Competitive Analysis Techniques

A roadmap is not a strategy! Yet, most strategy docs are roadmaps + frameworks. This isn't because teams are dumb. It's because they lack predictable steps to follow. This is where I refer them to Ed Biden's 7-step process: — 1. Objective → What problem are we solving? Your objective sets the foundation. If you can’t define this clearly, nothing else matters. A real strategy starts with: → What challenge are we responding to? → Why does this problem matter? → What happens if we don’t solve it? — 2. Users → Who are we serving? Not all users are created equal. A strong strategy answers: · What do they need most? · Who exactly are we solving for? · What problems are they already solving on their own? A strategy without sharp user focus leads to feature bloat. — 3. Superpowers → What makes us different? If you’re competing on the same playing field as everyone else, you’ve already lost. Your strategy must define: · What can we do 10x better than anyone else? · Where can we persistently win? · What should we not do? This is where strategy meets competitive advantage. — 4. Vision → Where are we going? A roadmap tells you what’s next. A vision tells you why it matters. Most PMs confuse vision with strategy. But a vision is long-term. It’s a north star. Your strategy answers: How do we get there? — 5. Pillars → What are our focus areas? If everything is a priority, nothing really is. In my 15 years of experience, great strategy always come with a trade-offs: → What are our big bets? → What do we need to execute to move towards our vision? → What are we intentionally not doing? — 6. Impact → How do we measure success? Most teams obsess over vanity metrics. A great strategy tracks what actually drives business success. What outcomes matter? → How will we track progress? → What signals tell us we’re on the right path? — 7. Roadmap → How do we execute? A roadmap should never be a list of everything you could do. It should be a focus list of what truly matters. Problems and outcomes are the currency here. Not dates and timelines. — For personal examples of how I do this, check out my post: https://lnkd.in/e5F2J6pB — Hate to break it to you, but you might be operating without a strategy. You might have a nicely formatted strategy doc in front of you, but it’s just a… A roadmap? a feature list? a wishlist? If it doesn’t connect vision to execution, prioritize trade-offs, and define competitive edge… It’s not strategy. It’s just noise.

A top-performing Enterprise rep from Salesforce told me her top strategy for getting & keeping an Exec's attention. It's spending 15 minutes looking at a 10-K. Doesn't even have to be theirs (!!) Here's why. 10-K's tell you 3 things that either your Prospect, OR their Top Competitors are focused on: ---> Their Key Initiatives ---> Risks to their Business ---> What they Plan to Spend Money on ***Even if the company you're talking with is private, you can still use a 10-K. *** How? Read their Competitor's 10-K. Everyone wants to know what their competition is doing. Here's how to find it: --> Google this: "(company name) competitors" --> G2 also has Top 10 competitor lists for SaaS --> Pick 1-2 of their competitors & scan the 10-K* Using this info sounds like --> "Saw {your biggest competitor} just announced record-breaking growth in sales & revenue. And that they're focused on going after SMB companies. Also making strategic investments in sales & marketing tools. And that risks around X,Y,Z are top of mind. Curious to what extent your strategies & risks are similar?" *Where to find a 10-K: --> Go to Company's website --> Then Investor page --> Find the PDF link How to get what you need in 15 minutes: --> Ctrl + F for words like "risk", "initiative" / "strategy", "invest in" --> See link in the Comments to SalesHacker article for more details --> Also, Google/news & Seeking Alpha: summaries of analyst comments WHY it gets and keeps an Exec's attention: --> In their 10-K, it's their Risks, Strategies & Plans --> If it's their competitor's, it's good intel --> Either way, shows you've prepped Execs want to talk about their Risks, Plans & Market Share. Not your company or product or what it does. Executive conversations win deals. PS - Executive conversations are a topic we're focusing on in the group coaching program I'm offering in April. LMK if want more details!

