETWEEN SALES AND PRODUCT MARKETING?
Misalignment can be a huge problem. It can result in bad assessments, inefficient processes, and overall just the misuse of resources that suck away all of the efficiency of even the best laid processes and procedures. That happens because everybody has an opinion on many of these subjects. The sales rep has tons of experience in competitively positioning your product against most of the big names in whatever your industry or specific market might be. You don’t want to discount their opinions and their insights, but they’re going to have a different set of objectives and priorities from the competitive intelligence team and sometimes even from the larger business goals. You can align based on priorities, if you’re collecting all of the stakeholder input and also measuring the utilization and impact at the end of the creation cycle for a given piece of intelligence.
WHAT ARE THE IMPORTANT COMPETITIVE ATTRIBUTES THAT SALES TEAM LOOK FOR TO HAVE ANOTHER VENDOR DEAL?
I certainly have a large volume of requests to draw upon to answer that question. Like any competitive intelligence analyst, I’m getting tons of requests from the sales team for support in any number of different ways. What I most commonly see are questions around specific pricing models or specific features and whether or not competitor X has a feature compared to us, and they want to really break those things down, then present them in a way that’s quickly shareable externally out to that prospect so that they can take a look at and formulate their own opinion based off of that, because that’s hugely a hugely powerful psychological device when someone is viewing a piece of content on their own, and then they draw the conclusion, they feel like they own that decision and they don’t feel like they were tricked into it or guided it by a sales rep. Even in the best of situations, there’s always going to be some level of mistrust or a belief that the sales rep is going to be biased in that situation. And so arming reps with something that is quick, concise and digestible by customers is what I hear the most often being requested.
HOW OFTEN DO YOU UPDATE COMPETITIVE DATA POINTS?
That’s one that we’ve wrestled with a bit when we were starting our program at my current company, because I was coming in as a single competitive intelligence analyst to handle the entire scope and breadth of all of our competitors. So very early on I realized, this isn’t something that we can just run through and update ad hoc because things are going to fall through the cracks. Hence, I prioritize our competitors into four different tiers. I have a rolling updates cycle for 30, 60, 90, and then as needed I update cycles based on the priority of that competitor. And I evaluate the priority of that competitor every 60 days.
HAVE YOU DEVELOPED ANY GROWTH HACKING TECHNIQUES OVER THE PERIOD OF TIME TO GET THE RIGHT INFORMATION THE RIGHT WAY IN A QUICK MANNER FROM YOUR COMPETITORS?
Ever wondered, how do you break down a large volume of knowledge and then transfer that knowledge into someone else’s brain so that they have the same level of understanding and proficiency that you do? And if we could crack that nut a hundred percent of the time, then we would probably have a lot more solutions for a lot more industries. The way I look at it for competitive intelligence is through revision cycles. Your first pass at a battle card or a comparison page on your website is going to be based on your intelligence process and wherever analytic framework that you have in place to accomplish that task. But that’s only the first version. My final step in the intelligence cycle is looking at utilization and feedback, which can be difficult to capture, but it’s worth it for figuring out how well that knowledge is transferring to the end user.
What I mean by utilization and feedback is that any time your competitive intelligence program produces a deliverable, be it a battle card or something else. I need to track not only how much it’s being utilized and who is utilizing it, but how. Specifically, if it’s a battle card, how are reps actually utilizing the content? Are they taking the information and reading some of these positioning statements verbatim out on sales calls? Are they using it as a study guide before they ever get on a call with a prospect or, maybe they’ve come up with some new novel way of utilizing that information in their decision making process. Understanding that aspect of your intelligence products helps you shape the way that you’re presenting the information there.
For example, you can go into incredible detail on the technical aspects of different features of a piece of software. So you can dive very deeply into the access controls and the reporting and analytics, other different things that you might have in a given piece of software. At the end of the day this is information that the customer prospect probably already has, or has probably already read over once or twice. It’s not even if they’re asking for it and they want to hear about it. They’re probably doing that because it was one of their buyer criteria. It’s part of their evaluation process that they want to break down the features. What you really need to show them is something that they’re not expecting. You need to bring that information in a much more concise and focused way that drops the answer that they didn’t even know they were looking for, directly into their lab. If you understand what pieces of knowledge are being transferred from you to the battlecard, to the sales rep, and then finally onto the customer, you can understand what kind of changes you need to make in your revision cycle. That’s a very hands off way of looking at the utilization patterns passively. Of course, feedback would be the active component of that. How are people actually utilizing the battlecard versus what do they say that they want changed or say that they need to add?
WHAT KEY TACTICS WOULD YOU LIKE TO TELL YOUR CUSTOMERS ON WHAT THEY SHOULD DO TO IMPROVE THEIR COMPETITIVENESS IN THE MARKET?
There are three things that are of critical importance that I don’t hear a lot of companies doing in their competitive intelligence program. The first is a really robust, structured analytic process when it comes to framing questions. The second piece that I would recommend folks incorporate is a deliberate utilization step within their intelligence process. Something that signals to the analyst and the program to look for ways that their intelligence is being utilized by the end user or the person actually viewing their product. The third thing that is the most important is to keep your process human. What I mean by that is that more than 80% of the techniques and steps could be done with a piece of paper or a white board upon a wall, maybe with just yourself or one or two other people. It doesn’t take a massive budget for technology and video conferencing tools and brainstorming software or a whole team of analysts to come up with good insights. It just takes good sound, analytic processes and good analytic integrity to create actionable intelligence that helps you win.
This was the five step approach to keep everyone focused on the desired outcome, when answering a broad competitive question from sales, executives and customers in the world that is moving to AI and automation. Keeping our process ‘human’ is a piece of great advice.