my competitor and i launched identical linkedin campaigns. same budget, same audience, same product category. i crushed him 8:1 on deal conversion. he was confident going into the test. better product. stronger brand recognition. more funding. bigger team. we both targeted VPs of sales at 500+ person companies. same demographic criteria. same ad creative quality. $10K budget each. month one results: me: 47 deals closed. him: 6 deals closed. he was convinced i got lucky with better prospects. "let me see your targeting strategy," he asked. i pulled up my dashboard. "i don't target demographics at all." "what do you mean? you're running linkedin ads." "i target behaviors." i showed him my approach: instead of job titles, i track content consumption. instead of company size, i monitor website journeys. instead of industry filters, i watch engagement patterns. "i built an audience of people who've consumed competitor content in the last 30 days. downloaded sales automation guides. attended webinars about pipeline management. visited pricing pages of tools like ours." my "audience" wasn't demographic. it was behavioral. "linkedin lets you upload custom audiences," i explained. "i upload lists of people who've shown buying behavior. then i target those lists with ads." he was targeting people who might need our product. i was targeting people actively shopping for our product. "how do you identify buying behavior?" he asked. "third-party intent data. website pixel tracking. content engagement scoring. competitor analysis tools." i showed him my process: week 1: identify companies researching sales tools. week 2: find individuals at those companies consuming content. week 3: build custom audiences from behavioral data. week 4: launch ads to pre-qualified prospects. "demographics tell you who someone is," i said. "behavior tells you what they're doing." he was advertising to VPs of sales. i was advertising to VPs of sales currently shopping for solutions. same title, completely different mindset. my prospects were already in buying mode. his were just scrolling linkedin. the conversion difference made perfect sense. he rebuilt his entire approach: behavioral targeting instead of demographic filtering. intent data instead of job title assumptions. shopping behavior instead of profile characteristics. next month's results for him: 52 deals closed. 9x improvement over his original campaign. the lesson was clear: demographics describe who people are. behavior reveals what people need. target the behavior.

When you pitch your startup, competitive strategy is key. I saw a company this week offering a 𝟰𝘅 better product than the competition for a 𝟭𝟬% 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝗿 price. It wasn't selling; they had made a crucial positioning mistake. Let's see why, using the diagram. First, look at the solid curved line: that's a cost/performance tradeoff, with higher cost on the left and lower cost on the right. As you approach the maximum possible performance, cost gets very high; at minimum cost, performance is low. The curve shows the competitive state of the art. Our competitor, "Them," occupies the white circle. Now look at the dotted curved line. That's the cost/performance tradeoff available to Us. Our startup has a better technology, which puts us up and to the right of the competition. Ideally we would be able to use our advantage to move anywhere along this higher curve; in practice, of course, our technology has constraints, so we may not be able to reach all parts of the curve. The three competitive positions in green ovals are obvious winners, provided our advantage is large enough. We can match competition's performance for lower cost (same for less), offer higher performance for the same cost (more for same), or land somewhere in between (more for less). In game theory we'd say these positions are dominant. The red zone is where the startup I saw is positioning: higher performance - in this case much higher - but at a higher price. In that zone you're not going to replace the Them circle; it's not your actual competition. There may be a competing higher-performance product - shown by the white dotted circle - that's your real competition; or you may have to create a new segment. Either way, it's likely a lower-volume niche. If you can't match the competition's price, you also can't claim their entire TAM. Why is this so? The 4x product has much better price/performance, but customers don't buy price/performance, they buy price 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁. Consider a disk drive example. Suppose we have a novel storage technology. Our target customer's high-volume product ships with 256GB and they pay $15; we offer 1024GB for $18. For the high-volume product we're in the red zone, and we're not going to win. If there's a higher-capacity model, we might play for that one; otherwise we're begging them to create such a model. Yuck. The yellow zone, less for less, is interesting. Christensen's Disruption Theory is based on the observation that technology can overshoot market need. The competitor's "performance" should be measured by its utility to the customer, not by raw specifications. Blue Ocean Theory applies here as well: we can offer 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 in some dimensions in order to provide 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 in others. In both cases we'd be developing a different segment, not replacing the Them circle. Finally, what if you don't have competition? Actually, you do. At minimum, the status quo is your competitor, as most customers do nothing - use that as your "Them"!

I use AI to help with positioning. This is my power move. For me, AI-generated blog posts and superhero dolls distract from the true transformative superpower of LLMs. They give structure to unstructured data. You can feed in a raw bunch of words, and LLMs can identify patterns, summarize themes, and (be careful) interpret meaning. Positioning work is about identity and reputation. It’s about shaping fundamental perceptions about what you are, what you do, who you’re for, and why you’re great. When you do this, it’s important to have a grounding in how your buyers think. I’ve found AI to be an incredibly powerful tool to support that process. I constantly fine-tune my approach, but here it is in a nutshell. -Interview your best customers. The ones who love you, who most resemble the customers you want to win.  -Get hold of sales call transcripts from “golden deals.” Competitive ICP deals where you won and hit the ground running. -If you have win/loss interviews, those are obviously useful. Take the transcripts from all of the above, and drop them into NotebookLM. (Other AI tools work, but Notebook LM is purpose-built for this.) Then, start asking questions. -What do your best buyers have in common? -What are the trigger events driving them into the market? -What type of solution are they looking for? -What alternatives are they considering? -What are their key criteria for a winning choice?  -Why are they choosing your product? …and so on. It’s limitless. I’ve found this to be an incredibly fast and effective way to get an outside-in view on positioning. …the other thing you can do is create a “cyborg focus group.” I will post about that another time. 

GTM teams are winning with a THIRTY-year-old technology. New AI tools can be great, but this is tried and true (and free). RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds have been around since the 90’s and are criminally undervalued and underutilized in GTM. They give your GTM team free competitor intelligence, relevant signals, and timely updates. RSS feeds allow you to, essentially, ‘subscribe’ to websites so every time that website changes or gets updated, you get notified with the new content. The best part is that a lot of websites offer completely free RSS feeds. Here are just a few leading GTM teams use them: 1️⃣ Competitive Intelligence: - Monitor competitor product pages for feature launches - Get Slack alerts when they hire key roles - Track their content strategy automatically 2️⃣ Lead Generation: - Monitor government databases for new records (Form D filings, 10k reports, etc.) - Monitor popular industry forums for new posts - Industry publication job postings - Company blog updates from target accounts 3️⃣ Content Strategy: - Track what topics perform well in your space - Monitor thought leaders for trending discussions - Automate content research - Again, more websites than you think actually offer these for free. Use Clay to tap into RSS feeds and action them in almost any way. Takes 20 minutes to set up- runs forever. Here's a quick walkthrough:

The best competitive intel programs don’t just log what competitors did. They help your team figure out what to do next. Here’s the core job of a CI program: - Catch early signals that something’s heating up - Make sure the right people actually see it - Act fast before it turns into a problem Most programs stop at step 1. Sometimes they make it to step 2. But then things lose steam and folks go back to what they were doing before /: To keep momentum, here are the workflows I lean on to surface threats and make it easy to take action: 1. Sales confidence surveys Quick Google Form sent to the field. Helps me see which competitors reps are worried about and why. 2. Threat analyses Pulling win-loss data from the CRM to see who we’re beating, and who’s beating us. When you pair both, you start seeing what’s ACTUALLY happening, not just what FEELS important. And if you don’t want to spend hours building new CRM dashboards, Klue's Competitive Revenue Analytics dashboard can take you from insight to action much more quickly.** **in some cases, they can even take care of the "action" part for you too. Check the video to see what I mean :-) Anyway, this work stream helps me flag issues early, build trust with the field, and give GTM teams what they actually need. And as a result, I've gotten way less “cool, good to know”s and way more “oh s***, we should do something about this.” 😇

Are there alternatives for what you offer? The only honest answer is “yes”. Your positioning needs to make it clear why prefer you. Because if it's all the same, people will take the cheap option. Or the trustworthy category leader. Plot your competition on two axes that matter to buyers. A 2x2 should highlight tradeoffs buyers actually care about. Each axis has to represent a real choice. Do ICP research and map out things people care about, and what are the negative perceptions about the category. If you position your competitors right, and they stop being your direct rivals. Because you're selling something they literally don't sell. The trick is to find two axes no one has highlighted yet. Do that, and you’ll often see one quadrant wide open. That’s the space you can claim. The aim is simple. Be the only brand that’s clearly and credibly delivering on what that space represents. For the buyers who care about that, picking you becomes obvious. Competitors lose because they don’t offer it. You win because you do.

Most people treat SEO like guesswork. They write content, sprinkle in keywords, and pray for rankings. But without competitor analysis? You’re flying blind. I learned this the hard way in my early SEO days. I spent months optimizing content, only to realize I had no idea who I was competing with or how they were winning. Once I shifted my focus to strategic competitor analysis, everything changed. Here’s what that process looks like now for every client I work with: Audit the top 3-5 ranking competitors → What keywords are they targeting? → How are they structuring content? → What’s their backlink profile like? Find the content gaps → What questions are they ignoring? → Where can we offer deeper value or updated data? Study their backlinks → Which sources are driving authority? → Can we earn similar or better-quality links? Track ranking patterns over time → What’s rising or falling in SERPs? → Which changes triggered those shifts? Competitor analysis doesn’t mean copying. It means learning. It gives you the map, so your SEO strategy isn’t just reactive, it’s intentional. So if you’re investing time and money into SEO but skipping this step… You're not just falling behind, you’re missing your biggest opportunity to grow smarter, faster, and more efficiently. SEO without competitor analysis isn’t enough. It’s like showing up to a race without knowing the course. ♻️ Repost if you know someone who’s stuck in the SEO guessing game.